United Stateslol, I wasn't even aware there were Gex games on the GBC. There's even a TAS of Gex 3 GBC already done. That has most of the routing worked out.
That is correct. Games with things like inventories make it more complicated.
[quote=E_Dragon]Most people just want to run the game as a whole rather than playing one segment over and over to optimize it to the fullest, which is actually a bit sad, because it is really good practice.[/quote]
For game categories where most of the runs use the same route, they can use the Individual Level leaderboards to keep track of who has the best segment. It's something I'd really like to encourage.
While cleaning/updating the information for some games, I've had a few things come to mind:
• Names -- I'm assuming this is set to use Extended ASCII? I've only seen Unicode be used for Japanese names. Also, should characters 0x7F to 0xA0 not be allowed? There hasn't been any games that have needed to use them, and those who are using them shouldn't be (most notably Mickey’s Speedway USA). I pick on those ones because sometimes they can be stored as Unicode instead.
• Other Translations -- Not for the site (I'm sure that's a long term goal), but for games/series. I think having at least a PAL name entry would clear up some confusion. Some games try to compensate for this (like Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando/Locked & Loaded) so that they can still be searched. If a PAL entry is added, similar to how time is now handled, the website would default the name to the region. I'm not sure if it's worth adding anything deeper than NTSC/PAL/JPN names.
• Abbreviations -- Should these be overhauled? Some series have the same abbreviation as one of their games (like Portal series and the first game) and some even being different games entirely (Ib and Infinity Blade, frustratingly). Not every game can be abbreviated so easily. What about games with same abbreviations (like Super Mario Bros. and Super Meat Boy)? Is it chosen by first come first serve or popularity?
• Games with off-site leaderboards -- Not all of them are treated the same. Why are there entries for the Donkey Kong Country games while others like Super Metroid and most of the Halo series are missing? Are they supposed to be left blank to redirect users like with DKC, or gone entirely? It would also be good to have a list of which games are not on the site. I tried making something of a list a little while back.
• Release Date -- Which release date should be used? The US release, the Japanese release, or whatever one was first? With months being added, it would be good to clarify this.
• Milliseconds -- I know choosing between centi/deci/milliseconds is planned, but shouldn't the box for milliseconds always be available? Keeping track of specifics can help when there's ties, rather than needing to dig back to videos and re-record their times to break them.
• Other Game Types -- As I've mentioned in the update's thread, there may be more game types that should be added to clean up the odd 'game' leaderboards we have.
• Game relationships -- I've yet to go in deep on this. Some games have relationships with each other; some being alternate versions, platforms, regions, etc. Some games are completely different with the same title while others are virtually identical. Maybe some kind of tag similar to series can connect them; I need to research this more.
• Following series -- I'm unsure whether or not this is a known problem. It's not possible to follow series boards to know when there's a new post.
Maybe I've mentioned too much in one post...
[quote=kirkq]Anything else come to mind?[/quote]
Sorry for the delay. Multi and Pre-Release work well; they can be displayed by default. Homebrew could work, but wouldn't they usually fall under fanworks? Do we even have a homebrew game on the site?
I'll address separate game leaderboards later.
I made a thread addressing the problem with categories for difficulties. It applies to these games too: /The_Site/thread/7z7du
I've been thinking about speed again for a while. The sliding speed scale and the fairly imprecise in-game times makes this difficult. C&C1's and RA1's in-game timers are in whole minutes, but is also tied to the number of rendered frames. If game time is chosen, what's to stop someone from going at the slowest speed to the effect of almost TASing? If real time is chosen, then not only is the CPU speed a problem, but imagine someone who beat another with game time, but not real time (like with the Airstrike mission mentioned before). Okay, we can limit the max speed to 6 (except for auto-scroller ILs), justified partly because of CPU limitations for each PC. There's still the problem with game time and the slowest speed. Should the minimum speed be 6 too? Not to mention the save & load problem which can greatly skew the game time. Seems like there'll be differences for each game. C&C1 -- FG: RT/GT - IL: RT/GT RA1 -- FG: RT/GT - IL: RT/GT TS -- FG: GT/RT - IL: GT/RT RA2 -- FG: GT/RT - IL: GT/RT Gen -- FG: RT - IL: RT (No In-game time)
I'll bring this up per game when I'm able to speedrun again.
I've changed my thoughts on resolution. Any res should be fine. I don't see it making a huge impact.
Edit: Actually, going over Renegade, it may be viable to use real time (no loads) to resolve problems between real time and game time, at least for Tiberian Sun and upward. I'm just not eager to have three time columns.
I made a thread addressing the problem with categories for difficulties. It applies to this game too: /The_Site/thread/7z7du
Difficulty categories are a mess to deal with for any game with them. I'm using Hard, Normal, and Easy as generics for reference.
• Separate categories for difficulties - Can cause a lot of clutter if there's more than one or two categories (like Any% and 100%). You need to check each one to see the times. On the off-chance a hard run is faster than an easier run, it might not be noticed because they're not stacked against each other. Especially so for Normal, since middle categories are often ignored; people look for the fastest and/or hardest runs. • Subcategories for difficulties - A little better, but still has the problem of different times being noticed. Defaulting to one kind of screws over the others. • Difficulties are recorded but are on the same leaderboard - This puts easy and hard on the same board. In most cases easy will be on top, and since hard runs are below easy, even for the best hard run, it'll skew the perception of it since it has a lower rank. • X difficulty only - This isn't very fair for players who do the easiest difficulty for speed, or for players who do the hardest for the challenge. • Hardest and easiest difficulty only - Probably the best for most games. Sometimes middle difficulties have enough difference to justify running it too, though.
I thought of a possible solution for the site to add. It doesn't address all the issues, but should get most.
Categories for up to certain difficulties - Example being Any Difficulty and Hardest Difficulty. This separates the two main concepts: fastest and hardest runs. Defaulting to one doesn't hurt too much since the category title shows which one users are looking for. For games with notable differences for middle categories, a category can be enabled for Normal+Hard.
There'd need to be a 'sequential' setting for variables for this to work, meaning the values higher on the list are considered greater than the ones below. Then subcategories are set for upto said values.
Edit: Now that I think about it, this could somehow extend to platforms and regions, too.
Will Individual Levels be recorded here? With in-game time it's a lot easier to keep track of them.
[quote=kirkq]DKC kind of got out of hand at one point quite a while ago, and there was no real resolution.[/quote] I was going to bring this up in a thread I'm posting later. How is the DKC trilogy handled? Why do they (and SMRPG) have blank boards redirecting users to their offsite leaderboard, while some games don't exist at all here (namely Super Metroid).
Whenever a game provides an In-Game timer, they should always recorded along with Real Time. However, choosing either Game Time or Real Time as the primary measure is case-to-case. For the occasional game that requires you waste Real Time to see what the Game Time was, then it can be skipped if Real Time is chosen. Regardless of which one is primary, the other time can be secondary, there to help break a tie.
Time without Loading is nice too, but usually only necessary for more recent PC games. Keeping track of it is almost pointless if Game Time is chosen over Real Time.
Laggy bug. Viewing the source of a games page, I notice that for Platform, Year, Genre, Engine, Developer, Publisher, Game Type, and Series; all of their labels are made directly into the html. I think that's what's causing a lot of lag when viewing game pages.
Added three new sheets, which can be accessed on the bottom of the screen: Top 500 Games Categories Top 500 Categories
The Top 500 sheets were added mostly so sorting isn't such a pain when you want to check out the most 'popular' games/categories.
The categories sheets use Lighnat0r's modified formula, so they're calculated differently from the games sheets. They also don't have the names of the categories because of API limitations. Use the example link to go to (presumably) the world record run and see the category. From what I understand I would have to crawl every single game's API for category information, which would be strenuous for both the server and me. Game names are still there.
I guess they could change the Bot Reporting thread to General Reporting.
I know Gyoo and Lighnat0r respond to their tweets, so Twitter works for PMing until they implement it to the site. I'm certain Twitch would work too.
Thanks for wanting to help, but try not to revive threads that are really old.
Minor bug. Series sub-forums are organized by order they were created rather than the "Default sort for series overview".
Minor bug. Some page titles don't display properly:
It's in the tab and title. I'm using Pale Moon 26.2.0
Edit: The problem exists in Internet Explorer 11.0.9600.18282 as well.
Nice job adding duration to the formula. It was something I considered; I didn't want records that were long enough to be let's plays affect the outcome too much. If you think it doesn't make much of an impact, then it's probably fine.
While making the 'freshness' column (which is ln([Activity]/[RunCount])/ln(2^(-1/30.4375))) I found that the column was roughly 'weighted average age of runs' per game. When the run count is 1, the freshness is the age of the run. It applied similarly to the Activity column, which could best be summarized as 'number of recent runs', albeit not exactly. If you multiply it by (1+h/2) though, it could be stretched as 'recent hours worked' (since you can argue people work at least an hour worth before getting that run) or something else.
I will mention that if the half-life is at 15.21875, a run a day, everyday, would eventually converge to 22.46 (when not multiplied by time). You could divide the activity value by it, add an extra decimal, and call it 'average new runs per day'.
Edit: It'd be a good idea to put a hard limit on how large (1+h/2) can get; otherwise it can be manipulated. There are a couple of Super Mario Bros. 'runs' that are 99:00:00 that screw the activity up. I'd clamp it to 5 (which would be 8 hours).
This could possibly be added to the first post:
If someone doesn't have any means of contact, try making a post one of the games they moderate. If they don't notice it, your last resort could be to submit a fake run to try to get their attention.
I like to believe that most moderators follow the games they moderate; I'm not sure what it does by default. Don't post to series forums, moderators don't get notified for posts there, nor can series be followed (hopefully that'll be changed in the future).
