pirik :

People would disagree with you about disregarding it. But when I see for myself that the only thing Low IGT runners do differently than normal runs are the clock warping technique in 5 locations. That despite each of these use feeling like they skip either movement or entire sections (which is why they're appealing, especially also because they're easy time-saves), a decent bunch of them are barely faster if you death warp instead (5-1 red orb, 6-1 blue crystal snipe because of death planes right below). And that the remaining few (1-2 : 5 seconds / 5-2 gate : 8 s / 3-1 gondola wait : 15 s) only save upwards of 30 seconds. Even if more are found, still not overly huge... unless a miracle happens. I don't know if making a whole different speedrun category for a 30 seconds faster speedrun is worth it. Cherry on top, this time gain only applies to Support runs. On Standard... only the 5-2 gate one can be done... also only easy. The whole Low IGT/Pause abuse debacle only affect extremely specific runs...

Right now, someone accidentally managed to disable the support move cooldowns : https://twitter.com/twistedelf6966/status/1557607918287040512 If we can manage to consistently reproduce that, then KPRS game will be dead. We will have found our ultimate glitch. With that, we're not just gonna save 30 seconds off runs. We're gonna destroy the entirety of Vision 6, Vision 3-2 - if we can't just completely skip them - and possibly much more. It might even end up edging out PS1 DtP, RTA wise. And perhaps, we'll get to abusing it on Lunatea's Veil !

Now THAT, sounds like it will require its own category day one (next to Support mode). It's already so broken on its own that getting it to happen at all will be like randomly capturing a legendary pokemon early in the game. Not pause warping. At the very least merge these cool applications to normal runs. We're still speedrunning. And not like constantly pausing the run for 8 seconds to skip walking a distance that you would otherwise manually do in less than a second. Small tangent. About the pause function abuse itself, pirik, I agree with your idea of instating a time limit to it. I believe I am suggesting the same thing, when I talk about regulating pause utilisation [and in general, the various situations where the game is paused in general, like world map screen or cutscenes) for top level runs. It only matters to them, as at that point you've extinguished much of the possible time-saves, and where speedruns are of a whole other significance.])

I sound like I don't want this to ever become a legitimate way to play the game. It absolutely is ! I would love to see a properly optimised run (even if it asks for TAS). It seems like something fun to route or simulate, less so to perform in real-time. But is it important, relevant, meaningful to add to a proper speedrunning leaderboard, even regardless of the myriad of technical issues it introduces (which pirik also pinpoints) ? I don't think so, given what I demonstrated about the time-saves and accessibility. And are people currently showing off its true potential ? Not really. Even then, the best easy support Low IGT run, is still more than 3 min slower than that of first place who isn't.

It makes sense that these players still go for these tricks, because they save time in interesting and skippy ways and are easier compared to death warping. So again, it would really make more sense if we just allow these uses of pause warping during normal runs from the beginning, and probably not proceeding any further with Low IGT stuff as a whole. The current Low IGT runs would be able to merge with the normal runs and not be left alone anymore - on an isolated island without much point of interest - on top of massively simplifying the leaderboard, not only for now, but for then. Honestly, the quirk about these uses being scarcely available between categories, and only fully usable in easy Support, and nowhere on Standard, really seals the deal for me thinking it is truly the best way we should go about this, and that it has no merits to deserve its own category. Especially if people are only going to play it that specific way, and not like how it's designed to be (the speedrunning unfriendly way).

But again, that's another way to see it. We will go by how people want it.

amoser : I reassure you that in none of the solutions that I am keeping track of, we would get to delete any of the runs. At most moving them around and removing a category layer.

We could have all the possible categories in the world, but only if the board look good with them and is easy to use. If our problem right now was only about being able to do difficulty irrelevant runs, it would be simple troubleshoot by this point. But... let's look at this again.

People could want to do pause function abuse only stuff, whereas others would want to do pause warping only stuff. Then for the people who want to switch difficulties mid-run, there are two groups. Those who want to change them during the stages. And those who want to change difficulties between stages. Why the latter ? Well, because pause warping remains overpowered for other reasons than just being able to change the difficulty, and some people wouldn't like doing it (much like death warping is not appreciated by everyone).

How can we go about adding these ? The first one, we could add two new difficulty variables (irrelevant & irrelevant but only between stages or something). The second one, add 4 different pause abuse variables (pause function abuse / it + pause warping / pause warping only / none - the main one) to keep track of all of these. I'm not even counting stuff like death warping, or no skips/glitchless...

Do we really want to have this many categories ? Especially when we can expect that, at top levels, the vast majority of them won't affect the run time by more than a minute, and the gameplay differences are just like arguing semantics at that point ? It will interest one runner out of a thousand... for an entire src category slot ? It's not like a google spreadsheet you can afford to infinitely extend on any directions, or fill how you want without it looking necessarily bad. This is the src official page of the game's speedruns. This is why I think the 4th variable difficulty solution mentioned in my previous post is not ideal. It will still leave the question open about the other possible Low IGT categories. Although it would be fine if we arbitrarily decide to not count them, and only focus on the main ways to play Low IGT stuff. And, taking account of what amoser said, we could revert it back to how it originally was, a difficulty variable where all Low IGT runs are (again, a very reckless decision on my part). I do not see why though someone wouldn't want to play on hard and Support mode on. Making fun of it. Regardless, it's not like they programmed that hard mode automatically disables it.

That, or the second idea, which we would couple by tracking these extremely specific types of runs at least unofficially. But I would still find relevance in allowing people to use pause warping in normal runs, at least specifically the five known usages. Barring people off such tricks by requiring them to play on Low IGT does not do it for me.

I'm sorry if my last post made you feel worried about me. I am very sound and good. I'm very enthusiast and expressive about this subject, but I may for sure be looking at it too seriously with the wrong lenses. It really doesn't look simple the way I see it, perhaps because it's not just a discussion about the game, but also about speedrunning fundamentals, and approaches with managing leaderboards. And I didn't always help it very much given my mistakes.

Anyways, we have two new solutions I'm fine with. I do have a preference, the simpler one, but that's just one voice.

I moved ahead and added a new difficulty variable called "Irrelevant".

These are the newly updated difficulty rules :

" Input the difficulty level you have played on.

If you are playing between multiple difficulties in the run, it belongs to the difficulty irrelevant category. If you have changed it during a stage (as opposed to during the world map), the run will be considered as being a Pause Abuse run .

When playing on a fixed difficulty, if you intend on using pause warping, but do not have access to costumes, you are allowed to warp by changing difficulty, then warping a second time in a row to reset the difficulty to what you were originally playing on, in order for the run to remain being a fixed difficulty speedrun. "

That way, you can still run the game on the Low IGT playstyle. As a recall, Low IGT is a way to play the game where you strive to get the lowest possible times technically achievable in the game. For such a run to be submittable here, your run would have to play on the difficulty irrelevant setting, and doing pause abuse. The pace of the run is much different than that of a titular speedrun, because you are allowed to pause the game at will (and therefore, the run itself), and you will have to pause a lot anyways to use the various time-saves this gamestyle allows. Which are :

• Doing pause warping on many checkpoints in the game, either to skip movement (either skipping entire sections, backtrack, or a tiny bit of walking), to reset the room cycle, or to skip backtrack after grabbing certain collectibles like phantomilians (because they still save after you die or warp, like extra lives and unlike dreamstones).
• Pausing the game to take breath, prepare, set up tricks.
• Alternating difficulties between normal or easy in order to optimise the game by damage-bouncing on the side of enemies for extra speed depending on your health and the duration of the invulnerability frames (routing is required), as well as refresh your health. But also, playing the bosses on easy as they have less health. And finally, activate clocks well after you've died to stop the IGT while warping, much like it is done in Balue's Tower ILs or Cursed Leorina. The state of Low IGT runs will change depending on the main category (any%, 100%, using support mode or not).

But now, the problem with Low IGT as a name, is that it implies you get the lowest IGT times allowed by the game using whatever means possible, compared to the more restricted speedruns that currently ban most of the tricks I have listed. More simply, you need to closely match the theoretical human limit of these restricted speedruns, then employ these various Low IGT exclusive techniques, in the hopes of reaching this isolate realm of fast times that normal runs are absolutely locked from. And your final time has to be faster times than the human limit, because if you don't, you're technically not reaching the lowest IGT times possible of the game. Do you understand the catch ? Basically, no one can do this except very dedicated top players.

Hence why we should probably stop using this term, as it implies that if you're not doing exactly this, then you're not doing anything Low IGT related. I mean, if your Low IGT run is still minutes slower than that of first place without it, it's only fair to say that you're not actually doing any Low IGT stuff at all. You're only just using restricted tricks that are allowed either by the pause abuse mode, or irrelevant difficulty choice.

Now, this doesn't mean we have abolish the categories we currently have to accomodate this. Everything works fine, it's just that we should stop using Low IGT to designate these runs. Pause abuse can do

Now, about my earlier time-save estimation of the five known clock snipes + pause warping skips... I've come to realise two mistakes in it :

• I completely forgot that you can immediately fall on the gondola pit in 3-1. So, the pause warp doesn't actually save 15 seconds, it saves nothing compared to a simple death warp (both save like 15 seconds, but their individual difference are nigh).
• For 1-2, you would correctly save 5 seconds if you death warp... but if you just go the intended way past the pillar, which is the thing I forgot to consider, you save at most a second...

Which in turn, lowers the already measly gain of 30 seconds... down to 10. 10 seconds for combining all these 5 tricks. 8 seconds of which come only from the 5-2 clock warp. And exclusively on easy.

I was pretty angry learning about this. Imagine considering a new way to play the game that revoles about abusing the fact that pausing the game stops the IGT. You add entire category slots and rulesets... all just for the interesting tricks to be miserably slow, runners doing 10% of what you could do to save time, only making use of the same 5 pause warping uses, leading to... a 10 seconds different speedrun. 0.5% of Roku's current first place time of 32:39 removed.

At this point, I am really tempted to remove everything having anything to do with the pause abuse category. To get an interesting looking run would require an insanely good player, tons of effort on planning, grinding, patience with all the pausing... all for something that might not even lead to a very different speedrun time-wise. I am sorry, but such a run or challenge is something that belongs more to a place like youtube, where some popular youtuber like Karl Jobst present it, and someone who completed it (and even then it's not that interesting in comparison to the other speedruns or challenges he's covered). Not an actual speedrunning category for people to run on. Catering to too specific players to be interesting. It's to my taste being given too much credit for what people actually do and fare with them, basically nothing. It's severely underwhelming, and fundamentally it has nothing to do with a speedrun.

And, honestly, I think the same thing for difficulty irrelevant runs for that matter. It seems to lead to a completely unoriginal looking speedrun. Why would you play on anything other than easy ? If you don't allow yourself to switch difficulties during stages (= pause warping, so back with the issues explained above), you would only lose time not playing on easy.

If it were all on me, I would have disallowed pause warping speedruns on the spot. But I won't, for a couple reasons.

• Horrible moderation practices if I actually carry on with this without proper discussions and warnings, especially for big matters. Lol.
• I still want to hope, and give these sets of categories a chance, I'd love to see being wrong, see if people actually do interesting stuff with them (I am on the stance that this hasn't happened yet)
• I may still be okay with allowing these five pause warping uses in normal runs. That way, the current runs that use them are not lost, and it would mean more fun tricks for everyone. ...But at the same time I may not. After all, they are so slow we might as well forget about them. The fact that you would have to pause the game (and run) for 8 seconds, 5 separate times to use them adds hurt to injury. Maybe only the 5-2 one, as that one actually saves time and is a big developer meme. There may still be cases where we could allow exceptions. If, for instance, we could manage to skip the two last engines of Ishras Ark (not the revisited version) using pause warping, that could end up saving a lot of time. It's not confirmed though.

So I would give the current design a couple months. If I see that nothing of significance has been achieved, that no new interesting pause tricks that would change things around haver been discovered, that these categories still look dull and and that the runs all look the same, I think I would allow myself to go ahead and redesign the leaderboard to competely remove these categories (pause abuse, difficulty irrelevant speedruns, anything that is to the spirit of Low IGT), as it's clear, they are overstaying their welcome, and it is for the sake of the leaderboard, keeping it relevant. Pruning the withered branches off the tree.

One small post, about PC FPS regulations.

Me and other reviewers have noticed that the vast majority of PC runs have the FPS counter be extremely small, such that even in 720p, they are just barely readable, even on full screen.

It doesn't compromise the validity of any runs, just makes it harder to read, so fear not. But, I want to make awareness of this problem, so that people may try and find a way to make it look slightly bigger, small quality of life for everyone.

I changed the rules to encourage people to try and largen it. It will never be a rejectable offense to keep it small, but at least starting from now, it should be common sense that it's not the wisest option.

The counter is also not made easier to read due to an ever changing background. In the worst cases, if you have a green counter, then it is barely readable on the green colored stages such as vision 3. A solution to that would be to put it on some black background, but again, that may not be possible with every program or recording setup, so it is only just a recommendation, not a requirement.

Hello again.

An update post about the potentially groundbreaking exploit mentioned some posts above.

An investigation was led by Bobbykaze about what we now refer to as infinite support jump, ISJ. https://twitter.com/twistedelf6966/status/1557607918287040512

He managed to understand why it worked, and reproduced it in this video, along with a breakdown of the required actions : It takes quite a while to setup, it requires reloading the entire sub-game at one point, and the procedure easily lasts one full minute of real-time. You get the glitch to activate only at the beginning of the stage.

What this glitch allows us to do is simple, disable the support jump cooldown. I don't have to explain how useful that would be, in fact I already did a while ago. It conserves through rooms, which is great. Although, we don't know if it conserves through a death, stage reset, and pause warping. This is currently unknown information at the time of writing this.

Unfortunately... it might turn out to be completely and tragically useless in the end. Here's why in one simple sentence : it only works on 1-1. Some later stages were tested, and in the sequel too, but there, ISJ didn't show any signs of life. Not all stages were tested however. Far from it. For all we know, 6-1 could allow it. That is why we should make sure all of the possibilities are extinguished.

To make things more complicated, it has been determined that it's only possible on 1.0. Meaning you would have to find a way to revert to that. This is effectively the first difference found with that version and 1.1. But don't immediately come to the conclusion that we will now have to account for version differences in the leaderboard. As it stands, this trick is no good for us to have.

As we said, it's useless. You can only use it on 1-1. On 1-1... the most linear level possible. You're faster sliding on the ground and damage-bouncing off enemies than in the air, and everything you would want to skip can already be skipped with normal support mode (Lephise Statue). So ISJ wouldn't help here. The only thing it potentially would - even marginally - be helpful for, is for when you want to save the phantomilian in the windmill. Outside that, it'd basically be worth nothing. Furthermore, if we strictly follow Bobbykaze's steps, you would lose time, because starting 1-1 the first time, you cannot pause the game for three seconds. Three IGT seconds. You would have to save more than three seconds to make up for it. The only hope you could still have, is by making it work by using a different setup than Bobby's in which you activate the glitch, and support mode before entering 1-1, before the run starts.

Sadly, the way it presents itself, I think we should ban it. I don't want runners or ILs to reset their console or something to revert their version of the game, and to suffer by spending a minute loading and exiting the game everytime, only so they can hope to use this trick to potentially save at most a second if they play perfectly, which is probably impossible anyways. It's a huge drag that brings nothing good to make up for it.

Unless there is new information about this technique, I think this is the wisest decision. As it is, it shouldn't be worth any of our precious time.

I'd like to bring a slight change in the way we handle the act of pausing in ILs.

Recently, Pirik performed this run. It was a submission at some point, but he has deleted it since. In this run, you can see that he has paused right before the midpoint cutscene. Rule wise, this run would thus go to the pause abuse category.

But let's be honest. This is stupid as hell. And I'm mostly the one who pushed for this in the first place. This press happens way after the first phase is taken care of. Pausing here bears no gameplay significance, and can in no way be used to abuse the game in any way whatsoever. Moving it to that category is completely nonsensical in my eyes. And it was a really short pause too, so nerves wise, even though he had a legit serious pace up to that point, I don't think that helped him much in the end if it lasts one second.

So I would propose that we tweak and clarify the bit of IL rules that regulate this, to indicate that runners are not systematically "banned" off no pause abuse runs if they happen to pause, especially when it's of the accidental nature (like pressing pause too early to skip a cutscene, which is a very common mistake), and is inoffensive to the integrity of the run. That won't make the rules any softer, pausing is still very much prohibited, it's just so we can save these rare runs that truly do no harm and have no business being moved to Pause Abuse.

And just saying, because that possibility comes to my mind, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense to argue that we should ban it regardless because it helps reduce cheating slightly more somehow. Pausing in full-game runs isn't banned, and that seems like a way easier location for runs to be cheated. Furthermore, pause warping exist, so we would have to ban that as well.

I don't think this will see much debate, but I'm still making this post out of safety.

Another day, another topic to discuss.

In full-game runs, what can we say about the run if the runner quits the game ?

How do you quit the game, first of all ?

You can soft quit the game from basically anywhere. If you're in a stage, you can return to either the world map, or the title screen of the game in question. If you are in the world map, you can return to the title screen.

Footage of going to the title screen from the stage :

And then, you can hard quit. On Switch and probably other consoles, you can simply close the game on the menu page. On PC I imagine, you could also alt + f4 the game or something.

When soft quitting, the game will prompt you to save your progress, briefly after you pass through the world map (if auto-save is on, the save will be automatic). It's to be assumed that hard quitting before that screen will make you lose stage and IGT progress. We'll see why later that could become a problem.

Let's start this discussion with an interesting idea : can you skip the L'sV credits, and if yes, would that be good ?

Effectively, you can. Begin by saving your game after you're prompted to do so after the KoS cutscenes. Proceed to quit the game the hard way (as you cannot pause during the credits), re-launch the game, and load your save-file again. You should find yourself at the Terminus of Tears stage, therefore past the credits, and the stage is shown as blue, meaning it's completed. Final time should show at the bottom of the concerned save-file.

So if you wanted to do the final boss before the extras in 100%, you could effectively hard quit the game to skip waiting for the credits to roll.

What are the downsides to this ? It would seem to be a cheating paradise, due to enormous quantities of black screens that can be used to splice with. But this argument is not receivable, as it's not like there aren't already a ton of black screens in the normal game you can exploit. We have to make do with that.

The continuity of the run (in other words, the proof that the run is single-segmented, and that the run was done in an single go as opposed to taking a big break somewhere) would be difficult to establish once the game screen becomes black. There is no way to know for sure that the footage i continuous and a time gap wasn't just added between the first part of the run before the hard quit, and the second part after it. Making estimating the RTA time impossible, as a consequence. But again, same dilemma as before. You can't prove for certain that a run is continuous anyways because of silent black screens. Which makes me wonder if we should stop worrying about run continuity, and arbitrarily assume that the run footage presented will be continuous. Well, maybe except for top level play. The burden of proof would become higher, and while you may still be allowed to skip the credits that way, you wouldn't be allowed to slack off during the IGT inactive moments.

So I think it would be fine if people do that ? Now that's not to say that you'd be able to sit on the screen for a while during the run. Even if the IGT will never update, if you really do nothing, you're not really speedrunning. That is reason enough for rejection.

Anyways. This is the only use I could find to quitting the game.

Second scenario. It was brought up in the server that someone could accidentally quit the game. Or similarly, the game could just decide to crash. If this was RTA, the run would basically be dead, but IGT is different. You could launch the game again, load your file, and return back to your progress without losing any time. Can we allow this ?

Well, it would depend on how the run was before the play was interrupted. If you're in the middle of a stage, quit gameplay through one way or another, and don't save your game when you're prompted to, loading your save-file will lead you to the beginning of the stage you just played, except you will have gone back in time, before you ever touched that stage. As such, the IGT would be reset. (you can also easily do this by hard quitting) And that is a problem. Because it is very much akin to segmented runs. You play a stage, you don't like your performance, so you quit the game to reset the IGT time by restarting the stage, and hope for a better stage time. Even as an accident, you could very well reset the IGT without realizing it, and have a much better performance than in your first stage iteration. There is no way we can accept such a practice. Your run stops being single-segment since you are re-doing a section of the speedrun. You are merely going back in time to try the stage again, almost as if you used save-states. That, instead of living and making do with your mistakes, like how speedrunning is supposed to go by.

But in the case that such a thing were to happen outside of stages, for instance in the world map, and if reloading your last save-file of the run were to lead to the next stage or boss you haven't touched yet, the IGT and the run wouldn't be impacted. So an accidental or even intentional game exist wouldn't immediately be problematic (But I don't know why you would do that anyways).

So simply put, you would be allowed to hard quit the game to skip the L'sV credits. Quitting the game from the world map would be acceptable, so long as you then resume the run by opening a save-file that lead you to a stage you haven't touched yet. But hard quitting the game from a stage would be banned, and soft quitting would as well, unless you save your progress on the world map before doing so, and load that save-file when coming back. That way, the run would be left undisturbed (it would represent a IGT timeloss instead of simply invalidating the run)

This might all look confusing, but in the end, it is unlikely anyone will be affected by any of this. Not only it seems useless to quit the run, but as of now, no one has yet to have done it, or pause for extended durations for that matter. All current 70+ verified runs have behaved well in thar regard. Muh like speedruns. This post would be a sort of broad guideline on how to handle such runs if they were to come up.

Actually, one of the reasons why this is a topic in the first place, is that returning to the title screen for instance might mess with autosplitters. Sadly, given what I've discussed here, it looks like quitting the game in specific circumstances might be allowed. But such situations seem so uncommon and useless that it doesn't seem worth it to adjust the autosplitters for them. Nor write actual rules about this. It will be fine...

Having said all this, I do not claim in any way I am knowledgeable on this topic, so if you think something is wrong, or happen to know a bit about how to handle that sort of stuff, please go ahead. If this was RTA, the problem would quickly be solved, but IGT doesn't make things easy.

This goes with the post above.

Quitting a stage to the world map is obviously safe. You're not abusing the IGT in any way. You're actually losing time if you do that, because you lose stage progress. It's quitting to the title screen or beyond that could be a problem.

If you accidentally re-enter a completed stage (as happened with buggle here : ) it should also be completely fine. You'll lose some time, but the run is still going.

Should be fine,

Hello.

In this post, I will discuss the state of IGT abuse (refers to tricks or time-saves related to pause abuse, and switching difficulties within the run).

More specifically, I would like to propose a leaderboard board design change that would still allow these categories to exist, runs to be conserved, and massively simply the board in itself while keeping it more relevant. I have changed mind for the Xth time, please disregard my past intentions.

However, before getting to that, I need to make a point.

Right now, we have a lot of categories. Some of them are rerlated to the different speedrunning categories, the gameplay mode, and the three basic difficulty. Those have never changed and are perfectly relevant to have. The speedruns change drastically within each and every single one of them.

But the remaining portions of the categories are dedicated to pause abuse, and difficulty irrelevant runs. The current leaderboard and rules are made so you are able to do runs where you only pause abuse but stick to the same difficulty. Likewise, you can do runs where you switch difficulty withing the run once or multiple times, but have your run not be considered as a pause abuse run (you need to change difficulties in the world map). There is a bit of flexibility as of what you want to do here.

But let's face it. These categories bear little difference between one another. They don't allow for a lot of original tricks, they don't change the gameplay experience in clear ways.

• Pause function spam : it is useful for pausing the run to plan ahead, setting up tricks more easily, dealing with bad situations. And yes, if one were to use it a lot, it would change the gameplay, and look for the run. But really, it's not gonna save a lot of time by itself. There's aren't a lot of tricks that are so hard you need to pause for them. Most of the time, you'd use it to save your skin.

• Pause warping : there are five DtP and two L'sV known uses, that save time by skipping something, such that they are slightly popular among players. But in either side, they don't save more than 10-15 seconds in the entire speedrun ! And they're not accessible in all gameplay mode and difficulty categories. There may be much bigger possible time-saves, if pause warping is found to be able to save-time when activating switches that lead to unskippable cutscenes, the backtrack skips of 6-2, or with the engine backtrack/escape sequence skips. The latter one is apparently possible, but has only been reproduced once and on an already skippable engine, and the timing might be insanely tight, way more than engine skips go for. Third, pause warping could be used to save some walking distance over checkpoints. Sniping them from far away, then warping back to them. No proper research has been made on the subject, but Bobbykaze thinks this is not possible with a significant amount of clocks. In most cases, it would actually result in a time-loss. And when it would save time... you'd imagine it's not gonna be miles. Finally, pause warping could be used to reset rooms, health, backtrack after getting collectibles (for a future all stages speedrun category), and probably more. But it's unlikely that any of this will lead to big time-saves. All in all, this technique either doesn't have a lot of time, or is way too hard for 99.9% of runners to employ.

• Difficulty switching : you want to play the entire game on easy. More health, shorter bosses, longer bullets... There are a couple theoretical uses, such as switching to hard to throw something at a clock, and proceed to die before it is struck, saving a bit of IGT. Kind of like we use in Balue's Tower. But they seem few and extremely far between. Or, you could switch to normal under certain portions of a stage to benefit from one second invlunerability to make more damage-bounces under a shorter time span. Remains to be found and still appears small. An actual practical use has been developed by Kumohachi. He plays The Ark Revisited on normal so it's faster to lose health for the engine skips (3 hit points instead of 15). Outside that, he only played on easy. It definitely saves time, but it's really just for one stage. The hardest stage by far, yes. But the gameplay is the same, just that you have less health to get rid off.

A common theme with these is that they are extremely specific. Nothing like support jumping your way everywhere. One hit KO on hard. More health, longer bullets, faster bosses on easy. And that, beyond just full-game runs.

This to say, all these various category distinctions that are meant to be flexible in allowing these runs, feel completely hollow. What's the difference between a fixed and variable difficulty speedrun ? Nothing on DtP, one stage in L'sV ? What is it with pause abuse and no pause abuse ? 5 tricks that represent 10 IGT seconds out of a 1920 seconds run ? Followed with basically nothing ? Perhaps something decent if you're a god, much better than Kumohachi who is already a master at his game ?

But as negligible as these are, you'd agree with me that it'd be a waste to disallow them forever. They still are part of the game, and relatively simple. Plus, some runs already exist with them. Including Kumohachi's recent full-game run, which although I haven't seen, I'd like to bet is the most skilled run in the entire leaderboard. Although there's ultimately no hard in doing so, as the videos themselves won't be lost and be suddenly worth nothing, I'd rather keep them around here than delete them.

Case in point. As much as I'm disappointed by them, for instance, I cannot bring myself to remove the difficulty irrelevant category. It brings little change to the run compared to other games out there, but by principle it's still a completely normal and expected way to play the game. As with the game being timed IGT, abusing the timer also constitutes a valid way to run the game.

Which brings me to say that I think it would make more sense if we had all of these IGT abuse tricks, all of the almost insignificant, controversial techniques, responsible for much of our headache with this game, be fused together within a single category. That way, we have a way to the run the game which... still doesn't represent much... but at least something. Something that can stand on its legs. A speedrun where your goal is getting the lowest IGT time you can, abusing the timer. The wild west of KPRS speedruns.

Back then, it was called Low IGT and was a difficulty based category. That term is slightly problematic, so I suggest simply replacing it with IGT abuse (difficulty irrelevant is concerned. There is no reason why you wouldn't do it during stages. And that, constitutes pause warping). We wouldn't need to carry the pause abuse category around, simplifying the name of videos. Rules, submissions would be simplified. A couple runs would be moved around, which would be done in a couple minutes.

Do anyone see anything wrong with that ? I know we're messing with the board once more. But for once I truly believe this would be the definitive, perfect board design, even for the future.

This definitely makes me most sense in the long run. There's no harm in letting the pause abuse/pause warping tricks be used, and boiling them down to a single category keeps things tidy. You could even call it Limitless or something, all tricks and difficulties at your disposal.

There it is. The 4th variable based category pause abuse is now obsolete. The 4th difficulty is now called IGT abuse.

The rules have been simplified as a result. The IL ones are still fairly large, but full-game runs ones have consumed an elixir of youth. Of course, I do not need to point you to the look of these boards which look so much simpler.

It's finally set for good.

I believe this one aspect of ILs wasn't made clear when discussing them, so allow me to come back to it and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Boss time-attack segments are found in boss ILs. This is the place where you can go and beat them the fastest way possible. It's also fun to compare these boss times and that of full-game runs.

Naturally, there should be a counterpart of that with stages. Stage running segments, so stage ILs, is the place where you can focus on beating a given stage the fastest way.

This was never clarified before, but I believed that, due to their nature, stage ILs shouldn't include bosses. It would be like doing two ILs in a row, which is counterproductive to the intended goal of this IL type, devoting time exclusively on stage portions.

I am saying this because DtP has stages where directly following them is a boss, and the stage isn't considered cleared until beating them. Since the rules don't make it clear, people could rightfully assume you need to clear the entire stage, such that you have the "vision clear" text appear. In fact, a runner, KalarMar, has. Thankfully, this does not compromise anything about the submission or run. We just need to retime it and it's good to go.

Now, L'sV has some boss-fight segments in the middle of stages. In this case, we have no choice but to count them in the stage IL time, especially because there are no time-attack modes for them. They're also generally very short bosses.

All this is to say that if you ever submit DtP X-2 IL runs, the boss won't be counted in the final time. But they would in L'sV. And the IL rules have been updated with this.

Hello everyone.

A new trick has been discovered in DtP² by NeilLegend : . It involves waiting on cutscenes in specific ways, to alter the global cycle of certain entities loaded in the stages, in a way that benefits the runner later on. In this instance, in the 100% standard category, it is making a wind flower activate sooner by not immediately skipping the opening cutscene of 1-1, so that its surrounding dreamstones and phantomilian can be retrieved seconds earlier than usually achievable. We do only know of this one application thus far. It can exclusively be done in rooms with cutscenes in them, which severely restricts the possibilities. It is however known to affect enemies (like the first Moo of 1-1), and that is on the contrary pretty significant. I feel it will not work with L’sV², but it remains to be proven.

When I first saw this trick in action, I was definitely hooked, but part of me couldn’t help but be slightly on edge about something. And that something was being able to affect the run without being subject to IGT, since it is disabled during cutscenes.

Is that an actual problem ? Does that constitute a IGT abuse technique ? I gave it a thought, and this is what I personally came up with.

I’ll say it immediately, I think it is harmless and that there is nothing to worry about. For the simple reason that, everyone is already subject to manipulating cycles or entities during cutscenes, consciously or not. People aren't necessarily always keen on their skipping game. It’s not an uncommon occurrence for a runner to not immediately skip a cutscene, being unresponsive to it for a variable amount of time. This is not a big deal, as the run is paused (unless you also mind about RTA), but that would be enough to potentially alter the cycle of some element in the stage. From there, who knows what could happen… granted, this is a bit of a play with extreme odds. But the point is, trying to ban or regulate this cutscene skipping in lieu of this is simply ridiculous.

So to me, this technique appears to be completely fine to use. It turns mundane cutscenes into something useful. It’s not like you can afford to wait on them for too long, as you may very well mess the cycles in your disadvantage.

…but what about it and the timing system ? Isn’t it a problem that it isn’t counted in the final time ? It constitute active and precise gameplay during a run. Does it compromise the entire system ?

Well, IGT wise, it was already a strange decision for the developers to design a timer that only counts gameplay, and not like cutscene time, world map, pausing… so personally, I like to think the integrity of the speedrun includes these moments. They just don’t. So, I don’t feel opposed to cycle manipulation strats. Again, cutscenes pause the IGT, and are unavoidable. They are impossible to moderate, unlike pausing.

Now RTA wise… this is generally not an issue because RTA counts the time spent manipulating cycles. But then there's the one at the start of 1-1. Manipulating cycles there is not only possible, it’s shockingly useful. But. It affects the run before it officially begins, before either IGT or RTA kick off. And that seems wrong. Do we need to redefine RTA, all of a sudden ? To include the moment spent during this one cutscene ?

RTA was never meant to be an important metric. Its point is to estimate the amount of real human time it took to achieve the speedrun, and by speedrun I mean the real-time duration of the time the in-game timer started working and stopped working. RTA is nothing more than supplementary information about the performance. IGT timing tend to be much shorter and disconnected from reality for a multitude of reasons, so RTA is handy to have. It's also fun for people who still want to care about RTA.

If you ask me, not counting the split second of 1-1 intro cutscene skipping in the RTA time doesn’t sound like an issue. It would even be within the three seconds of approximation RTA timing we allot. I do not object to this special case.

If there is one thing to gather from this trick and discussion, is that cutscenes are now relevant to the speedrun. And as such, it is only fair to require them to be part of the run footage. Everyone already does without thinking twice about it. There’s just the 1-1 case we need to be weary about. And ILs. A run video that skips directly into gameplay without showing the previous cutscene tidbit (if there is) shouldn’t officially count in my opinion. This has never happened yet, people always record these moments. But for the time it will happen, we will be prepared.

Update to my previous post about entity manipulation through cutscenes.

Thanks to Takuto’s investigation, it has been found out to be possible in L’sV² :

Two uses are currently known about in Joilant Fun Park. They amount to about 3.5 seconds of time-save.

What does this new information change about the state of this technique ? Not much at all. Most of the arguments in favor of its usage are already explained above, but in short : it’s nearly impossible to regulate effectively, and using the technique requires you to be attentive and fast, as opposed to taking your time, such that it doesn’t really hurt IGT. There should be no problems with using it.

When I think about it, it might be possible to use in the original games as well ? But DtP, WII and L’sV are timed in RTA, so the chances of this technique being useful there are extremely slim.

New post, this time about a potential upcoming update to PC FPS regulation. A bit overdue too, but at long last, let's get on it.

So as you know, PC specific regulation requires runs to display a FPS counter. It also disallow runs that play at a FPS beyond the upper limit of 60 fps, the one the game was intended to be played at.

But, as you can see, there is currently no lower limit. And that is what might have to change thereon.

Let’s take a look at one of this player’s (Monika) speedruns : As you can see, her game’s FPS consistently ranges from 30 to stretches of 20 fps at times (parts of 1-1, 2-1 and 3-1). Don’t be fooled by the FPS of the footage itself, as the recording software was also struggling on its own.

From there, the argument might be made that a run done on a game with such a low technical performance would not be deemed acceptable, as the gameplay experience would not be comparable to that of any other runs. But, I don’t think it would necessarily be a compromising decision to allow it. Plus, while the footage framerate borderlines on the unwatchable, it’s not quite at that level (older runs of hers however were). If it was just about that, I wouldn’t see any issues with verifying the run.

However, some discoveries were made about the relationship between gameplay and FPS, that offer a new perspective on this subject. It all started within this very same run :

As you can see, this part of the fight looks completely bugged. Not only the enemies are spread out, their hitboxes are also affected. It’s very funny-looking, but it’s definitely not supposed to play out like that. Out of all the runs I’ve seen, this is my first time seeing anything of the like.

(There is another strange situation, Gelg Bolm first Moo dropoff being almost ungrabbable . But this situation will not be returned upon in this post)

The question then was, what can trigger it ? Question which we have now finally answered.

This very odd behavior, or more specifically, the length of the gaps between the enemies turns out to depend entirely on your framerate. The lower, the larger gap. Take a look at these screenshots, courtesy of amoser : https://imgur.com/a/62A4AY3 So, if you have a too low FPS, the game doesn’t behave as it should, which in my opinion would stand as a game inconsistency comprimising the run's validity. (And on one of the most important moments of the run and game too, but that’s besides the point)

The gaps are almost unnoticeable at 50 fps, and it is something the Switch version would be able to reproduce naturally due to its suboptimal performance. hence why we could go with this number as the lower FPS end of KPRS PC speedrunning.

For the some of you who may be worried by such a strict change, this is what I would respond. As of today, excluding Monika’s runs, no runners playing this game has ever had any problems, even small, with FPS. It’s always been clean green 60 fps submissions, or nothing. So, I don’t think this would impact a lot of players, then or now. But even then, even if you have a machine that can not run the game well, I say why care ? Still go speedrun if you think you’d have fun. That’s definitely what Monika did. Her latest run accomplished what she had set to do by a glorious margin. And she helped science. Leaderboard are a thing, but they’re not the thing. You’re not bound by rule chains. If you don’t have a good enough PC, don’t worry too much about it. Just play, have fun, and share your slice of life with people. So, while this would make Monika’s couple runs improper, it ultimately won’t sway her accomplishments.

50 could be a good limit, but that doesn’t mean that it would be okay for PC players to intentionally lag their game through outside means. (Unless – I repeat this every time - lag strats are found)

Is that good to anyone ?

I agree. It is a common thing to expect that physics doesn't work as intended below 30 FPS, which is a very generic bare minimum standard, and if we hadn't FPS requirements for run validation and a toxic community we could maybe end up with people abusing low FPS, but this is luckily not the case.

The only concern I'd have is to make sure it's worded such that it allows for temporary dips below 50 FPS, both because they're pretty inevitable even on console, and because measuring a variable frame rate actually gets hairy and even reliable tools often give different values because of how they sample the value.

If we're going to go with 50 FPS requirement, I'd say require the run to stay above that on average, with dips below 50 FPS lasting for more than a few seconds potentially invalidating the run.

And yeah, any intentional FPS abuse, even when it stays within otherwise allowable limits, should probably be explicitly banned at least for the main categories.

Also, where the dips happen could make a difference? I tend to get dips on the final hit to the bosses, when the game goes slow mo and there's no gameplay, and those dips don't really give me any advantage. If I got the same dip while dealing with Moo grabs or clips or platforming it could on the other hand impact and help me.

I will apologize in advance, I didn't think of consulting the FPS analysis of KPRS before making my post, and its results seem to depict a different story :

Technically, according to this video, the FPS on Switch can dip well below 50 fps. To 40 in some places even by the look of the graph. These are justs small exhibits, there is most definitely more to it. Ghadius, at least, seems to behave like 50 fps. But since other places don't...

With this in light, it might be necessary to lower the limit down. To 45, or maybe even 40.

Obviously, as amoser said, we want to be clear about the rule words once the changes are official.

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Now, about random lag spikes leading to accidental time-saves... it is a very natural worry. I don't know what's the general speedrunning consensus on these. I don’t often see people having lag spikes, though I’ve never payed much attention to them.

While it’s one thing to have random lag spikes, it’s another to bet on the lottery and expect one to happen at a very specific place, within a couple tenths of a second, or whole seconds, to perform a trick (lag only, or making something easier). Because they are akin to cosmic ray bit flipping (if that is even proven to be a real phenomenon), albeit with better odds. Perhaps the kind of stuff that can happen from an old dirty cartridge (but here, only FPS wise) is a more accurate representation of lag spikes's likelihood.

One sure thing is, if you pull off, accidentally or not, some trick or thing that is mostly only possible with lag spikes or low enough FPS, such that smooth 60 fps runners cannot get it to work. And get away with it while save time with it, then the run cannot be comparable to others due to the inaccessible advantage. And runs who incorporate lag abuse strats thanks to spike lags predictably coming directly from their own sloppy computer are probably ineligible as well.

But, in the end, these kinds of fateful runs are probably one in a million. Surely the opposite, losing time, is way more common, but are there that many examples of people accidentally saving “dark” time that way in speedrunning ? These are so out of the norm, I can’t help it but jokingly think that a run with such happenstances would not be eligible for the leaderboard, but would be eligible in some sort of “run rejected because the stars aligned” worldwide playlist, page. Personally, I will wait that I see such a run before saying anything. Case-by-case treatment.

If you still feel anxious about FPS randomly going down and potentially invalidating the run by breaking the game (therefore, integrity problem), no one has yet to have had lag spikes terrible enough to clearly make happen the Ghadius anomaly. Which, is about 87 runs so far. Plus, depending on how it behaves related to lag spikes (and not consistent lag), we could be even less strict. Just like before, we'll wait and see.

It's a bit worrying still, it's a bit of an annoying itch, but it does clearly not call the end of PC speedrunning.

I will make the changes. The allowed low end FPS value will be of 45.

Although the Switch can go a bit lower than that, it's only in specific spots. A player having such low FPS for the the entire duration of the run would not exactly be comparable. Plus, it may trigger effects and bugs that the Switch would never make happen. It's also a compromise with the Ghadius bug.

This number is not set in stone, it might be changed again with more info, insight and wisdom about the topic. Saying this, I wish that from now one this subject doesn't take away too much from more important ones to be held this thread anymore.

I know everyone is doing it and there never has been any problems with it, but if you have the possibility of playing and recording the game in 60 fps when submitting KPRS runs, please do so.

Hello again.

I would like to bring up the subject of RTA, and waiting on cutscenes for optimal cycles (ctrl + f "NeilLegend" to locate the post).

Last time, I argued that, despite counter intuitive and dissonant it would be, keeping the RTA rules as is, from the beginning of the IGT countdown, to the end (final boss hit) would be fine. In reality, it just doesn't make sense to not count the cutscene time in the RTA time. Cutscenes truly impact the run. You need to wait on the cutscene in order to access better cycles in the stage, to be able to achieve certain times. And runs such as this one reminds me of this fact : https://www.speedrun.com/klonoaprs/run/yln36j3z

You see, one of my worries about trying to update the RTA rules by including the cutscene before the IGT kicks off, was that I thought it would require us to retime every single run. A very taxxing process, especially for something this small about a time metric that's not even designed to be important.

But, I think there are two elements of the question that I have neglected when thinking this :

• It can be said that 99% of runs instantly skip the 1-1 / Sea of Tears intro cutscene. Such that this rule change would not impact them.
• Even if there are runs that we've somehow missed who would need a RTA retime, which would be extremely rare and probably inconsequential, we can always declare that all runs before the RTA update rule, are left as is.

Having this in mind, I would personally be okay with updating the RTA rules so it is more accurate with how the game is played. I'm just now waiting for your input.