United Stateshi. the timer should start when you hit 'start game' in the main menu. if it doesn't, there's some sort of configuration issue, or the autosplitter just isn't detecting the game properly. i would say double-check to make sure it's activated & see if there are any settings you missed (it's been a while since I messed with the livesplit autosplitter but iirc some of them have settings that govern whether they try to start, or do intermediate splits, or do the final split. if they're in this splitter, they would be in the settings button next to the activate button), but you sound like you already did all that.
even if it's functioning properly, it won't autosplit upon completion of every level. it'll just do game start, chapter completion, and final split. thermo did the IL subsplits by making his advance-to-the-next-stage button (the A key) also a manual split key.
a couple other things: livesplit/the autosplitter have to be running on the same machine that the game is running on. they function by reading the game's memory. it also probably won't work at all if you're using the new beta meatboy patch tommy made public a short time ago.
not really sure what else to say, so I hope this helps.
it looks like there's an oversight on the rules popups. rules text should be saying the game must be run at 60 fps for all but one category, but it only appears for IL pages at this time.
the any% all glitches category, of course, is free to run at whatever fps it wants. but yeah, if you wanna see something fun, try running at completely unlocked fps. if i disable vsync i can get up beyond 1100 fps and the game can't quite handle it . . .
can't submit it myself since i'm not mod but here you go
http://speeddemosarchive.com/SubTerrania.html
edit: also
also, the game's release date is march 1994 us, april 1994 uk (and possibly eu?). yes i know the game's title screen says 1993, i'm pretty sure that's wrong. i went through some old gaming mags and noted the release dates for different regions and when the game was reviewed.
hi, this thread is going to collect some basic info about how to get started playing the game.
a new version of the game, v1.2.5, was released on steam for windows PCs, to coincide with the race mode DLC and the 8th anniversary of the game's release. v1.2.5 is a tradeoff: a lot of glitches were patched out (including autojump and timer pause), but the game generally runs properly out of the box. In particular, v1.2.5 fixes most or all of the original version's framerate issues, and no longer requires a 3rd-party program to be used with a high-fps monitor.
If you want to play the old version, you can do so by opting into the "ogversion" branch on steam (rightclick game in your steam library -> properties -> betas -> select "ogversion" from the dropdown). you will also have to disable the race mode dlc, if you own it, and block the game in windows firewall (otherwise the game will hang for minutes on boot, as it tries to ping a server that no longer exists). See the other pinned thread in this forum for instructions. Note that ogversion can no longer access Super Meat World at all.
other pc platforms (linux & mac) have not had updates to v1.2.5. supposedly that's in the plans sometime, but it's been a couple years already, so don't hold your breath. consoles don't need it at all & won't receive it.
all of the below info was written for 'ogversion', the previous version of the game.
Generally, for fullgame runs, Windows > Mac/Linux >> modern consoles >>>> switch/360/xbone >>> vita/pstv
The Windows version is the de-facto standard. For the any% category, the differences between versions are primarily loading times & some minor speed tech. For other categories, character roster & major glitches also come into play.
The reason the Switch is separated from the other modern consoles is that it has a couple unique crashes that pop up in any%. 360 and XBOne just have extremely long loads. Vita/PSTV have some perceived lagginess when playing and are not recommended if you have a choice.
The best platform for individual levels (ILs) varies, and the above rankings do not apply. The different character rosters between games mean the PC versions can get the best overall time on some levels while consoles win out on others.
In any case, please don't worry too much about this -- we'd much rather see you run the game on a "worse" version than not run the game at all. :> Also note that, for whichever version you pick, you need to be able to record video & audio footage of it to get runs on the leaderboard.
Whatever you prefer, for the most part. Keyboard is slightly superior to controller at the highest levels of play for the 106% category or individual level runs.
A collection of tutorial links is available here**.
It's required to play the game at a stable 60 frames per second (fps) for all but one category. If you're playing on windows, you should highly consider installing and using rivatuner. See this thread for how & a more detailed why http://www.speedrun.com/smb/thread/tw32f (note: v1.2.5.
the "-lowdetail" and "-ultralowdetail" command line options can, if you play on a pc version, reduce the load on your system & save you some loading time, at the cost of graphics quality. If you use steam to launch the game, rightclick game in your steam library -> properties -> set launch options -> type in one of the two options (skip the quotes). If not using steam, google it.
Your save file is located at (game directory)/userdata/savegame.dat , at least for windows. Fullgame runs are required to use a new, fresh save each attempt. There are utilities available in the resources section that can delete the save & launch game for you in a couple clicks; if you'd rather do it manually, I recommend creating a shortcut to the userdata folder on your desktop.
Any% route reference: https://www.speedrun.com/smb/guide/zdtgv
How to autojump: hold jump, press pause. Let go of jump, unpause (without using your jump button)
How to sprint jump: see the brownie skip tutorial video linked just above (from thebmxbandit11).
How to dual jump: the game tracks controller jump and keyboard jump buttons separately. By alternating between both, you can cancel controller jump into keyboard jump and input a jump without having to let go of & repress a button (does not work vice-versa). Saves slight time in many places. Now, this is extremely hard to get used to & not really recommended for new players.
The game features button remapping via buttonmap.cfg in the game directory, but the functionality that file offers is extremely limited. For more useful remapping, look into alternate software. If you want to, say, remap pause to a shoulder button on a controller, look into joy2key. I'm also told autohotkey works well for keyboard. Note that, while remapping is fine, you may not automate actions. Macros and scripts are banned.
Slightly faster level transitions: when you touch bandage girl, press A (as in, the key for the letter A, on your keyboard) to advance to the next level without having to watch the replay first. The S key does the same, but for exiting to level select. Remapping these keys to your controller with joy2key or whatever program is allowed.
Yes, having a high-hz or high-fps gaming monitor can make the game run... off, with bosses moving at super speed and things like that. You can either drop your monitor's hz down to 60 in windows (& make sure vsync is on), or see above for how to install & use a program called Rivatuner to limit the game's fps to 60.
If you've encountered a situation where your game lagged & then you clipped into a wall, don't bother trying to reproduce it intentionally. There is an extremely easy way to make it happen anywhere, such that you can clip into pretty much any wall you want. This is known as the alt glitch, & it's extremely broken & banned in most categories. If it keeps happening unintentionally, try lowering your cpu load, by doing things like closing out of unnecessary programs running in the background or running in low or ultralowdetail (see above).
enjoy the game!
As part of running the game, I did some research. May as well put it down in writing here, since I don't think I'm ever going to run this game again.
First, I have some RAM addresses. Tompa helped me find these. Actually, I'll be honest: I didn't help much =p (I tried, but after an hour of trying to get x position and then realizing my final answer was wrong after all...).
x position: 057B, 2 bytes, unsigned y position: 057D, 2 bytes, unsigned x speed: 0573, 2 bytes, signed (will always display as positive in ram watch for some reason) y speed: 053F, 2 bytes, signed
I'm fairly certain these numbers are correct, but if it's important (if you're TASing or whatever), you should double-check. Speed does /not/ seem to correlate linearly to pixels per frame either.
tompa also had this to say: Sep 16 17:17:44 <Tompa> You won't start moving forward until your speed reaches 96, and the subpixel position doesn't get saved it seems Sep 16 17:18:05 <vorpal> i'm not sure what that means Sep 16 17:18:29 <vorpal> does that mean there's no subpixels at all? Sep 16 17:18:56 <Tompa> Well, first speed you get is 16, after holding a direction for two frames. Normally, that 16 is the amount of subpixels you have moved forward. But it doesn't move you at all until you have accelerated to 96 Sep 16 17:20:53 <Tompa> So yeah, doesn't seem to be a seperate x-sub counter that matters, hmm Sep 16 17:21:02 <Tompa> Or I just can't find it atm
Neither of us are really sure what that means.
Movement:
Just holding forward will get you to 304 speed. Jumping & holding both buttons will get you to 604, but you lose it when you land. If you bunnyhop and jump on the frame you touch the ground, however, you can preserve it. This is the fastest form of movement.
However, stringing together a bunch of frame-perfect jumps is not gonna be 100% successful. If, when you land from midair, you hold both face buttons and just press forward, Bart will walk forward at the same speed: 604. The catch is that the next time you go to jump, you will automatically get knocked down to 304 speed again, as if you had failed a bunnyhop.
The obvious solution, then, is to walk most distances and only bunnyhop when you absolutely need to. In this manner, you should save a bunch of time on average. I never bothered timing the loss from each instance of losing speed, but I figure it's somewhere between a tenth to a quarter of a second, just from eyeballing it.
When you're on the skateboard in the great wall stage, things are much more complicated.
When you're on flat ground (i.e. just starting the stage), both jumping and not holding straight forward cause you to lose horizontal speed. Incidentally, this is why you want to go through the top door right after you spawn: you get to accelerate to max much faster, since it's much closer to your horizontal plane than the bottom door. You actually lose horizontal speed when you're holding up-right or down-right, as opposed to straight right.
On the downslopes, that prohibition is removed. If you hold up-right or down-right, you lose no horizontal speed. Jumping still causes you to lose time: about 1 frame each time you jump, provided you accerlate back to max immediately after landing. Also, you want to avoid all the krusty head pickups you can (they get tallied up at the end of each chapter), & you want to land as soon as possible after the mandatory big jumps.
Lastly, Bartman (flying powerup) has the same horizontal speed as walking or bunnyhopping. Obviously his vertical speed is way different.
Some specific stage notes:
China 1 (the junk): far as I can tell, climbing the mast is frames faster than going for the bartman flying powerup if you do it absolutely perfectly. I don't trust myself to do that, so I just flew it.
China 2: I wrote a lot about the movement mechanics in this stage up above. I will say I didn't try too hard on making an optimized route here, since that's a lot of complexity that boils down to, damn, I lost exactly 1 frame here.
China boss (Fu Manchu Burns): Absolutely hate this guy. I swear his hitbox is fundamentally broken. As far as I can tell he's only supposed to take damage when his fan is closing or closed, but that distinction seems fuzzy at best. I saw a quickkill in one of the TAS wips but was never able to replicate it, and the guy is random anyways.
Ice Cave: It's possible to skip waiting for the bubbles with a frame-perfect bunnyhop, but if you miss it, you pretty much die instantly.
Ice River: the ice floes you stand on get gradually pushed back left by the current. Jumping on them moves them forward. How high the jump was when you land on them doesn't seem to matter, so I just spammed small jumps (but I also took it pretty safe when jumping from one floe to another, since this game's physics are trash).
Ice boss: double-hits are pretty easy if he spawns next to you.
Egypt 1: top route is a few seconds faster than bottom route (you don't have to time the assisted jump up into top route: just keep the face buttons held as you land on the launcher platform & it'll launch you up automatically). I cut several hard jumps out of my runs b/c they're hard. The really tiny platforms are pretty screwy: their hitbox seems a little to the right of where they visually appear. The bigger platforms are also screwy: sometimes you have to jump around on them to make them move, or sometimes you have to keep trying to make them spawn at all.
Egypt 2: because of the quicksand in this level, bunnyhopping is better than running for the beginning section. The invincibility is slower, but dodging the cyclones is harder than it appears, so I always ended up losing more time when I tried to skip it. At the bottom of the pit, the rightmost bartman flying powerup is faster despite being out of the way, b/c you're drawing the scorpion away from the door by getting it. If you get the powerup on the left, you have to wait.
Hollywood 2: The opening section seems a bit random in when the fireballs and flaming dudes will spawn. I was also never able to find a great route for fence + stomper section. I did, however, make a map of the coffin teleporter maze: it's simpler than it seems. See also: 
For the RIP room, it's possible to be much more aggressive than I was, but the room is honestly complete trash & harder than everything else in the game combined. The hard jumps are indeed frame perfect, & you also need to have a good setup for them to make sure you're actually at max speed and far enough right when you bunnyhop.
Hollywood boss: as far as I can tell, he has very few to no invulnerability frames, but the megaphones he throws often block your shots. Easiest way to fight him seems to be to stay in front of where he's moving (he always comes down, goes left, goes to the right, then back to the center and up), jump up, and mash shot a couple times backwards. If you play it right, the cherry bomb drop will fall either while he's up out of range, or beforehand (the bomb drop spawns when you reach 0 shots in your inventory). He takes 15 hits; you should be able to get him in 2 cycles (I lost several seconds here in my run).
other resources: there's a tasvids thread with a couple WIPs from like 2006. One of them desyncs partways into egypt, & while it isn't terribly well optimized (I think it was done on a bad rom & I couldn't find the right one, the checksums don't match), it does a bunch of stuff I don't do. If you could watch the full video, it may prove even more helpful. The other video looks like some guy did bad RTAs with a few savestates, it's pretty useless.
good luck.
if you know anything the rest of us don't, please share.
alternatively, the new subcategory display that went live literally right after i posted is acceptable imo, even if i would still totally delete the other misc any%s if i had mod =p
i don't understand how people would want any% ww to remain on the main category list over alt any% ww just because it's "more popular". it's.... not popular. it's just not. i have never seen anyone even hint at wanting to play the category for more than 2 hours. it's just that a bunch of people did 1 run the week the wrongwarp was found, because of the novelty of it.
if i had used alt when I discovered the wrongwarp, everyone else would have used alt and we wouldn't be having this discussion because nobody would want it otherwise.
i promise you, i won't be upset that i no longer have 3rd place in this extremely prestigious category if it gets merged or replaced. in fact, if it gets merged, i'll spend a couple hours doing runs and then just like no-alt !! the only reason either of these categories should be main at all, honestly, is the belief that the fastest way to complete a game should always be on the main page just out of principle. that would be alt any% ww (or any% major glitches or w/e it gets renamed to).
my two cents.
my opinion is that alt any% ww should be the main glitched category on the leaderboard, and that it should either replace or merge with any% ww.
i don't really care if ppl want alt any% or any% ww to remain separate so long as they're in misc. basically i would prefer the main categories to be just any%, dark ending, 106, and any% glitched (allowing anything including alt, wrongwarp, and whatever else ppl come up with later, i'm sure the game is still more broken than we know), and ppl can do w/e they want with anything in misc lmao.
i voted yes to the consolidate option in the poll but i don't think the poll accurately reflects my viewpoint.
It's been a well-known article of faith among the few people familiar with rocket knight a while ago that kega fusion is a really inaccurate emulator for the purposes of RKA speedrunning. This stems from a run done a few years ago. A player called chum posted an emulated time on the SDA forums w/ video. ShadowJacky's wr at the time was a high 28, and chum got, I believe, a low 29. The overwhelming consensus was that chum's run, which he did in something like 2-4 days of learning, was significantly worse than SJ's run, and should not be anywhere near SJ's time. Therefore, the conclusion went, kega fusion must be an inaccurate emulator. It was probably saving 30-45 seconds over the course of the run. /obviously/
and then nobody played rka for years.
recently a few more people have picked it up. some of that number have used kega fusion, so this issue has come up again. I was watching a stream of AND4H's and made an offhand remark that we should prob just ban kega fusion already. That turned into a discussion about how inaccurate it was, and I decided to do my homework.
homework's here.
What you should look at primarily are the two columns labelled 'diff' (columns E and I). Those values are the # in seconds of whatever section it was I was timing. Left diff column is console, right is emu. So for example, running the intro loop x2 took 114.38 seconds on console (E2) and 114 seconds on kega fusion (I2).
That's less than half a second's difference over 2 minutes. This doesn't add up to anywhere close to how much time we all were assuming kega fusion saved.
The sections I tried timing were sections of the game that required little/no player input & lagged some. Most of them were boss kills to the start of the score countdown. For a couple, I let the boss play out a bit without player interaction (letting the stage 4 boss loop once while standing in the safe spot, the opening autoscroll sequence before you can damage stage 6 boss, etc). And since kega fusion wasn't saving the seconds I assumed it would, at the end I tried timing the longest pure dps-to-an-enemy-with-no-complications section I could think of, the last phase of the gradius boss. I guess I wasn't close enough to it or something on the emu runthrough lmfao
As it stands, I'm limited by the situations I can test. Anything that really depends on player interaction is too variable to framecount like this, which cuts out most of the gameplay portions. (why don't I tas it? because neither kfusion nor console (obv) have tas tools) But as it stands, it looks like kfusion is saving very approximately half a second over two minutes of play. Over the course of a 28 minute run, that works out to 14 seconds. No idea what the margin of error is on this, but it's probably big.
still not sure why we came to the conclusions we did when viewing chum's run. this shit is obviously not saving 45 seconds. It was probably some combination of seeing "learned the game in 2 days" and sub-30 and the run being a lot less clean all come together in a way that psyched everyone out. I can fully accept that I was probably looking for confirmation bias when watching AND4H's stream the other day & saying there's no way that speed would be possible on console. I bet it fucking was possible after all. I'm gonna blame it on the lag feeling more real when you have a controller in your hand, because you're trying to input so you're interacting with it more ;_;
I would also be interested in seeing someone replicate a test like this with bizhawk. But I don't care enough to do that. Also interesting would be seeing someone who's familiar with playing against a set of splits to switch around between console and one or two emus & see if any of them feel off. But again, I'm not interested in doing that either, so... yeah.
A dozen seconds over the course of the game. Do we care to do anything about that? I think it's notable, certainly, but that's not a big enough difference for me to feel an urgent need to ban kega fusion anymore unless bizhawk is significantly closer to console. And as I don't currently know or care enough to find the answer to that question....
The links to 4 of my pb highlights across all of my speedgames has changed. This includes my current any% and dark ending pbs, whose links are now broken on speedrun.com.
I resubmitted my shit, in any case. Posting this so other ppl can check their own vods. I skimmed through my new links and as far as I can tell the highlights themselves are the same, they just have different hyperlinks for god knows what reason. obnoxious
i would like to see more about ps4 v pc. if anyone has a ps4, could you record a run through forest or w/e?
