FranceIt may have a crazy number of ILs, it doesn't make it a good idea to increase it more and more if it's not run by people. (And, yes, I'm absolutely biased : I don't want to have to run 20 more tracks)
Addons tracks are distributed through an official repository, but they remain unofficial. Should a game with a map/level editor include in ILs all (publicly-available) user creations ? Should SuperTux add ILs for any custom level somebody has done ? I'd say no.
Some game have high-quality user-done maps which offer a worthwhile challenge and have a big enough community to have people interested in them, but iirc it's common then to have a separate leaderboard for those.
Useful information, thanks. I'd still be against adding add-on tracks because we already have a lot of ILs (and this is bound to increase with new releases), but the stability argument is not valid anymore for 0.8.1, I guess.
Yes, follow the leader in easy is arguably harder than in expert.
They're not updated often, but they are indeed sometimes updated, the functionality to do so exists. So it's a valid concern.
Plus, most add-ons levels are bad (some former official tracks and a few non-official tracks are decent, but it's a minority). Allowing some add-ons level in the leaderboard would be an argument in favor of adding others ; adding only some would be a difficult position to hold.
And then, there are already way enough ILs. I and @Alistair_Findlay did a time for most normal direction ILs, but you can't say that there are a lot of IL submissions. Dispersing them in more tracks would be harmful, imho. I'm already bothered that the IL lists for a version contain former official tracks of previous versions, and that this will be growing and growing as new versions are released.
Completing all challenges, no matter their specific difficulty, deserves in my opinion to figure in the leaderboard if it can be faster than an all challenges all expert run. However, all challenges in expert is in some sense a 100% (achievements are truly worthless), while all challenges but not in all difficulties is a lesser degree of completion.
Among the possibilities :
- Add a "mixed difficulties" possibility to runs, but keep all the "all challenges run" sharing the same subcategory.
- Have a "All challenges (single difficulty)" and "All challenges (mixed difficulties)" subcategories (the names may be improved).
Considering that those runs would be 99% identical, with only the FTL part different (and arguably, the FTL in novice is actually hard...), I'm not really in favor of full separation.
In a game I moderate (SuperTuxKart), we have a similar issue, but we stuck with a single copy of the variable for simplicity's sake (we have over 30 ILs). However, this means that some ILs have a variable which doesn't make sense for them as an option.
An additional issues is that we had to duplicate rules a lot, because the rules are not exactly the same between ILs so we can't just set universal rules, but there are several groups of levels sharing identical rules. If we had the ability to create rules and associate them with a group of ILs (by associating ILs with "IL categories"), it would make things much simpler.
It's ridiculous to have possibly a speed record where you can just take your time and go slowly in the race skips, knowing it won't matter. If you do 1s less in the 3 non-skipped races and 1 minute more in the skipped races, it would be very bad in a normal full-game run, but it could yield you a WR with the current GP ILs rules.
Having non-timed moments with relevant non-trivial player actions is bad.
There is already an in-game timer for GP... It's just that it gives a wrong time when the player skips. If at least it added one hour or so on skip, it would make sense, but adding zero is absurd.
It's possible to just look at the timer on the last frame before skipping, maybe adding some rounding for good measure (so having a 60fps video is not a disadvantage), and compute a pseudo-IGT total using it.
@UbuntuJackson : using the current IGT rule, a skipped race count for 0,000 seconds, no matter when you skip it.
Currently, the rules for the GP ILs are IGT. While there is good in it (it discards loading time and doesn't force button mashing in menu to matter), it also means that racing for a full minute before doing a skip counts exactly the same as managing to skip in a few seconds. Doing the latter without screwing up the GP is harder and more skillful, so it's not good that it is not rewarded.
Do you think the rules should be changed ?
The possibilities are :
- Keeping the final GP IGT
- Doing it full RTA
- Some mixed solution : adding the game timer at the moment the player pauses to skip to the final GP IGT ?
Second : what should be the rules for the last GP ? Should it be 4 races (without fort magma), like it is in the story mode when done early, or 5 races, like it is otherwise defined in normal racing ? On one side, the double-skip in a 4 races GP is harder and it matches more full run experience, on the other, 5 races match the intended game design and one race more to do is one occasion more of gaining some time.
@Volvagia : well, if I had many runs, sure. In that instance, though, I've only 3 (non-obsolete) full-game runs, only one of which is listed as 4th., so I thought it easy enough to find. Leaderboard (but I guess you already found it) : https://www.speedrun.com/cave_story#Normal_Ending
I got a run which is listed as 4th in my profile and in the run page, but which on the leaderboard itself is listed as 3rd. There seems to be a "phantom run" counted as 3rd, which doesn't appear no matter the filters used.
New changes since the last update of this thread :
- The ghost mode improvements presented earlier in this thread have been integrated. There could be further refinements (comparing more than two ghosts, the ability to switch from one ghost to the other), but it's already a huge step forward.
- The sound in nitro challenges has been fixed (will be triggered even if you used some nitro) and a sound has also been added for when you go from over the target to under it.
- Bigger minimap (+80%) for easier quick lookup, also displayed during the initial countdown phase.
- Several bugfixes and small improvements (as a french, I particularly like the one fixing the inputs from french keyboard layouts, some keys didn't work)
- New visuals for skidding particles.
Great ! Now I hope we'll see some new 0.9.3 runs from @Kitoko or @UbuntuJackson or maybe even someone else.
What issue do you get when building the WIN version with timer mod ?
Well, that allows to see the PB runs made on lower difficulties to not be hidden by default. It also works like this on ILs (look at nessie's pond normal ILs).
I did it that way to not have a too drastic change. If the consensus (basically, your opinion and @Alistair_Findlay 's ; unless someone else chime in) is to change this so that only the best run across difficulties is displayed by default, we can change this.
I put run from different difficulties to not obsolete each other.
Considering that the language translations are listed just below the main download on cavestory.org ; some of them hosted there ; I would not really have thought them unofficial despite being community-contributed.
Anyway, thanks for your answer.
For training, I prefer using a version with a translation.
I guess that the rules forbid using something else than the Japanese version because the length of the text affects the time the run takes ? It remains forbidden even if the language patch increases the duration of the run ?
If I got a time good enough to be competitive, I'd certainly run with the original version to gain some more time, but if I'm at +50% of the WR I wouldn't worry much about losing three minutes more to this.
