New York City, NY, USAI asked in the discord (which btw you should join if you haven't already ;) ) if taking out the load removal function from the ASL file would be for the better, seeing as the boards right now use RTA timing and probably will so for the foreseeable future. Runners using NBlood notified me of an issue with it, which I technically can remedy and already have, but this seems to be the most sensible decision going forward.
If you are a runner, please switch your compare time to Real Time going forward. Thanks! Any concerns with the decision please do not hesitate to bring it up here or in the discord. :)
To set up the official Autosplitter, first right click on your livesplit window and select "edit splits". After doing so, when you set your game to Thief (2014) you should see that under "Start timer at: " there is now a small description of the autosplitter and what it does, and to the side of it there should now be an "Activate" button to press. Just simply hit it, and you are good to go!
Alternatively, if you've already had your splits set up before the Autosplitter was added to the livesplit database, you should have a pop up window appear telling you of the Autosplitter the first time you open your old Thief (2014) splits, so just follow the prompt there. Please use this in runs going forward as it will make the leaderboards more accurate and ease workload on mods going forward. Thanks!
If this is somehow not working for you, you can also manually set up the Autosplitter by downloading the raw script file linked in resources - the one by Mysterion. That shouldn't be needed as the method above is quite simple and easy, but just in case :).
Going forward it is strongly recommended runners run the game with the autosplitter made for this game (you can add me on discord for a direct link, or hit the "activate" button when setting your game in splits) for a more accurate representation of your run time, as the moderators would like to have the rankings be based on Time Without Loads from here on out.
This ASL file also pauses the timer based on when the game is loading AND during the quicksave pause. Seeing as the quicksave feature freezes the game for a period of time that is INFLUENCED BY THE RUNNER'S COMPUTER SETUP (cpu most importantly) this creates an unfair disadvantage with regards to RTA timing for those who have lower end specs, hence the switch to Time Without Loads. Quickloading is also affected based on setup but not as obvious and downright unfairly as quicksaving is.
Manually timing out when the splitter would pause is an inaccurate and time consuming effort, especially given sometimes it is hard to discern when the game initially freezes during a quicksave upon viewing the video. For now I will attempt to retime any fullgame (episodes 1-4) runs that are not using the load remover under 20 minutes. This means I will be retiming of Hanomamoru's, Perochialjoe's, and Muty's runs to determine their Time Without Loads, and update the leaderboards accordingly (all other runs are too far away/irrelevant to WR to worry about this, sorry).
Please, use the load remover going forward as moderators manually timing out runs may not be the case going forward and YOUR RUN'S RTA TIME WILL BE THE ONLY TIME CONSIDERED (placing you under runners with Time W/O Loads, as the leaderboard prioritizes them first). If you need any help in setup, don't be afraid to ask here or in the discord! :)
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- *UPDATE * * *
Please just set your game name to "Blood: Fresh supply" and hit the "activate" button that appears, like so:
Or message me on discord for a direct link!
Due to an egregious error in setting up the categories, the rules had stated that "Secret Levels are not required" for an All Secrets run.
Surely we can all see how this is... wrong, right? We verified previous runs before blindly going by the rules, but it has been decided now by the mods to wipe the boards clean of any run NOT including the secret levels (and also all the SECRETS within those levels!) from the board.
Going forward, I will amend the rules to state this more clearly, but just in case no one checks the rules (for some reason), a post like this should hammer it home.
Hey, I run thief and with newmantle we're able to clip thin walls and doors by swinging the blackjack and leaning+jump. Figured I'd try something similar with the wrench in this game. You have to bind mousewheel to jump to get it to go backwards. Timing can be a little aids if you're wondering.
Not sure where this can be useful though, but I remember @Mucus.Middleton was bugging me to clip the RADIATION door in engineering. If someone can give me a save or wants to try it themselves on that door go for it. Obviously the ones in the video don't need to be clipped, but were just for demonstration.
I've gone ahead and removed "episode 1-2" and "episode 1-4" categories because the latter felt redundant, and the first one (1-2) felt odd to leave afterwards.
As of now the categories are: Episode 1-5 (full game, main category) Episode 1 (start game and finish Episode 1) Episode 1-3 (start game and finish episodes 1, 2 and 3)
Episode 1-3 might be removed soon as well, but it's sort of a "midway" point and is probably distinct enough to keep (especially with more runs! wink wink)
Such is how stuff must be done when incompetent devs can't just allow us to do proper episode runs like every god damn "retro fps" ever in the history of forever.
If anyone stumbles upon this game, just know that for the time being, pretty much everything is a WIP.
Seeing as how you are unable to do traditional "episode runs" like you could for Doom 1/2, Wolfenstein 3d, DUSK and pretty much EVERY OTHER DAMN FPS GAME the only solution I could come up with is doing categories for the beginning of the game to the end of a certain chapter.
Could just stage select each stage from the episodes 1 by 1 but thats tedious and boring, though could be the only way to achieve true "episode runs". I've tried to talk to the devs on steam and GOG about this so hopefully they'll add it in.
Since the beginning of the new year, we've taken strides towards getting a working load remover available for use by all runners as a means to combat load discrepancy a other factors that could add on time in an RTA setting. With some help by members of the community, we now have achieved this goal, and will now have it be recommended for use going forward.
So then, what shall we do with the current runs on the boards that were done with a simple RTA timing method? Well, I've gone through the runs that I thought mattered (the top ones that we're sort of close to eachother), and timed out any frames where the word "loading" appeared on screen from the transition from mission briefing to the shop menu/spawn in.
Just to clarify, I'm timing out any frame that looks like this -
Notice the box that usually says "continue" transitions into "loading" after being clicked, I then resumed the timer once the first frame of the shop menu/spawn into game world appeared on screen. For quick loads, I timed out from first "black screen" frame to last "black screen" frame before spawning back into game world. I must stress, these are the ONLY PORTIONS OF RUNS THAT WERE TIMED OUT MANUALLY, mission briefings, ending stats screens, shops and and accidental pauses were left in.
Obviously, doing this by watching the youtube videos one frame at a time can be a little inaccurate, because some recordings were only 30fps, so sometimes the jumps in time were more massive for those than they were for 60fps recordings, giving them more "load time" to remove. Also, there are very very slight loads from shop menu to game world after hitting "play mission" that I could not reasonably count because of no real transition between the two in terms of changing of frames. My runs had about 15.52 seconds of loads, while @Blacksecret 's run had 20.20 seconds of loads, which evened my run out to a 32:46.760 and his to a 32:45.750. I was a first place holder built on a bed of lies and better hard drives! A BIG PHONY!
Its also worth noting that, at the time of this writing, I don't believe the current load remover times out cutscenes. Some users have an issue (or benefit???) where their cutscenes don't play at all, which could give them an advantage, albeit very minimal, over the course of a run. On the matter at hand, I personally believe they should be counted TO the time, cause the player does have control during them and can end them through their own input, which I believe should be always counted. But with some runners not having them play at all and just instantly going to the Stats Screen, I can see this being an issue for sure. Thoughts on the matter?
It's obvious going forward we ask all runners to use this new Autosplitter/Load Remover if possible, because the times from now on will be sorted by "time w/o loads" in ranking. You do not have to use this function, of course. I will go ahead and add the splitter to the Resources page and try to write up a guide on how to do it soon(ish).
I could also try to time out the Expert runs using the same method I did for the Normal runs, but seeing as they aren't close to each other, I don't think its that important to spend hours on that atm.
Also, for most of the runs on the boards, I just made both time fields the same numbers, since wasting a lot of time timing out their loads would be pointless cause it would have very little effect on the rankings.
Since the beginning of the new year, we've taken strides towards getting a working load remover available for use by all runners as a means to combat load discrepancy a other factors that could add on time in an RTA setting. With some help by members of the community, we now have achieved this goal, and will now have it be recommended for use going forward.
So then, what shall we do with the current runs on the boards that were done with a simple RTA timing method? Well, I've gone through the runs that I thought mattered (the top ones that we're sort of close to eachother), and timed out any frames where the word "loading" appeared on screen from the transition from mission briefing to the shop menu/spawn in.
Just to clarify, I'm timing out any frame that looks like this -
Notice the box that usually says "continue" transitions into "loading" after being clicked, I then resumed the timer once the first frame of the shop menu/spawn into game world appeared on screen. For quick loads, I timed out from first "black screen" frame to last "black screen" frame before spawning back into game world. I must stress, these are the ONLY PORTIONS OF RUNS THAT WERE TIMED OUT MANUALLY, mission briefings, ending stats screens, shops and and accidental pauses were left in.
Obviously, doing this by watching the youtube videos one frame at a time can be a little inaccurate, because some recordings were only 30fps, so sometimes the jumps in time were more massive for those than they were for 60fps recordings, giving them more "load time" to remove. Also, there are very very slight loads from shop menu to game world after hitting "play mission" that I could not reasonably count because of no real transition between the two in terms of changing of frames. Both my runs and Noctorious' runs timed out to be 26:29.800~ or so, but due to possible inaccuracies I've just changed both of them to read as "26:29 w/o loads".
Its also worth noting that, at the time of this writing, I don't believe the current load remover times out cutscenes. Some users have an issue (or benefit???) where their cutscenes don't play at all, which could give them an advantage, albeit very minimal, over the course of a run. On the matter at hand, I personally believe they should be counted TO the time, cause the player does have control during them and can end them through their own input, which I believe should be always counted. But with some runners not having them play at all and just instantly going to the Stats Screen, I can see this being an issue for sure. Thoughts on the matter?
It's obvious going forward we ask all runners to use this new Autosplitter/Load Remover if possible, because the times from now on will be sorted by "time w/o loads" in ranking. You do not have to use this function, of course. I will go ahead and add the splitter to the Resources page and try to write up a guide on how to do it soon(ish).
I could also try to time out the Expert runs using the same method I did for the Normal runs, but seeing as they aren't close to each other, I don't think its that important to spend hours on that atm.
Big news update taffers! Recently there has been a discussion on what to do with the mission "A Keeper's Training" for fullgame runs on both Normal and Expert. After a lengthy discussion with a majority of community members, the consensus reached was to remove the level from EXPERT only. The reasons brought up that led the discussion to this conclusion were:
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The level defaults back to Normal difficulty despite selecting "Expert" in the mission briefing anyway.
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Expert should be a category of doing all the missions on the Expert difficulty. If it defaults back to normal, that doesn't make sense now does it?
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There is also no fundamental change to the route or any of the objectives as a result of this.
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The game also lets you skip training without the use of any cheat code or NG+ setup.
To keep in line with the idea of "Expert should be a category of doing all the missions on the Expert difficulty." We've discussed changing the category names to be less confusing and reflect the respective requirements a little better, something to the like of simply "Normal" and "Expert".
"Normal" signifying "Beating all levels on Normal difficulty" (Including training, since it is that level's only difficulty really), and "Expert" signifying "Beating all levels on Expert difficulty" (Excluding training, since it can not truly be played on expert).
Have any objections to this change? Any suggestions for different renames for the categories? Let us know! You can read the whole discussion in the discord.
If there is no substantial opposition to the decision, this will go into effect in the coming days, and any Expert fullgame run with training in it will be retimed to reflect the change.
Big news update taffers! Recently there has been a discussion on what to do with the mission "A Keeper's Training" for fullgame runs on both Normal and Expert. After a lengthy discussion with a majority of community members, the consensus reached was to remove the level from EXPERT only. The reasons brought up that led the discussion to this conclusion were:
-
The level defaults back to Normal difficulty despite selecting "Expert" in the mission briefing anyway.
-
Expert should be a category of doing all the missions on the Expert difficulty. If it defaults back to normal, that doesn't make sense now does it?
-
There is also no fundamental change to the route or any of the objectives as a result of this.
-
The game also lets you skip training without the use of any cheat code or NG+ setup.
To keep in line with the idea of "Expert should be a category of doing all the missions on the Expert difficulty." We've discussed changing the category names to be less confusing and reflect the respective requirements a little better, something to the like of simply "Normal" and "Expert".
"Normal" signifying "Beating all levels on Normal difficulty" (Including training, since it is that level's only difficulty really), and "Expert" signifying "Beating all levels on Expert difficulty" (Excluding training, since it can not truly be played on expert).
Have any objections to this change? Any suggestions for different renames for the categories? Let us know! You can read the whole discussion in the discord.
If there is no substantial opposition to the decision, this will go into effect in the coming days, and any Expert fullgame run with training in it will be retimed to reflect the change.
Hi, recently a user by the name of @kirbyPlayz has thrown a huge tantrum on the forums for Hot Lava (https://www.speedrun.com/Hot_Lava) over not getting moderator for a game he didn't even run (or own, for that matter).
Normally this is whatever, just someone being weird, but he posted recently something to the effect of "if you don't unban me from discord and give me mod back i will track you all down and murder you."
This insane and concerning post was made literally on this site, though he's since deleted his post, but I'm almost positive the site mods can see it in his post history. I'm probably just not looking in the right place to report someone, but this thread should still be useful since a glance at his post history shows he bothers every board he can for moderator, and gauging from his response here, it's probably best to post this as a warning for others.
This is the new discord going forward primarily for Speedrunning only. Old one still there for general thievery talk and FMs, but you would have to ask for an invite. This link will never expire.
This is the new discord going forward primarily for Speedrunning only. Old one still there for general thievery talk and FMs, but you would have to ask for an invite. This link will never expire.
This is the new discord going forward primarily for Speedrunning only. Old one still there for general thievery talk and FMs, but you would have to ask for an invite. This link will never expire.
