OK I just want to go through and talk about a couple things, some of which are in response to previous posts, others are just my thoughts.
As for Casual and his plugins, his plugin went undetected because it specifically does extra in order to make the demo internally seem real. My plugin does what's required to make it look visually real but I make no effort (and do not plan to) make the demo file itself look real. The painmarker problem (which I don't think is completely fixed with either plugin) is because of the source engine being somewhat non-deterministic with projectiles or some floating point error or something (we think).
Regarding the ability of people to modify my plugin - it is virtually impossible to change it. The plugin is written in C++, and while compiled .dlls
are technically possible to decompile, it would take a god among gods to do anything remotely useful with something of this size. If somebody else wants to write their own plugin, that's another issue, but they won't be able to get anything usable except the general idea of how it works from what I've released.
With jump videos, assuming people still submit runs and jumps, rjweekly and other jumping channels shouldn't be too concerned. All demos recorded online are fine and POV demos are easily verifiable with the method I described in my other post. For those recording jumps offline, it's not really that big of a deal to record an extra POV if you usually just do STV. If you really are that lazy and can't type 1 extra line, install
P-REC and stop complaining.
Now, of course there is more to this discussion than just "oh, its detectable, no more problems". The main thing that discouraged me from releasing in the first place is something that's been brought up here a lot - people will probably lose motivation to do runs and trickjumps and whatnot, and it's just generally demoralizing to see someone who has spent 1/10 the time you have practicing use a program to make themselves look better than you. The "it's just a game", "stop caring about efame", and "they're different categories" arguments have been brought up here a bunch but I really don't feel that they have much validity. Yes, we know who the top jumpers are and who is actually good and who isn't, but there isn't really much denying that a large part of why they spent so much time practicing and getting better is because of the competition aspect of jumping. No matter how many times you say that it's not the same category and how many times people acknowledge that it isn't, it's difficult not to see TAS videos and become somewhat demotivated. This is pretty much why I tried to keep it contained to only a few people.
I'd really like to see that people don't get out of control with the plugin. I know that there's definitely is a positive side to it's release and it'll probably do some good things for jumping and the community, but like I've said before, I can't help but be worried about what might happen if it does get out of hand. From my perspective, at this point, there isn't really much that can be done about anything, we just kinda have to wait it out, see what happens, and hope for the best.