Hello Speedcreepers
I wanted to take community opinion on how we should time the categories.
The IGT (in game timer) is the "easiest" method, but things like Pausing and Time Change impact it.
Utilizing RTA (real time attack) I think seems a bit more correct, as (to me) the important bit is how long you take overall to do the mission. If you need to reload, speed up / slow down things, ect, that should all factor into the overall time of the run and how it displays on the LB. But I dont really want to leave the techniques out from gameplay, because its all valid gameplay wise.
Let me know what you think, and appreciate all input!
It's not an easy decision, and there are definitely drawbacks to either choice. Using real time will exclude a lot of people without high end PCs due to the lag from this game being rather CPU hungry. Using in-game time, on the other hand, means the runs could easily be quite long in real time - the best runs in terms of in-game time often take several hours in real time to achieve a run that ends up only being a few minutes according to the in-game clock.
My personal recommendation would be to compromise by using the in-game time as the primary metric for the leaderboard, while disallowing pausing or slowing down the time after you unpause the game initially.
We often like to make a save on frame 1 with all our units placed and the early terraform markers already in place, just to cut down on repetitiveness when restarting runs. I think it should be allowed to load a save from frame 1 - but disallow any sort of pausing or time adjustment as soon as you unpause the game. And, of course, no loading of any saves unless they're on the very first frame of the map.
With all that said, the downside I can see to my suggestion would be that people with slower PCs could be said to now have an advantage if their game is essentially playing in slow motion. So yeah, I'm not sure there are any easy answers that don't give anyone an unfair advantage but I personally feel this is the best compromise.
It could be worth it to have both IGT and RTA as different subcategories for the individual levels. For full game runs I say RTA only.
RTA: uses external timer such as LiveSplit. I think the player should be able to pause or slowdown because the player is punished with timeloss by doing so, and some tricks are impossible to do without pausing. We could have a rule banning the x2 and x4 speeds though, or have them be a separate category like Creeper World 4 has on their leaderboard. Though I notice Creeper World 4 had very minimal participation for the x2 speed category so maybe just skip that one?
IGT: is just using the in game timer with no strings attached. If the submission video is long, then so be it. This would definitely appeal to players who want to play the way the game is "meant to be played". It would effectively be like the in game leaderboard except on here there's video proof of cheating. Cornucanis brings up a good point about this category being easier for lag. This would only be a subcategory for individual levels. Full game run using IGT doesnt seem feasible to calculate and verify.
I kinda like cornucanis's idea about loading a save from frame one, though Id say this would only be allowed for IGT IL runs, and not RTA runs where setting up is apart of the challenge. A mod would clearly see that a loaded save would have "0:00" in the top right and know that this save has not advanced the frame and verify the run.
My suggestion is similar to DerKO. I would suggest taking inspiration from the Creeper World 2 leaderboard layout where individual levels have an RTA and IGT categories. There are very different strategies that you have to use for IGT categories and RTA runs. Just using one over the other will cause us to miss out on a lot of cool and different strategies when you have to make decisions on the fly or finding calculated and precise strategies while paused. Since the two games are very similar in their layout and time keeping, my vote would be to align this game's categories similar to that game. I know I am a bit biased having already done speed runs for Creeper World 2, so please take my suggestions with a grain of salt.
Thank you everyone for your excellent insights. I am going to go forward with the idea of splitting the categories into RTA and IGT. I feel like this allows for the greatest freedom for people to come up with interesting strategies, no need to limit ourselves to just one approach. I will get the LBs set up today and get the submitted runs approved and into both categories for now.
Thank you all!
Thanks for taking the time to get everything set up. Feel free to give me a shout if you need a hand getting all the levels added and the rules sorted out. I have a few cool level strategies I'd gladly record to submit on the leaderboards, but I don't want to jump the gun and start recording before the rules are in place.
I just discovered something particular with the IGT on the leaderboard. the time is not set when the mission is completed but only when the XIE core are destroyed. per example Cero map. you normally need to do all the task in order to complete the map and continue in the story. But the leader board score only register when the XIE is destroyed and the rest of the mission is not counted on the final time
per example Cero map. you normally need to do all the task in order to complete the map and continue in the story. But the leader board score only register when the XIE is destroyed and the rest of the mission is not counted on the final time
That map is kind of a special case. You can use SHIFT+E to enter editor mode which will allow you to confirm that the IXE core is actually the only required objective. As soon as you collect that core you will have achieved all victory conditions. The reason you can't rift jump out at that point is because the tutor.irpl script on that map sets the mission complete dialog to be suppressed until you've reached the final state of the script.
So the objectives are complete, but there is a custom script preventing you from rift jumping until you've finished all the tasks considered to be part of the tutorial.
so I guess this specific mission can't be IGT then if I understand that right cause the leaderboard scores are not the time we are looking for in this case. when would the IGT be counted? When the leaderboard register the completion of the objective or when the rift out is possible to continue the story?
Traditionally the time used for comparison of any IGT run is the time you post to the playlog. Using this standard metric on Cero makes it entirely trivial since you can complete it in 8.8 seconds without too much effort. That's not necessarily a dealbreaker in my opinion though - to me it seems preferable over making a completely different set of rules just for a single mission.
