Loadless is Finally Here! (and more)

Hello everyone,

Since we started advocating for a restructuring of the SRC page, the most pervasive and pressing issue has been moving to loadless. With an autosplitter and load remover being available in LiveSplit for over a year now, we can finally say it's here.

It's definitely worth explaining how we've adapted to allow loadless as it is complicated and will lead to a very strange period for Ty speedrunning as a whole. We hope it brings old runners back to the game to give it another go and really drive those times down.

Before we go into that however, another important topic to mention is an edit to the rules surrounding modded skins. With a new autosplitter being created, we have had the opportunity to output all of the necessary information required to verify that a run has not been cheated. We may ask for these log files if we have any suspicion but they also server as a great way to police skin modifications. All you need to do is provide your log file along with your submission. More details have been added and updated here.

Anyway, let's talk loadless...

Background

Firstly, the reason it has taken so long to get to this point is largely down to SRC not making it easy to switch to loadless. Turning the LRT timer on switches every existing run to LRT which is not ideal. All existing runs are RTA times and should not be considered LRT. However, any runs that don't use the default timing method also get thrown down to the bottom of the board so even people with really really fast RTA times would be below the slowest LRT time.

PC

We wanted to avoid both of these issues so we modified every single PC run across both boards to put the existing time as both LRT and RTA. This means the times will never be shoved to the bottom but we're also still promoting and encouraging runners to shift to loadless.

Console & ILs

During this process, we also had to switch every single console run to use only RTA. If you're submitting for console, please still only fill out the RTA time. Furthermore, we turned on the IGT timer for the Time Attack ILs. This timer should only ever be filled out for Time Attack ILs.

New Autosplitter

Along with this announcement comes a brand new autosplitter which makes individual collectible splits far more consistent as well as adding extra split settings for more categories. The new code is well commented and structured to make it easy for future development if needed. The timing method for loads and autosave removal has also been adapted to be more runner friendly.

If you need any help figuring out the autosplitter, feel free to reach out to us in the discord.

Going Forwards

So what does this mean for the near future?

Since the main timing method has been switched to loadless, we are about to enter a very bizarre period for this game. Ideally all runs would be retimed or every runner would immediately PB and the positions would stay the same but this is incredibly unrealistic. People's positions on the leaderboard are bound to move around significantly as we settle into the new timing method. We have done our best to mitigate the impact but this will, no doubt, be a mad scramble for positions.

We encourage this. Having as many older runners coming back to reclaim their times as possible is an incredible thing for our community and there was never going to be a way to avoid this when considering moving to loadless. Over time, this will even the playing field and refresh the leaderboards and we can't wait to see what new and old runners alike do with this incredible game.

Thank you once again for your patience. We have now achieved everything we set out to in our original plan for revitalising the community. We still have plenty planned but for now, we are just excited for more runs.

Good luck to all of you!