I think the question is why are there separate '10 Golds' and '9 golds and 1 silver' categories anyway? Because that's what it is. Be simpler to just have one category for the tests and one for 100%, either allow prize car skipping or don't, and you're done. Then you don't need these strange rule discrepencies because a) you don't want the non-gold Any% strat to be 'who can sandbag the best Bronze times' and b ) the better skill gets the better times

It's just weird that if you intentionally go slower on one of the tests you can skip minutes of stuff, but if you don't, you're not.

They are, but you can't officially install GT3 to a HD without homebrew so its a gray area and with the way things went with GT2, things that aren't accessible to the majority eventually get split into their own category or outright deleted. For example, there has been talk on the Discord of removing the top time here, since it uses a HD while mine and ninja's don't.

But yeah, get a fat then you can use either HD or disc. In a game like this there's far more driving than loading so being ever-so-slightly-disadvantaged in disc load times isn't gonna make much difference.

Mine's a 75004 slim if you at least want parity. Though load times do depend on the state of your disc too.

In Any% it depends on how good a driver you are as to whether the Esperante is worth it. It takes about 20 minutes to get it if you do all the time trials first try, and the car is only eligible for some of the beginner races so you have to make up that 20 minutes over only about 40/50 laps. It's by far the best car you can get, but I'm on the fence as to whether its worth it versus using a car you can buy (I used a NA 2 Viper).

In 100% since you have to do the time trials anyway for completion, it's a no-brainer to do them first and use the Esperante it to get an F1 car like so: Time trials Amateur Worlds, save and reset for the GT-One road car Polyphony Digital Cup using save and reset for the F1 car

From there it's pretty much just knocking out the 3,201 laps as you're never in need of money and you can mostly buy the fastest cars for each event. The only optimum car you can't buy is the Speed12 for the FR races but there's plenty of buyable alternatives.

Despite it having a higher HP, torque and lower weight, the Turbo F1 car is slower than the NA one. I used the US version in my run so I don't know whether 001 or 002 is the NA one, but that's the best one. IIRC it's not the one you get from the PDC though, which means its not the one you'll primarily be using.

Also your assumption isn't totally correct. With a little setup the Escudo has a lower average lap around Super Speedway than the F1 cars, primarily due to the fixed, high tyre wear on them. That means in the F1 you either have to pit often to keep the optimum lap times, or trundle around on red tyres which negates their advantage.

Ninja did the full 26 hours all at once but Book and I have done runs splitting it into parts. There's no rule on the length of the parts, though obviously the shorter they are, the more time you lose to the mandatory saving and loading between them.

Bad luck dude, looked to be on good pace last I saw. Glad your PS2 survived it at least, and that 59.xx around Rome so it wasn't a complete bust.

I'm still not planning on doing it again (I need to get back to smashing sub 20 on Intelligent Qube), but there's some good stuff I can adapt into my route.

So I redid this because I wasn't happy with the number of spins and general screwed-by-RNGness of the first one (also because you really shouldn't be relying on the Weds Celica and Mugen Integra for more than the FF races, which I did).

And yeah, I barely missed sub 26 with a 26:03:14. There's definitely 10 minutes to save since I didn't wallride in the 2 hour endurance, like at all. Some RNG time (41 race resets), and a theoretical 10 minutes since I actually timed saving and loading and it takes about 53 seconds from map screen to map screen. I do that 11 times so that's just under 10 mins everything else being equal.

The fun of this for me is mostly in the planning and I've done that twice now so even though sub 26 would be nice and is kinda guaranteed, I'm gonna leave it for a long while. I'll put up my route in the resources, not so much for the route but because it's a massive spreadsheet with all the events, prize money, prize cars, how much they sell for, min/max credits you can have if you get best/worst prize RNG, cars & tuning fully costed etc

Did you do a race twice? This is my 100% screen, 1 fewer win and 53,000 less prize money.

Anyway, I got 26:44:11 on the PAL version. The Supra you start with is more expensive so I found a different car (RX-7 Infini) and just pretty much went on my own route from there.

It's not the fastest since I failed the Rome Night S License test once, lost to the Escudo on the hill climb twice, took the midgets and about 80% of the other one makes around SS R5 and the Expert Event Generator gave me the full Grand Valley twice.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPltnVf77OZ_cmYpb6c4cCCNl_h261W44

The PAL only thing was a joke :) 100% on it would take a lot longer just due to the lower frame rate alone.

I saw some of your 100% stream where you mentioned the RNG thing so I checked it then and didn't turn up anything obvious (it doesn't use the standard PSX RNG). I looked into it a bit more now and I did find how it decides on the random track, though it's not really manipulatable in any useful sense.

Basically, the game keeps track of how many frames it's rendered and it does some maths on that number. The result is then divided by the number of tracks and the remainder of the division is the index into a list of track names. So it's only really useful in a TAS situation with frame advance and somebody would have to be insane to do a 100% TAS.

I didn't look at Event Generator or other versions than PAL but I guess they work on the same principle.

Tech Notes for Track RNG since it might be useful to somebody at some point (PAL version): The function which calls the RNG and picks out the track is at 800190C4. The RNG function is at 80083B34 (a0 = seed location, the game uses different seed values for different things) The seed for the track RNG is at 801FF600, though this is really just a copy of the value at 801F06B0 from after you click Go (copied to v0 in the function at 8007D284, then stored in that functions caller).

The function that takes the track name and returns the relevant info from the .crsinfo file (loaded at 801E1910) is at 8005E630 (a0 = the race name, a1 = track code name (both from the string section at the end of gtmode_race.dat)). If the hash of the track code name doesn't match any of the tracks in .crsinfo (it doesn't for manufacturer races since their track is set to "none") it goes through the random function mentioned above to get one that is and calls it again.

Some of the code is loaded/decoded during runtime so to dump it, it's easiest to set a breakpoint on the addresses and then dump the PlayStation ram (the version of PCSX that has the non-F11 debugger has a button to do it) -> then load the ram dump as an additional binary file after loading the SCES file in IDA.

I'd probably suggest doing it how proper segmented speedruns usually work - i.e. going to the main menu and saving, then stopping the timer when it's done. Then when you come back, start the timer when you start loading. Saving/loading takes long enough in this game that that's about a minute penalty for each segment.

As for versions, let's just all use the PAL version. There's only one of them (I think) :p You can distinguish US 1.2 from other versions by the Muscle Car cup, the required licenses are all I-A (what they should be) whereas on the others they're shown as A, I-C & I-B. So unless someone is saving everytime they go through the Special Races 2 screen and swapping discs, you can tell if they've only got 98.2 on 1.2.

I know you've put a 100% route up, but if you or anyone else wants to know which days an AZ-1 or any other used car will turn up, I dumped all the cycles for each region - http://blog.airesoft.co.uk/2015/09/gran-turismo-2s-used-car-cycles/

I also managed to dump which cars are eligible for each Manufacturer Race (http://pastebin.com/ZT60HM0F), but there aren't any that allow the Escudo or anything or have version differences. I was a bit surprised that the Elise GT1 can be used in the normal Elise race, and the Tommy Kaira R can be used in the Nissan GT-R normal race but that's just me not knowing and/or forgetting.

Ok, so since I was made mod by someone I've added the IGT column. I didn't know the leaderboards kept both real time and IGT when you selected that option so that's the best of both worlds.

I've also added the Japanese name to the game. Shame there's no option for seperate JP/US/EU game names but whatever. I'm sure everybody who knows it's called Roll Away knows of one of the other names. Only problem is that its called Roll Away on Twitch's game list so the streams won't show up here.

I'd suggest this game should probably be timed using the in game timer rather than RTA, or at least have both listed.

The in game timer works by counting the frames from the level fly-in until you touch the exit, and then divides it by the frame rate (dropping any fractional seconds).

It doesn't count anything outside the actual gameplay like load screens and it accounts for the different frame rates between regions so it'd level the playing field on real hardware from standard PS1 PAL to PS2 JP FDS to Android / PSN releases.

The Kula Quest timer either caps or rolls over at 59:59 but that'd be a bad run anyway, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Comments?

GreenTunic: you might want to add クーラクエスト as the Japanese name of the game. Don't know where these are displayed or if they affect anything but it might bring some more runners in other than me & GT.