If you are playing on any of the older versions (or even current version once the splitter is updated), all you need to do is to open Livesplit after you open the game, go to the Edit Splits screen and click the "Activate" button. If it says "Deactivate" instead then it's already activated.

You may need to mess with the splitter settings, like setting your game version manually or choosing different autostart methods, but that should be pretty much all the setup you need to do.

The current version of the autosplitter that is built into Livesplit doesn't support Newest. We have been distributing an updated version in our Discord server, but game updates have been happening a bit too often and breaking the splitter all the time, so I haven't made it official just yet.

That being said, there's also the off chance that even if everything is properly updated, it may not autostart/autosplit for you. Some people are stuck to manually splitting. The important part is that load removal works (and that has worked for basically everyone so far)

If we decided to make such a category, it would follow the same base rules as every category we have already, mainly which commands are allowed or not

I don't know how many levels actually have relevant cycles anywhere though. I can think of 1 distinctively (it's been a while I played). If a level doesn't have any cycles (I don't if the scenery has cycles you can point out too), then you would need something else. Maybe those audio spectrum analyzers would be useful to check for spliced. Never did much testing with those

Well, you just need to play the level from the start and record how long the cycle is. You should be math out at what time the cycle on a video would happen. Like if a cycle takes 7s, you can just add or subtract 7s for each cycle saved or lost compared to your test run. If a run doesn't lineup, its probably spliced

Levels with cycles can be verified by checking if someone got a cycle that doesn't lineup. That's the most I can think of right now

I forgot to watch this when you posted videos. The stuff that happens when items/zombies get just barely offscreen is incredible.

There's no correct version to play. You have a fastest version to do a run but no version is "the" correct version to play anything. You can't just pick a version and say "use this because we want you to". As I said earlier, for all the categories a beginner would try, one version would suffice and that's a very small barrier of entry. If that barrier is too big, Newest can still be really competitive, specially in Co-op. If people really wanted to play they would

It's just an unfortunate thing about this game and how campaigns got released over time. Imagine if Portal had a few chambers released every update and the old chambers got patched occasionally on these updates. They would use many different versions for ILs and a main version for full-game runs. That's the scenario we have here. As weird as it might look, it's good to have it pretty clear which version of the game is being used, considering that we don't have any way around this and that there are many versions to be used for speedruns.

HL and Portal all have a main version (mostly) because the games were released and didn't have levels appended to it over time.

Downloading an old version is a very small barrier of entry to speedrunning the game and a very common theme among speedgames. The adjustment to said old versions is very minor and they (should) be very easy to find for download, as we have a separate Discord channel with download links for every version we use (maybe we need a better way of pointing a new player that doesn't use Discord to these download links). A new player is probably only gonna download one of these versions to start with, as most of them are only useful for ILs.

I get that the majority of people play on the Steam version and maybe even see that version as the most legitimate, but the minority of people that invest time into the game feel like playing on Steam version exclusively (since the effort of downloading a better version is so little). Runs on the Steam version can still get pretty competitive times on the leaderboards. You probably aren't gonna get many WRs with it but you can still speedrun and develop your own skill in that version just fine.

If people really wanted to speedrun the game on Newest, they would just do it, like you do.

SAR allows for Portal 1-like movement, with ABH (although It looks really laggy, and i havent managed to make It feel the same as Portal 1). If anyone invested time and did a run It could perhaps become a category, but someone would need to actually invest time into It to do a run (that isnt Just a casual playthrough with commands enabled)

You dont need to record LiveSplit at all. The runs are manually retimed from the video later. So you can do whatever you want with your timer

Only the ingame frame limiter should be used. I cannot confirm nor deny that using a 3rd party limiter has the exact same implications on the gameplay, but we should refrain from using external tools for an RTA speedrun either way

Znernicus tutorials are generally pretty good for starters, except for Chapter 8 i believe. Optimizations/new strats are spread out through the game compared to Znernicus' tutorials, but even then you can get pretty respectable times with the strats on the tutorials. Over time, if you get invested into the game, you slowly pick up better strats.

Watching the top runs is always recommended anyway

Yes, we will

In the video description he says "57s faster than ordinary tramming". That's quite a bit faster than just sitting there

"won't be allowed because then moderators would have to manually take away loading times" we already do that for every run, having a timer on the video or not

There are plenty of survival leaderboards out there. We figured there was no reason to start our own, specially when no one in the community showed interest in doing Survival for real.

To submit runs to the leaderboard, you Go to the Main leaderboard page and press the "Submit run" button. There you Just fill in the form and a moderator Will be notified that Your run is waiting to be verified.
Not 100% sure what apps are those but they should get the Job done Fine.

People have interest on Crash 1 with slides tho. It actually has a Lot of potencial to become a misc category. Some of the top players were running this actually