Hey guys, just an announcement post for anyone not in the Discord:

All Day Stages and All Night Stages have both been changed to Main Categories and are switching to Loadless time. Since this switch requires a lot of manual retiming (both of existing runs and future runs), the condition for this was that the 3 main people requesting the change will be responsible for this work. They have done exactly that, so Avikaielef, RazorX and xrrstyle have officially been added as mods.

Why the change? Well the amount of difference in loading times between Xbox 360 and PS3 has always been huge, but there's also been factors like console model, adding an SSD to your console and as of recently the addition of the Xbox One and One X. Loadless time will put all of these on equal ground. To fully embrace this, the menuing for the stages is also excluded from the timing to not punish people for unlocking missions or having DLC installed.

Why did this take so long? Well like I said it's a lot of work so it's more been a case of waiting for people to show up who were willing to put in said work. This goes for every future submission as well, so please be patient with the mods as it will take a while to retime and verify.

Why only these 2 categories? Well consider how much work it is to retime 1 run of a short category like that, where you only need 2 consistent cues for starting and stopping the timer for each stage and that's it. Now imagine doing that for a category which so many different elements and the length of Any% or even All Medals. Not very realistic for now unfortunately.

In addition to this change, All Medals has also been added as a misc category, because even though it's a bit of a funky run timing wise, it does have at least as many runs as All Night Stages, which is a fair enough argument.

Agreed on the not dismissing NG+ All Stages as a category, point in the OP was more "It wouldn't be the go-to for replacing current Any% as the main thing people run", but rather look into it after people show interest in running it.

I'm not big on penalizing people for switching wispons as in nearly all cases, the switch means slower strats in the stage anyway. I feel like a "Don't use it as an excuse to take a break"-clause in the ruling should be a reasonable enough implementation. It's not ideal, but imo worth it for the sake of supporting accesibility, creativity and variation.

As for Super Sonic, fair point. I'm good either way honestly.

I'd like to bring up another 2 points in favour of being allowed to switch in between though: Accessiblity and variation.

If you force people to stick to the same wispon (which in 99.9% of the cases is going to be Drill with stomp dash), people don't really get much of an option in terms of which strats they want to do, potentially scaring them away from the category. Let's say someone would feel more comfortable which let's say Lightning on Arsenal Pyramid or Burst on Null Space and wants to sacrifice some time to do those strats, but wants to be able to use Drill on everything else... they wouldn't be able to do that. The "less stress" argument would have the opposite effect here by forcing people into strats they don't want to do. Not to mention it would make for some nice variation in strats among runners.

If all of y'all are really for banning switching, then I will cave to majority rule, but I hope you can see where I'm coming from with my arguments.

Re: IGT not tracking wispon changing.

The reason we ended up not doing IGT for Any% is because of the sheer amount of stuff not being tracked. All the menuing, skipping through convos and cutscenes quickly, actively trying not to achieve certain missions to get less unlocks, all of it would not matter if we did IGT, making it a more interesting run because of working around these time constraints

For NG+ on the other hand, the only thing to really worry about is the wispon switching. Does it make for a more interesting run to have yet another category working around the same constraints, but way less so than Any%? Or does it make for a more interesting run to let people go unrestricted on their creativity. I personally think the latter.

We're also gonna need to have a poll for how we're gonna name the category it seems lol

Hey all, so as some of you are probably aware, there are some serious flaws with the rental system and as it stands the Any% route as we know it is becoming impossible to perform. The problem: the rental system pulls 9 choices from the top 32 runs on the in-game leaderboards. Currently the run relies on using this to get a Drill wispon way before you'd first be able to unlock it. Since Sega has pretty much stopped moderating these boards, we're getting to the point where all 32 are hacked times without Drill wispons, making it impossible to perform the strats currently used in the run. This is truly peak modern game speedrunning.

“Why were rentals allowed to begin with if this could end up happening?” The thought behind it was that we use every thing the game offers in order to get the time down as low as possible. No restrictions. If something like this would end up happening, we cross that bridge when we get to it.

Well we've reached the bridge folks, so what're we gonna do about it? Personally I'd like to see some changes that preserve the runs that have been done up till now, while implementing categories that'll promote activate competition. Here's my thoughts, none of this is set in stone, so please by all means discuss.

==Any%==

Any% should definitely be preserved as a main category, but with this change I feel like changes are in order.

• Add sub categories for Rental and No Rental.
• The default would be set to No Rental as that'd be the one people would actually be able to actively run.
• The Rental boards would be preserved to showcase the great runs done and so we'd be able to pick it right back up again should Sega fix the leaderboards.
• You could name the options for the Rental variable “Yes / No” too, but that looks hella weird on people's profiles and the front page, so I'd personally vote calling the options “Rental / No Rental”.
• Since the odds of Sega fixing the boards are rather small, I would personally be open to making an exception to the modding rule. If someone were to make a mod that makes the rental feature pick from a fake list of avatars full of Drills, then I would be willing to make that the one and only exception for the sake of preserving a category. If Sega won't fix their shit, we will.

==NG+ Any%==

While Any% No Rental is certainly an option I feel should be present at this point, I personally feel like the go-to category for a good run and competition would be NG+ Any%

• Cuts most of the downtime out of the run (unlocking avatar stuff, cutscene skipping, conversations).
• Since it's just stages, we'd be able to time by In-Game Time like we do for Episode Shadow, meaning the load time differences between platforms would cease to be a problem. Same goes for the known issues with locking FPS changing the speed the game runs at by tiny amounts, as thes in-game timer speed will always be on par with the game speed.
• To truly promote this as a category where all IL strats people feel crazy enoug to do are viable, I personally feel like we should allow people to either switch wispons for their avatar between stages or just prepare multiple avatars with the r ight wispons to switch between.
• As with any IGT timed category in the Sonic series, excessive pausing or breaks between runs would not be allowed.
• For now I would say Super Sonic DLC would not be allowed as it's not in the base game, but since it's free DLC I'm not very against it either, do voice your thoughts (though I'm pretty sure Super Sonic strats are slower in a lot of the stages anyway lol)

==Other thoughts==

• Normally I advocate for a category actually having people running it before making boards, but since we find ourselves in kind of a unique situation I'm willing to take a leap of faith that people will actually run these 2. Any% No Rental will be the only option for running from a new game and NG+ Any% is accessible to anyone who's finished the game.
• NG+ All Stages is also an option, but is gated by the fact that you need all red rings to unlock all extra stages and copying other people's save files sadly does not work. People would have to do it themselves, so I don't really think it's the go-to here. If people end up running it anyway we could always make a board for it some other time.

So yeah... discuss! I'd like to hear from runners especially of course as this is more of a “What would you like to run going forward” discussion rather than a “What would you like to see other people run”.

http://www.soniccenter.org/rankings/sonic_generations

There ya go.

Other games have gradually been getting IL charts here as well, but only after they got requested in high demand by people who already run the game and were willing to put in the work to transfer and maintain them.

It has seperate boards on the Sonic Fan Games section as it's not official part of the game https://www.speedrun.com/unleashedproject

Dolphin tends to have small gameplay inaccuracies scattered throughout and the faster loading would make score screens load faster too (which do count towards in-game time).

You're free to run on emulator and just not submit to the boards, but we prefer to not have an unofficial version be the fastest way to play or making seperate official boards for said unofficial version.

Noone's done a run afaik. The category only recently got added to console because people started more actively running it, but in the interest of not adding empty leaderboards I'm holding off untill someone with a PC All Stories run asks for a leaderboard

You can leave this one here to help spread the word, but it should be fine to make one there too (I don't moderate those pages so can't know for sure)

Small correction on what Allegro said, we don't do mods for these leaderboard pages specifically. That's base game only. Should anyone start running the mods though, then there's a good chance for leaderboards here https://www.speedrun.com/sonic_fan_games (much like the Unleashed Project mod for Sonic Generations)

Thanks for bringing it up though, I for one had never heard of it before, so if anyone's interested they're free to run whatever they want :3

Others can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the switch version is much like the PC/Xbone/PS4 versions in the sense that the KT Glitch (infinite jump) is patched, making NG+ much much slower compared to PS3. NG categories should be fine on switch, as long as the loads aren't slower that is, but yeah afaik PS3 remains the go-to for NG+

I've done 2 semi-blind "runs" too and got to like 8 hours There's plenty of runs around for a leaderboard, it's just that most of the runs were just non-serious one offs and noone cares enough to want to request a board. Still curious about the pickle medals though cause I thought they were consistent with amount of souvenirs gifted.

Edit: also to make a correction from my earlier post, seems zzz took it down to a 4:37 :O

Ye this category has been a thing for years already, Josh is the only one who tried to run it somewhat seriously, but even then noone ever cared enough to want a leaderboard. Current record is what Iden linked, it's 4:43

The route he used did end up beating the game to unlock Eggmanland souvenirs though, so I'm surprised to hear it's possible without it. I imagine you'd need every single Wentos souvenir? If true it's interesting and a big potential timesave, albeit an extremely luck reliant one.

You can, I'll review them to fix inaccuracies if there are any

http://www.soniccenter.org/rankings/sonic_generations There ya go

try watching a run

No, we just use the Sonic Heroes channel on the speedrunning discord. Don't go off making a different discord please, we'd like to keep things centralized.

There is already a discord for this, but I think it's invite only for organization purposes or something. idk ask Paulie

Hi there, it's not allowed to have mods active even if they're purely visual sorry. This is both out of precaution in case the mods unintentionally change something and out of bad experiences with allowing mods on other Sonic games in the past (it can get kind of a mess with neverending discussion about what mods should and shouldn't be allowed). Easiest way to ensure these is to just keep the game clean.