Why not create a "Fetus Seed" Category? :D It's just a rondom seed like all the others but also a random starting point for a non-random run :D

Thanks for the great explanation! :) Ok this changes my opinion completely, so forget everything i said about that skip before^^

I'm absolutely in favor to keep this in any way in the run because of the different route options this opens, and this is an absolutely legitimate strat which makes the run indeed much more interesting.

Hmm but this doesn't make the other problems with Emu vs. Hardware disappear :/ Difficult to say which one is better now. I think neither is. Does anyone know how other Amiga Speedrun Communities handle that Load Time and Hardware-difference topic? I think this isn't a Giana Sisters only problem.

Well there's not an easy solution for this after all. Just as Reboot said, in RTA you can't compare the times on real hardware since it can be too different. And you shouldn't give emulators any advantage or disadvantage to real hardware. Also as mentioned in the other thread, the countdown speed of the timer between the levels seems to be faster on faster hardware. I could just rerun the game with an A1200 instead of an A500 and get an easy WR. I don't see any other solution for this, but cutting out the transition between levels in the video, which is actually not so uncommon in many other speedruns. You also can't see when your disk is accessed or any other internal hardware-data on videos. Maybe anyone has a better idea?

Besides these issues in RTA, what also needs more discussion is the bonus-time-skip. Reboot, can you explain how to exactly pull it off? It seems to be fairly impossible to get it every time between every level. You also just got it once in your run and it cuts away so much time, if you can pull it off more than 2 or 3 times in a run, the rest of the gameplay would become meaningless and the run just becomes "Who can pull off that bonus-time-skip more often?". Just for some math: If you could actually pull it off with 50% success on every level, The chance to get it 15x in a run is 0.003% or less than 1 in 30.000 attempts. I can imagine that this would keep away many potetial runners from grinding for WR since it reduces the whole run to just this one trick. I see still a lot of improvement possibilities within the game itself and maybe there are other yet unknown in-game shortcuts, which sould be encouraged to get discovered to keep this speedrun interesting.

My suggestion for now would be to make an extra Category for the RTA with loading times and bonus-time-skip (but then, only emulator and with fixed emulator settings). Then everyone can choose what to aim for.

Hey MilkToast, i wrote you on twitch, look at the Icon in the lower right corner ;) I also tried to contact RoboSparkle through twitter. Let's see

Hmm ok i understand.. but is this really the way we want to go here? I mean in the end it would only depend on whether you get the glitch or not - in every of the 20 levels. Playing the levels good or bad would become more and more meaningless. Maybe it could be an extra category or something like this.

Hey MilkToast,

I just submitted my first run :) Of course i can suggest you as an additional mod. But maybe it's even better when you apply and suggest me as Co-Mod, because as you said, i'm quite new here.

I also developed an Auto-Splitter which stops time during the level transistions. I used it the first time in my run. It's not really user friendly to use yet, but i will continue developing and post here as soon as it's somehow useable :) If you (or someone else) is interested in testing, feel free to contact me.

Here's the Supercut of my current submission (6:03). There's still a lot of room for improvement, but at least i have something to show ;)

have a great time, Mike

Hey there :)

I just did some work and re-timed all the current runs with the actual in-game playtime and cutting out all the loading times and level transitions in-between. As written in this thread (https://www.speedrun.com/greatgianasisters/thread/v5g6y) it's really difficult / impossible to make a reliable RTA ruleset for emulated games of this kind, that makes it fair for everyone. Different emulator settings result in different loading times, but also maybe other factors like emu-version may make a difference in the resulting times in-between the actual gameplay. Especially people who want to play on real hardware would be treated really unfair. The only solution i found, is to just take the actual time the game is played and eliminate all the other "analog" factors.

My method was to take the uploaded video and cut out all the level-transitions with a video editing tool. I tried to do this as accurate as possible. Though because of different framerates of the captures (the game runs at 50 fps, some videos are 25, others 30 fps etc..) there may be one frame plus or minus in the transitions, though they shoud even out through the entire run. But i don't think we have to be accurate down to milliseconds anyway yet. ;)

Here's the results and the corresponding supercut-videos:

1. Reboot - 06:01 -

2. RoboSparkle - 06:22 -

3. MilkToast - 06:31 -

4. WojT__gl - 06:53 -

Some final things i noticed in these runs: In Reboot's original video there was no Timer-Countdown between stage 14 and 15. Looks like a glitch but i never encountered that in my attempts before. Also WojT__gl used some weird graphics mod i didn't see before. I wouldn't have accepted this run, but it looks like the gameplay is still legit. Also i didn't bother to cut the Warpless run from TaTuMi3 since it's just a random slow playthrough and not really a speedrun.

I hope this may bring some more consistency into this game and hope to see more runs submitted. Mine will come soon, too :)

Stay awesome! Mike

Hey Milktoast,

Thank you for your appreciation :) Yeah what i do is just time the pure in-game-time. One way to do this is to just take the video and cut out every part that isn't on the game screen (=every frame with a black background / level text on it). I'll describe that seperately in another thread. It's not so much work. About 15 minutes per run. This should be the one-to-catch-them-all method for timing i guess (hope) :)

About the Mod: Yeah i surely will do that. I would really like to write down some more specific rules and maybe bring some more life into this games speedruns. I will write in the Mods-Forum as soon as i submitted my first own run, guess that's also a requirement :) I'm also currently working on an autosplitter to make timing overall much easier.

Hey there :)

after attempting a few runs by myself and also watching all of them here available, i came to the conclusion that the only reliable measurement option would be to actually count the real in-game time without loading. At least without making all currently submitted runs obsolete because of the not defined settings for the emulator.

Counting that time isn't such a deal. It took me about 20 minutes to cut my run frame-perfect on every level from the first non-black Frame after the text to the first black frame after the level ending. I think i will also do this for all the submitted runs the next days, and post them here, just for comparison.

Maybe an issue would also be capture-options. Since the game runs at 50 fps, i wanted to set my Monitor to 50Hz refresh rate using CRU and also captured at exactly 50 frames. I also checked the frame-accuracy by looking at the timer countdown at the end of the level. Each second should last exactly 2 frames. But i guess we don't have to be so precise yet ;)

I think all this should also be an issue with all of the Amiga (and other non-console) games here. Another option would be to just define every possible setting, including kickstart AND game-version in the rules (it should be the original non-cracked release). But this would totally exclude many people who play on real hardware, which is a big deal in my opinion.

As for the moderators. I saw there's an option to contact a site-admin if the mods of a game are not responding. Who knows how many submitted runs are still in the pipeline. And I also want to submit my run also as soon as i think it's good enough ;)

I'm just wondering how few runs there are in total for Giana Sisters, since it's obviously one of the biggest amiga-classics, as far as i know.