England^ Yet evidently not proud enough to time it accurately.
For me, it's my Sparkster SNES Easy and Normal runs, probably equally proud of both of them.
Easy:
PB/WR: 13:05 Sum of best: 12:57
Normal:
PB/WR: 19:14 Sum of best: 18:49
The gap between PB and SOB in Normal is larger, but the run is also correspondingly harder. This is a momentum-based 2D platformer in the same vein as Classic Sonic/Freedom Planet, where the stages themselves are short and sweet but going fast is all about knowing exactly how to conserve momentum and transfer it through your various states. Many of the boss fights are also significantly RNG-heavy, making it extremely difficult to get consistently good runs, as it demands that all the elements of execution need to be performed without mistakes, and then you have an ATTEMPT at a good run by getting good RNG. It's not even a case of bad RNG slowing you down, but rather killing you outright. This is a VERY difficult game to optimise, and I'm honestly quite proud of the job I've done on it thus far. Both of these categories are now at the point where I don't even know if I can PB anymore. There's time to come off both of them, but the likelihood of just getting a run where I both play well enough and then get the RNG I need is just starting to become disappearingly small.
Actually, I wouldn't mind being added for Panzer Dragoon Zwei, love that game. The board is empty right now, and the current moderator hasn't been online for 21 days, and the only form of contact listed is his Twitch channel, which he has no past broadcasts on.
This thread is for if you've been unable to contact them for 3 weeks.
Huh, didn't realise this thread was here for the longest time, but this is definitely a relevant issue for me.
I've wanted the Megaman Battle Network series on SRcom for months, and have previously volunteered to manage the boards myself. The responses I got were in the region of the aforementioned grey responses, ranging from "The times are tracked elsewhere" to "Mods would get bored of maintaining the boards" (lmao, in that case what's the point in having any leaderboards if 'mods won't maintain them forever'??)
I'm still more than happy to moderate the boards myself if they were to be added, and as for a 'background check' or vetting me for suitability, feel free to check out the list of games that I moderate, which includes Sonic Adventure 2, one of the largest boards on the site. I'm heavily against the aforementioned "Make a game board just to add your own times, then fuck everyone else." I actively search out existing times for the boards I moderate so as to expand the boards.
tl;dr pls add the Battle Network series to the site and make me a mod for them.
I don't necessarily agree with a console/emulator split, since the idea behind this proposal is "Consoles and emulators are not equal", yet I've demonstrated that even different emulators aren't equal. Because of this, I'm inclined to lean towards having consoles and the most accurate emulator on the same board, and then just discourage usage of other emulators.
One could go further and argue that the consoles themselves should be standardised on this basis, as it has been shown that the various platforms this game can be ran on have significantly different loading times, but this is a separate issue to console/emulator as variable loads by console are just a natural consequence, whereas console/emulator is due to the emulator itself simply not emulating the game accurately, and this can be due to more things than just loading times; emulators can run at a higher framerate, not emulate lag correctly, etc.
tl;dr at this point it's an issue that is still just to be discussed, but I think making a console/emulator split on the boards would be premature at best.
Yeah, this is a multi-region issue. If the game moderator doesn't feel like it's a problem and won't address it, there's nothing doing. At least the runs are showing up properly though.
Generally, no. Having a split timer onscreen should NOT be a prerequisite of a submission, unless there's a specific reason for it. If mods would reject a run purely for not having splits, they're not doing their jobs.
Timing accuracy can depend on the game's own timing method. If you're playing a game where the ingame timer only tracks minutes/seconds, then milli/centiseconds are kind of obsolete, but if it's a game where it tracks that accurately, not including those values on the boards is dumb because you're literally not showing the times that the game itself provides.
Imagine being this shit of a speedrunner
There's a place for tool-assisted runs, it's called TASvideos.org
What makes you think any tool-assisted runs exist on this leaderboard?
You should totally watch me running Sparkster. Really, REALLY fast game, all movement tech/optimisation, no glitches whatsoever, manipulating bosses into quick kills.
Imagine game moderators being level-headed, knowledgeable and reasonable.
I'm an outside observer, but I don't personally believe any external modifications should be used if possible.
Legitimate arguments can, and are made against the use of emulators for speedruns WHATSOEVER due to concerns about emulation accuracy, and that's without throwing modifications into the equation. The way I see it, the more changes you allow because it "Changes nothing about how the run actually works", the more you're opening yourself up to awkward questions and arguments. Plus, if at some point further down the line it turns out that there IS reason to question stuff (As seems to be happening here) then you end up with a difficult situation on your hands where you could potentially have a lot of runs that used the previously 'ok' changes, but they're now candidates for deletion due to rule changes and extra standardisation.
If that situation only came about in the first place due to the use of modifications, then the solution seems pretty clear in my eyes; don't use them.
As far as establishing a consistent start point for if you're trying to start RTA timing at the same time as IGT, I'm about to do some testing on Bizhawk. Gonna establish roughly how long the intro FMV cutscene is, then start splits with an Offset of that length, then change it incrementally and try the game intro a few times. I'm expecting to see something along the lines of starting with an offset of -2:35, but I'll see how it goes. I'll be streaming the process just now. Whatever findings I get, it would be really helpful if someone is able to replicate what I do on original hardware and confirm that the timings are the same, since I don't have any hardware set up right now to try it with.
... In that case, why is there still a field for them in Edit Theme?
The parameters of CE skip are ridiculously precise, and you're not trying to clip. What happens when you do the ramp jump with a lot of speed is that you clip out of bounds for three frames as you hit the floor, and in that time you want to hit the speed pads whilst you're still airborne.
CE skip works by getting launched to the right by the speed pads whilst you're airborne and out of bounds, since you then won't get stopped by the ground, and the walls won't stop you further down. Actually achieving this is very difficult. Your speed value needs to be higher than what the speed pads before the first ramp provide you, which is why we spindash down the hill and dodge around the speed pads, and I'm pretty sure your speed value can be too HIGH for it to work as well, so most people slow down slightly as they approach it.
Even when speed is correct, there is a specific range that your X, Y and Z co-ordinates all need to be inside in order to actually hit the skip, so it's not just a matter of jumping off the ramp. You need to do it in the right spot, at the right time. For people learning the game, this skip is absolutely not worth looking into. You're frankly wasting your time by focusing on a skip which isn't even consistent at WR level of play, and your time is much better spent on other parts of the game.
So this game currently has no rules set, and there has been some discussion as to what this game's rules should include, as well as timing methods.
As far as timing goes, there are more nuances to this than there first seems. First of all, you need to determine where the start/end point of timing is, which sounds easy, but actually isn't very simple, for a few reasons.
First of all, I believe that the RTA should correlate to the Ingame timer as closely as reasonably possible, for consistency purposes. To this end, this would set the start/end point for RTA as the start/end point for IGT. For the end, this is easy enough; the ingame timer stops counting once you enter the Spirit Stone Chamber after defeating Evil Gaia, so this should presumably be RTA's endpoint. Currently, Elmagus is the only one with an RTA run, and he uses last hit on Evil Gaia as his endpoint, but he also wastes no time between there and entering the Spirit Stone Chamber, so that's easy to retime.
The problem is determining the start time. I've just spent some time running some various emu tests, and the ingame timer does NOT start counting when you select New Game, which is what people have been using as their start point for RTA.
When you select New Game, the game begins with an FMV cutscene that lasts for a couple of minutes, then the first ingame cutscene featuring General Baal begins. As far as I can tell, this is when the ingame timer starts counting. Not even specifically when the SFX of the cutscene starts, it appears that the cutscene actually begins several seconds before the sound starts playing, because that was the only way I could match up timing with Livesplit against what the ingame timer read when I reached the first save point in Parm Port.
So that sounds simple enough, but then I encountered another problem; emulation accuracy. I ran these tests on both Bizhawk and PSXfin, and got entirely different results. Turns out, PSXfin is a very inaccurate emulator. From selecting New Game, to gaining control in front of Gantz:
PSXfin: Gain control at 9:30, save point reads 7:16 Bizhawk: Gain control at 9:45, save point reads 7:32
PSXfin saves 15~ seconds over Bizhawk just in the game intro purely because it's not emulating the load times correctly. What's more, the ingame timer reads an entirely different value! This would suggest that the ingame timer actually takes loading times into account, so shorter loads due to poor emulation = lower ingame time.
Bizhawk is definitely the accurate one; it gains control at 9:45, which is exactly the same as Elmagus' RTA run, which was performed on a PS1. If emulator runs are to be accepted for this game, Bizhawk is for sure the emulator we should be permitting, and only that, unless it can be demonstrated that another Playstation emulator has similar accuracy. Just from the intro, PSXfin saves 15 seconds due to shoddy emulation.
If we compare start points of 9:30 to 9:45, this implies that PSXfin consistently saves approximately 3% extra time over Bizhawk/original hardware.
To put this into perspective, Elmagus' RTA WR is 13:35:03. Under these parameters, it would have been approximately 13:10:36 on PSXfin. That's just ridiculous to allow.
tl;dr I would like to make RTA/IGT comparable but it's a little silly to work out and measure, and it brought to my attention that you should really run on original hardware if you can help it, and use Bizhawk if you absolutely must use an emulator.
I think the site layout update broke something in the code. Favicons no longer show up in the browser tab view for me, or for others I've asked, but they show up in user profiles under people's Moderating Games lists.
