Hey everyone,

I'm new to speedrunning, and was wondering if you need a physical timer on screen to submit a speedrun on this site?

In other words, can I have my timer on my phone and if I PB, I could still submit the video with no timer.

Thanks!

There's no requirement to have a timer onscreen, it's just a handy tool to have so that you and the viewers can easily track your progress. The physical presence of a timer has no bearing on the actual time of a run, though.

Ok, but do the mods verify the time on their own if there is no timer on screen? How does that work?

The timing is simply redone by a moderator, or preferably yourself. You're responsible for your own run after all, and it shouldn't be the mod's job to essentially do the submission for you. They'll of course do it if it's necessary due to inaccuracies in a submission, but it's not fair to expect them to regularly do it for runners.

Lots of people don't seem to appreciate that even when timing with an onscreen timer, like LiveSplit, you're invariably going to have inaccuracies. People just submit whatever time the timer displays when they stop it at the end of the run as their run time, but that's not likely to be correct if you're not paying very close attention to when you should be starting/ending time. Every run has a specific start/end point, and any time before/after that does not factor into the run, regardless of what the timer reads.

For games that only measure down to seconds, this isn't really a problem as it's very easy to manually time even just with a video progress bar, but for games that track centi/milliseconds, you're gonna have to framecount. This is made much easier on games that use Ingame Time however, as those typically have timers within the game that you can then just copy/paste if it's a cumulative time across the run, or just add up level times if the IGT is the sum of individual levels.

Many PC games also have functional autosplitters that will do your timing for you, so there's that.

Thanks for the response. This is very helpful and really appreciate it.

While it is not required it definitely makes it a bit easier as far as getting your run approved. It of course depends on whatever game you are running. I have never stated a timer is required to be on screen but it is a lot easier for viewers so I don't have to do as much work to get your run approved. So you might see it approved faster.

How accurate does your timer have to be with the game.

It doesn't have to be exactly accurate. Most mods will retime your run anyway, but it does help the mods to have a relative time to go on.

also please dont necro 6 year old threads. the timer is technically irrelevant (note that some games force you to have a timer, these are often pc games like all games with the source engine)