Hey all!

After almost nine years, CastleMiner Z has received an update. Several of them, actually. These are existing community bugfixes released officially. While this is great for casual players and fixes issues like laser crashes, it's a bummer for speedruns as it patches out glitches like infinite ammo and crate duping. This isn't the end of our strats though, as Steam allows us to downgrade the game very easily to whatever's available on their servers. With that in mind, I figured it best to ask the community how you'd like to see the leaderboard change to handle this new version, or even other older versions.

Should we...

• Add subcategories and annotations - Each run will display what version it was run on and they'll be separated among more competitively fair groupings.
• Only add annotations - Each run displays its version and competes with all other versions. The best rises to the top.
• Do something else. Suggestions are welcome.

Working with subcategories may also allow us to consolidate Distance% into one main category.

It would be a pain to downgrade and lose laser weapon stability, though. Over the years, I've become aware of a relatively unobtrusive way to fix laser crashes. Since it's a memory bug, we can use a Large Address Aware patch to trivially solve this issue and make lasers more usable on older versions. So, would you be okay with allowing the Large Address Aware modification? This would become the only modification allowed in the rules. I've only personally tested it on 1.9.8.0, but I didn't notice anything unusual.

Even if this is old news by the time you're reading it, feel free to chime in!

Hello!

I'm a fan of the "Add subcategories and annotations" approach, but I can also see how simply adding annotations could work just as well. I haven’t had a chance to try the new update yet, but if it was just a bug fix, I don’t see any issue with just annotating the version. However, if there were major changes that made certain categories significantly easier or harder, then I can definitely understand the case for adding both subcategories and annotations.

Just thought I would add my thoughts but I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone thinks as well.

That's a good point. For now, categories like Hell% seem to be unaffected, but anything that benefits from infinite ammo or duping will have a pretty big disadvantage on 1.9.9.x. I'm still seeing the modders working on new bugfixes and new updates are getting pushed, so things may change even more soon.

Any thoughts on the Large Address Aware patch, @RyanRodriguez?

@Dweather This might be the lazy approach, but maybe we just follow what other SR communities have done when big bug fix patches drop. That said, this patch is kind of out of nowhere and if I’m remembering right, it’s been like 8 years since the last one. So yeah, it doesn’t really follow the usual rollout you'd expect from most games, but I’m sure we can pull some ideas from how other SR games handled it and work those in here.

I keep thinking of Call of Duty Zombies as an example. I don’t know exactly what their process is, whether they archive records or tweak things from one patch to the next, but there’s probably something in that flow we can learn from and apply. I would be curious to know if they still accept record times after bugs get patched.

I think the Large Address Aware patch could add to the longer runs. I run more of the shorter categories, I enjoy the short repetition. I would be interested to see how stable the runs would be now.

I see no issue with observing how other leaderboards manage the issue and learning how we can adapt. I've found checking out the Minecraft and SCP: Containment Breach leaderboards to be quite informative and they seem to have similarly robust options to BO6 Zombies. We would continue accepting runs for all listed versions and add new subcategories for versions with different and significant advantages that people find fun to run.

Indeed, the LAA patch adds quite a bit by fixing laser crashes. Undead Dragon, Distance% 5K, Enduranger, Enemy% 10 Aliens and anything we could think of in future would have lasers available to them alongside all of our other tricks. Allowing the patch also has a few implications in terms of fairness, as it'll level an advantage Linux users have where running the game through Proton 5.0-4 and later forces large address awareness by default. It would additionally paper over the advantage some setups running Windows have where lasers cause crashes much less often. DigitalDNA has also implemented a fix to allow the game to use more memory in 1.9.9.8 and beyond, so we're not exactly straying far outside of the developer's intended vision or anything.

Quick update for those reading along on SRC or aren't in the Discord server: Changes are finally (albeit slowly) rolling out on the leaderboard! Please pardon our dust while these changes are made. I'll be rounding all of them up in the news tab once we're done!