I agree completely with Jarlyk's statement to be honest, I like the hollow knight TAS community and seeing that turn into something competitive or having to "verify" our TASes just does not sound fun. I don't really understand how TASVideos works or what its rules for TASes are seeing as I joined here specifically to comment on this thread, but just with what Jarlyk's said, I'd prefer not to have that type of community. I've experienced the "pray it won't crash" multiple times while TASing modded bosses on hollow knight patch 1.4.3.2 and I know what Jarlyk means when he talks about it
On the topic of desyncs with HK tases which we didn't mention yet is that movies sometimes don't sync on other devices and sometimes even don't when switching between WSL2, VM and dual boot on the same system. Also the latest interim build of libTAS has caused existing TAS's to desync, likely because the stack smashing issue with loading save states that was fixed.
Yeah, the interim build causes many issues when it comes to syncing LTMs from the 1.4.4 release, I haven't even been able to figure out why. On top of that, on the main 1.4.4 release, for some people save states don't work, but others don't get the stack smashing error (the error that was fixed in 1.4.4). I TASed for months without savestates and it sucked, especially on a game like HK where LTMs can easily get in the hundreds of thousands of frames and it takes a while to get to the right spot, even fast forwarding and without force software rendering on.
As you very well know Peeka,
Hollow knight TASes also sync horribly over changed settings.
Changing the menu background leads to different particles and different rng.
Changing resolution or language from the originals used to create the TAS have similar effects.
This game is a very time consuming and difficult venture to optimize properly. We're still discovering new things even 6+ years after the game's release and 2 1/2 years after the formation of the HollowKnight TAS discord server.
In conclusion, I'd like to see this game displayed for a wider audience in the TAS community, but I don't think altering rules or how we TAS is in the spirit of that, since we face much different adversities in our TASing than others.