EnglandHere you can find a Discord server for all of the Rocket Knight games:
Here you can find a Discord server for all of the Rocket Knight games:
Here you can find a Discord server for all of the Rocket Knight games:
Here you can find a Discord server for all of the Rocket Knight games:
Before you get excited, it's not notable. Adjusting for RTA timing, the TAS gets 4:22, and a high one at that. Just like my original run.
It has brought into question whether 4:21 is possible, though. I've learned some things about this game whilst creating this TAS:
- Jumping, in and of itself, is faster.
- Falling is slower.
- Some parts of the current RTA route are actually slower, by frames.
There is one element to this game that ties all 3 of these points together, and is not detectable in a run: Lag reduction.
I had a NIGHTMARE fixing desyncs due to the way lag works in this game. For practical purposes, it's random. The frame that you perform specific actions will influence how many lag frames you get thereafter. Even an action such as jumping up to a platform will give variable results depending on when you jump.
The most surprising thing this taught me was that taking the third turtle in Stage 3 is SLOWER. How is this possible? It's because the speed the turtle moves is only marginally faster than taking the bottom path, but the lag generated by the higher path, including being forced to collect the heart up there, generates so much lag that it actually loses more frames than it saves.
I think if I went back and completely redid this TAS from the beginning with lag reduction in mind, it could be a 4:21 equivalent, but it's a lot of frames to save. About 50 of them. Will there ever be an RTA 4:21? Don't hold your breath. Will record and upload soon.
Hello everyone,
I'm the Panzer Dragoon series moderator and have been in charge of the Panzer Dragoon Zwei boards for months, and was now recently added as a Super Mod to this board also, as there were some things that I felt needed changing around and standardising.
I've changed both the rulesets for the categories and the time that each run took:
Rule changes include defining the start of the run as the player starting a new game on the title screen. Previously it was defined as "When the player gains control", which is approx. 17 seconds after this.
I've also changed the point at which time ends, which is the more important difference. Previously, time ended when the final bosses energy bar was depleted, but I do not believe this is an appropriate place to end timing for two reasons:
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The player still has control after this point, as demonstrated in the current Normal WR when the game is paused after this point. The player could potentially fulfill that condition, then pause the game and leave it, at which point the game would never end.
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The time between the final bosses death animation starting and the final fade-to-black is variable based on a variety of factors including position. This changes the amount of time that elapses after the boss is defeated, and as such should be treated as part of the run.
Therefore, I have decided that time should end on the final fade-to-black. At this point, the player has lost control and can do nothing to influence how quickly the game progresses. This mirrors how the rules for Panzer Dragoon Zwei are set out, which I laid out months ago. I originally thought of also using energy bar depletion as the end point but quickly noticed the same issue, that the bosses death time depends on position, so that was not an appropriate place to end the run.
The rulesets and timings of the runs have been adjusted accordingly. Please feel free to ask any questions here or get in touch with me on any of my associated social media platforms.
Cheating is bad. Really, really bad.
Look, if you know that you can get a time in a game, or even think you "deserve" that time, I understand the temptation to cheat. Why sit through thousands more resets if the game's just not giving it to you, right?
But the thing is, as this case has shown, you will NOT get away with it forever, and you will never be trusted in the same way again. Getting a WR or a super optimised time is an incredibly tempting goal, but it's just as much about the journey as the destination. Part of what makes having those times feel as good as they do is the amount of work you needed to put in to get them. You'll experience very little satisfaction in passing off a cheated or spliced run as genuine, and if your game's community has even a bit of activity, it's very likely that at some point someone will look at your fake run closer and catch you out.
Just don't do it, alright?
On your left you will see that we not only have the Full-game leaderboards, but now we also have leaderboards for each Individual Level, M1 through M5.
This also applies to Bosses and Green Hill until SRcom's infrastructure is a little more sophisticated, so for now just submit all stats for those boards as M1.
I should have made a thread for this sooner, but we now have an active leaderboard for SA2B Category Extensions. There, you will find boards for Knuckles/Rouge Centurion, All A-Ranks, Hero Story Low%, Boss Rush, 171 Emblems and Knuckles x20/Rouge x25
About time SOMEONE made a thread about actual current speedrunning events.
Predctions/hopes/fears about what will/won't make the cut?
I've already voiced elsewhere that I hope Breath of the Wild doesn't get in purely because of how new it is. It deserves a few more months of work put into it and then being shown at AGDQ18, in my opinion.
I'm of course hopeful that at least one of my submissions will make it in (Sonic Adventure 2/Undertale/Sparkster) but as for other games I specifically want to see:
Digimon World 1 by Raikou: This is a really impressive run utilising extensive RNG manipulation. Anyone who knows this game probably remembers it as being very cryptic and difficult as the game does absolutely nothing to teach the player of the overall objective. A speedrun really trivialises this game to an almost hilarious extent.
F-Zero GX by 1davidj and Naegleria: This is one of the few games I would like to see as a staple entry in every event. Pure madness, and a Time Attack race is a sight to behold. It's hard to describe just how high the skill ceiling is in this game.
Freedom Planet by Fladervy and Revolucion: This is a mind-bending run to try and keep up with, and a race is even moreso. If you like Classic Sonic, you'll love this. Plus the physics are... INTERESTING. And not always in a bad way, either!
Megaman Battle Network 1 by PrismaticBlack: I've wanted to see this game at a GDQ for years, and that was BEFORE the run was heavily RNG manipulated. Now that it is manipulated, it's a whole different experience. Every single element of RNG in this game is controlled by the player now, creating a run in which the runner can literally announce ahead of time every 'random' event that's going to occur.
Just a quick PSA to announce that in the Resources section, you can now find "Spades' Savestating Tool" by, well, Spades, which will allow you to 'savestate' on PC version. I say 'savestate' because it's not a bona fide savestate, but rather a tool that allows you to save the character's current position, and then teleport to that position. That's the basic thrust behind how it works, at least. You can also use this tool to generate as many lives as you need, so between being able to save/load state and use infinite lives, practicing is now more streamlined than ever.
I've included a preliminary Readme in the download, though it is a very simple tool to use. New versions may be released later with additional features, and I will update the download link when appropriate.
Coatsink are planning an update that will address the checkpoint abuse issue in the game and make it unusable. That being the case, IL times will be perfectly viable for Single Segment runs, and so I have decided they are to be preferred as they remove any advantage that PC runs have due to loading times.
All submissions from this date onwards will use IGT as the primary timing method, which is the sum of your Individual Level times. To this end, you must pick up the hourglass at the start of every stage. If you fail to do this, your time will still be accepted, but will be listed at the bottom of the leaderboard as it has no IGT stat. Any runs using checkpoint abuse before the update is implemented will be summarily rejected.
By and large I'm not a fan of the Filter lists because they can be kinda unwieldy, especially with a lot of variables.
I would quite like to be able to Sort a leaderboard's runs by clicking the relevant headers such as Player to sort by alphabetical order, Platform to show which runs were done on what console, Date so that you have a chronological view of the board, etc.
I feel like this would essentially perform the same function as the Filter list whilst only being a single mouse-click away, so I'm not sure why this isn't a feature already.
So this game currently has no rules set, and there has been some discussion as to what this game's rules should include, as well as timing methods.
As far as timing goes, there are more nuances to this than there first seems. First of all, you need to determine where the start/end point of timing is, which sounds easy, but actually isn't very simple, for a few reasons.
First of all, I believe that the RTA should correlate to the Ingame timer as closely as reasonably possible, for consistency purposes. To this end, this would set the start/end point for RTA as the start/end point for IGT. For the end, this is easy enough; the ingame timer stops counting once you enter the Spirit Stone Chamber after defeating Evil Gaia, so this should presumably be RTA's endpoint. Currently, Elmagus is the only one with an RTA run, and he uses last hit on Evil Gaia as his endpoint, but he also wastes no time between there and entering the Spirit Stone Chamber, so that's easy to retime.
The problem is determining the start time. I've just spent some time running some various emu tests, and the ingame timer does NOT start counting when you select New Game, which is what people have been using as their start point for RTA.
When you select New Game, the game begins with an FMV cutscene that lasts for a couple of minutes, then the first ingame cutscene featuring General Baal begins. As far as I can tell, this is when the ingame timer starts counting. Not even specifically when the SFX of the cutscene starts, it appears that the cutscene actually begins several seconds before the sound starts playing, because that was the only way I could match up timing with Livesplit against what the ingame timer read when I reached the first save point in Parm Port.
So that sounds simple enough, but then I encountered another problem; emulation accuracy. I ran these tests on both Bizhawk and PSXfin, and got entirely different results. Turns out, PSXfin is a very inaccurate emulator. From selecting New Game, to gaining control in front of Gantz:
PSXfin: Gain control at 9:30, save point reads 7:16 Bizhawk: Gain control at 9:45, save point reads 7:32
PSXfin saves 15~ seconds over Bizhawk just in the game intro purely because it's not emulating the load times correctly. What's more, the ingame timer reads an entirely different value! This would suggest that the ingame timer actually takes loading times into account, so shorter loads due to poor emulation = lower ingame time.
Bizhawk is definitely the accurate one; it gains control at 9:45, which is exactly the same as Elmagus' RTA run, which was performed on a PS1. If emulator runs are to be accepted for this game, Bizhawk is for sure the emulator we should be permitting, and only that, unless it can be demonstrated that another Playstation emulator has similar accuracy. Just from the intro, PSXfin saves 15 seconds due to shoddy emulation.
If we compare start points of 9:30 to 9:45, this implies that PSXfin consistently saves approximately 3% extra time over Bizhawk/original hardware.
To put this into perspective, Elmagus' RTA WR is 13:35:03. Under these parameters, it would have been approximately 13:10:36 on PSXfin. That's just ridiculous to allow.
tl;dr I would like to make RTA/IGT comparable but it's a little silly to work out and measure, and it brought to my attention that you should really run on original hardware if you can help it, and use Bizhawk if you absolutely must use an emulator.
So, how is everyone enjoying the submissions so far? Bring up anything that's particularly caught your eye or looks interesting.
Myself, I'm submitting 5 games for AGDQ: Sonic Adventure 2, Undertale, Sparkster Genesis, Sparkster SNES (Yes, they're two different games) and Rocket Knight. You can find full details of each run in the individual submissions.
As a personal recommendation, I highly suggest checking out Megaman Battle Network 1 and 2, submitted by Tterraj42 and Keizaron, respectively. If you like RNG manipulation in RPGs, those runs will blow your mind.
Due to a recent rule change concerning video evidence retention, certain runs cannot formally remain on the leaderboard without existing evidence to sustain them. Nontheless, I don't want to just purge them from existence, and would like for their memory to remain somewhere, so here you will be able to find details of old runs that cannot remain on the boards.
So, browsing YouTube it is apparent that some players have completed runs of this game without submitting, people who aren't members of this site, in fact, and thus CAN'T submit.
Among these times are players who play on emu, specifically Fusion, which has been highlighted recently as a potentially inaccurate emulator. For instance, I was going to add this time by Onclemol done at a marathon. The video claims it is a 29:44, but after retiming due to inaccurate splits, it is actually a 30:00
But I decided to check his Twitch page, and his old PB shows that he uses Fusion. http://www.twitch.tv/onclemol/c/1926429
How should this be approached? As of now, I am happy to accept these runs after Vorpal's findings of Fusion difference being potentially negligible, but if anyone else has serious objections, feel free to remove the run until something more concrete can be decided.
This game currently has no rules to tell people how to time their runs, and as a result I actually used the wrong end-of-run point for my first couple of PBs. The game page could do with a paragraph like:
"Time begins on selecting Start on the title screen, and ends on the fade-to-white after the final autoscroller."
