Washington, USA04/11/2025: Huh, I genuinely don't know where the video for this went! I guess the original Twitch highlight got deleted at some point without me realizing it, and I don't have a local recording anywhere.
I assume there's no means of rolling back to an older version, so new runners just won't have access to the pre-patch version? If that's the case, eventually it would make sense to by default filter out all pause exploit runs, not for a few months or whatever but presumably eventually everyone will have naturally shifted to the patch.
It's been a bit since I've managed a board, but adding variables and not totally splitting the board seems best for that? Otherwise, we'd have half of all the boards sitting around without any new runners.
I have a very basic timer functioning that skips load screens automatically (and skips a beat on other screen fades, oops) but still requires manual start and stop (though I might hack something in to do an automatic start). I have yet to look into developing LiveSplit plugins but I expect that to take an order of magnitude more time than this timer.
Basic tests on my PB and Tricrow's PB from a few days ago put the times without loads at 1:22:51 and 1:25:18 respectively, plus or minus a couple of seconds. I haven't run through the other videos yet, but this definitely makes clear how dramatically the load times are affecting runs.
I'm going to make a few revisions to the timer and then I'll post it so that everyone can use at and/or verify my work. I think I can change the leaderboard to include time without loads and sort by that, if that's what we want?
I've made a dumb timer that should at least function. I'll test it out later.
Yeah, it seems like it only impacts the Hydra battles at all, since Cragmor, Lupir, and Lapizard have plenty of leeway to grab more ingredients. Might be tougher for Hard mode.
Worst case, I could just make a super simple timer and re-time the runs myself, which has the benefit of being able to update old runs.
Hmm, that's a wrinkle. I could certainly add in version number to the leaderboard, though I think I need to do something specific to make sure it doesn't break the current entries.
I could jury-rig something if I find time, but I don't think that would happen for a while. I don't know if it would be super efficient but a simple solution would be a program that watches the save file for flags that indicate key events, and then also pauses the timer while the screen is black.
If you wanna do a run of some misc. category, feel free. Doesn't seem worth putting something up if no one's doing it, though.
Whatever you need to do to make the game work for you is fine by me! If anyone else has thoughts, feel free to chime in.
