California, USAI wanted to try using a dedicated solver for Traveling Salesman-type problems to search for a possible improvement to the route. In order to do this I need to identify all of the different segments of the main story + each substory as well as the map coordinates of where they begin and end. With this + a high quality PNG of the game map I think I can generate a distance matrix indicating the approximate time it takes to travel between any two points on the map. Then I need to also work out the precedence list (which events are prerequisites for other events). If I have all that then I can use the LKH-3 solver to try to find an optimal route. So I was wondering if anyone had experience with data mining this game in order to find the exact x/y coordinates, or else how I might go about installing a mod that tells me my current coordinates so I could play through the game and document it myself. Thanks
For most leaderboards, there is still too much leniency on emulator runs despite how easy we know it is to stream & submit a TASed run. When a console run gets cheated/spliced the way it gets caught is through pretty objective measures like audio disparities. But with emulated runs you are forced to deal in really subjective junk like whether certain movements "feel" fake, or what your opinion of the runner him/herself is. I just feel like this is a tremendous waste of mods' time having to put that much time and effort into judging something as real or fake when they really have no genuine evidence either way.
The most popular leaderboards on this site already have extensive regulations on what is required of anyone who submits an emulator run, and these guidelines have roughly the same major points. They aren't identical though. There are a lot of standards that exist in some rule sets but not in others and they don't have consistent lists of allowed emulators. But there is really no reason whatsoever why these guidelines should vary so wildly between games on the same platform. If you have a standard set of rules for say, NES emulation, those basic rules to prevent dubious, unverifiable runs will apply to nearly every single game on the system.
Now we could have this gigantic list of emulator regulations and copy-paste it into every single category of every single NES game. But that takes up a ton of space and would need to be updated constantly with the release of new emulators.
So instead how about this:
- We make standardized lists of reasonable expectations of emulated runs + allowed emulators for each console, and publish it either as a dedicated page on speedrun.com or as a sticky.
- For each category on each game on that system we just include a hyperlink to the page/sticky. That way we have a standard set of rules that won't have to be manually updated by individual game mods.
I'd say that a lot of the mods on this site (including me) aren't completely educated on which emulators can be trusted. But if you had an official template signed off on by people knowledgeable on the subject they wouldn't need to worry about it.
Now of course, with the way the site is currently set up and run by different groups of mods we run into the issue of territoriality & cliques who will outright reject certain changes so I don't know if I'll ever actually be successful in making this an official thing. But at the very least it could be a semi-official posting that we could recommend to current mods or anyone adding a new game on that platform.
As an example, I looked at the most popular NES leaderboards and compiled some of the guidelines they have for emulator/flash cart usage.
This is pretty exhaustive and I doubt most leaderboards would be willing to adopt it in its current length but even a hugely abridged version of it would make a huge difference.
(The first two are not restricted to emulator runs but still good general guidelines) Please ensure game audio is audible. Turbo/Autofire and left+right/up+down are banned. Multiple inputs remapping (like down+a on a single key) is not allowed.
Due to the relative ease of submitting a TASed run, emulated runs are held under higher scrutiny. To minimize the chances of your run being rejected, we recommend the following: -State the name & version of the emulator used in your submission comments. -Capture the entire emulator window, including the border. -Enable frame counter and input display. -If the emulator has a movie option you should show the "no movie" message. -Your run should begin from (and include) system reset or power cycle. -It is highly recommended that you stream all of your attempts and provide split files.
If you used a flash cart (like Powerpak or Everdrive) or some other way to play the game not on original hardware, please add that in the comments as well.
Recommended emulators: BizHawk (NESHawk core), FCEUX, Nestopia (Alternatively I found this list compiled on the Castlevania forum: https://www.speedrun.com/cv1/thread/gxkie)
Other possible lines -State whether you used a keyboard or gamepad. -Enable handcam if possible. -At the end of your run, show your key bindings (to prevent multiple input mapping).
Also, with emulators and flash carts there does exist the possibility that someone could do runs on a bad ROM dump or even on a surreptitiously hacked ROM. This could be prevented by requiring a specific ROM checksum.
Hi, The current rules state that for these categories, you have to get the highest possible ranking for the given difficulty. However I've found it's still possible on Simple to get a B+ if you max out everything on the scorecard except for a 5/6 Power Meter. Is it sufficient simply to get a B+ or does everything on the scorecard have to be maxed out too?
Hi, noticed that the IGT time was taken off of my Hero/Dark Story submissions. Is there a reason why you only accepted Real Time for certain runs? It doesn't say anything in the rules about it.
There are some songs that have multiple ranked versions by different beatmappers. Do these count as separate songs for the purpose of the category or can you only pick one per unique song?
http://www.speedrun.com/Aero_Fighters
There is only one run and it is listed as 0m 01s so that the moderator could list his high score run.
For The Lion King the definitive version is the SNES/GEN release but there are also lower-quality ports of the game for NES GB and SMS. The SNES and Genesis versions are probably identical enough that they should be under the same entry, but the other ports are obviously quite different (SMS version has REALLY different levels). The same goes for Aladdin (GEN) having NES/GB/GBC ports and The Little Mermaid (NES) having a GB port, etc.
Should ports of the same game that are different enough to warrant separate speedrun categories have separate entries on speedrun.com or should they all be listed on the same page and simply have different category entries for each platform? I'm leaning towards the latter because I want to combine pages to simplify the games list but I wanted to ask for a consensus before I delete anything.
