Hesse, GermanyWe just got the first submission on the NTSC NA version of the game. The NTSC version benefits from a faster run speed, which affects both real time and ingame time and therefore has a very obvious advantage in both full game and individual level runs.
I think it would be best to separate the leaderboards between PAL and NTSC, however, I will hold off on doing that for the time being. This is because we have very few runs submitted at the moment, and you can see at one glance which runs were done on which version. Creating a leaderboard separation would cause existing runs to be separated off into a different tab, essentially hiding them from default view. This to me seems counterproductive to the idea of having a leaderboard that's fair and accessible for everyone. Once more runs are submitted though, I think this leaderboard split should be introduced to ensure everyone can continue playing on their preferred version and still have fair competition.
If any past, present or future runners of this game have any suggestions, comments or feedback, I'd be happy to hear it. Thank you!
Hey! I'm looking forward to the opening of the leaderboards. So far I have done an All Tracks speedrun, and also a couple of individual levels. Since the game has its own way to detecting if you used skips or not by displaying the "cheese"-symbol, it would be cool if we could get categories for both runs with and without cheese
I would like to wait until ver 0.80 because adding more categories to the leaderboard every time it is upgraded may make it more complicated with many categories
Very reasonable! Thanks for the quick response
no oranges were wasted, ive eaten all 3 ive peeled during attempts
yes, for comparison, Cyberscore has separate charts for individual characters, and they have a total of 700 leaderboards for this game. I am personally not too fond of the idea of having an additional row of subcategories on the levels that further spread out submissions and clutter up the boards more. You are definitely encouraged to submit times with multiple characters to the leaderboards here, but you'll have to use the filter function if you want to only see times with one specific character
the vast majority of speedtech in this game is based on making clever use of the standard movement mechanics and level geometry and there's very little used in runs that can be clearly labelled a glitch. Many of the stages are also designed in a very open way that it's hard to tell when you are out of bound. As DreeGon said there's been many discussions in the past about this topic but at the end of the day if you were to make a category like this it would come down to making countless, largely arbitrary and hyperspecific decisions on how certain sections of a stage are to be played, and in my opinion this would not only be a huge pain to decide on and moderate (and would likely result in a ruleset many wouldn't be very happy with due to the sheer amount of decisions you have to make), but also very inaccessible to new runners cause they'd have to know what all these decisions entail in order to follow them accordingly.
I understand that for new runners many of the strategies may seem intimidating so it would be appealing to have an official "no skips" category of some sort, but imo its lack of practicability with this game would massively outweigh its benefits. While, yes, the top leaderboard spots use largely every strat and trick available, this of course does not mean that you have to make use of everything as a beginner runner. You can freely pick any strat that seems appealing to you and add it in, and leave out those you don't. With an official category ruleset, there will likely still be strats you wouldn't want to go for as a beginner, as I've said, most optimizations in this game are movement based, whereas other strats that you may be interested in using would be banned (for example, there are strats that look very glitchy / out of bounds that are very beginner friendly while advanced alternatives can easily be considered glitchless / inbounds). If you just submit to the main leaderboards, you can freely pick and choose which strats you want to do and also freely adapt your playstyle over time. Even without a glitchless category, most runners start out with only very rudimentary strats and add in more and more as they improve and feel comfortable.
Sorry if this is an unsatisfactory answer, but this is a complicated problem and you have to deal with a lot of different questions when making a restricted category which I personally don't think is worth it for this game.
Note, this is my personal opinion on this, this doesn't neccesarily reflect the consensus of the whole moderation team
edit: I also just saw you're using a modified version of the game, you would have to take off the mods for leaderboard submission if you plan to do that in the future. Feel free to join the Discord, we can help you with getting started with a good setup
hey!
the game varies in FPS (usually between 60 and 63) based on various factors to do with your OS and your computer hardware, so if you changed something since last playing and now went from 63 to 60 because of that, that can feel choppier thank what you're used to. On the resources page we have FPS mods to lock your framerate at either 63 or 60, those are mostly intended to normalize framerates between people in cases of real time races, but can also be used to ensure your framerate is at the upper end of the range.
Another solution could be to activate V-sync in the settings.
edit: when I typed the reply I hadn't seen the screenshot yet. So yeah, try activating V-sync, that's probably the reason then
please stick with the original disc version with the tools provided or the vanilla steam version. As Slysonic said in our Discord we can help you get set up, or also feel free to contact me directly through DMs
yes, under "Game Options" theres a setting to turn off tips
hey!
This game does not control with the d-pad, on the Dreamcast version the d-pad actually allows you to move the camera, so this game is only with analog controls.
We do not have glitchless categories, as most skips are just based on using basic movement mechanics, and many level designs are very open and all that most skips do is make use of environmental level geometry. So there's no clear distinction that we can draw between what is intended and what isn't for the majority of the run (in fact, I'd argue the base story categories are pretty much glitchless already, despite having skips). You are of course welcome to speedrun the game in any way you want and make up your own ruleset for yourself, just based on which strategies feel okay to use to and which you don't want to do, but we don't have a separate leaderboard for it, as that would require coordinating the entire community around a hundred arbitrary decisions to get a ruleset on where to draw the lines
burninrubber made a thread here showing a couple different ways of recognizing it: https://www.speedrun.com/bparadise/thread/qsyo0
On the standard leaderboards, the runs are timed by taking the start time (3 minutes) minus the finishing time, plus the time bonuses you get during the run. This gets you the time as if the stages had a regular level timer like any other character.
For example, my Hot Shelter run. Starts at 3 minutes, ends at 2:12.26, and gets 5 bonus seconds from lockons during the run. 3:00.00 - 2:12.26 + 0:05.00 = 0:52.74
If you don't wanna have to calculate it yourself before knowing what time you got, you can download "External IL timer" from https://www.speedrun.com/sadx/resources, that does it automatically for you.
On the Category extensions page, we have a highscore based Gamma level leaderboards, so there you can play the stages with the intended goal, of racking up as much time bonuses as you can and what's shown at the result screen is what counts. Those are not the main leaderboards though cause that's not really beating the stage quick https://www.speedrun.com/sadx_extensions
sorry for the late reply, the notification mustve gotten buried, so I only saw the forum thread at random now.
For full game runs, unfortunately we still time those in real time on console, and you'd be getting an unfair load advantage playing the game from the a microsd, so that wouldn't be allowed. However, you're fine doing individual level runs with this, since these just go by ingame time and aside from loads this then would just be original game on original hardware
what would that accomplish? The difficulties don't have any direct impact on how fast your time is, so youd just unneccesarily divide up the leaderboards. also you cant tell what difficulty is being played on from the video of a run unless the video shows the settings menu so that would be impossible to enforce
