BrazilCopy pasta from discord, just for reference:
"Loadless poses a rabbit hole. If you are going to take loads away, you might as well use the PS2 and make Any% 30min longer RTA just to save ~2min of ingame time.... But then if loads don't matter, you might as well use PS2 emulator to drastically cut load times AND remove lag.... But then if we are going to allow emulation because it's faster and easier, we might as well just allow dolphin with speed up data transfer to have next to no load screens to make it a lot faster, thus bringing us back to square one."
Emulation wasn't even allowed for DW4 in the past (technically it was, but runs were hidden, which imo is the same thing). But then the emulators got more accurate with the loads and I was able to prove they weren't faster, so now they are allowed to compete, albeit using console is faster.
As for the mario64 thing, it was just an example of game that has multiple separations because there are enough people interested in running and getting competitive with them. If there were a whole bunch of people interested in getting better at PS2, a whole bunch on Xbox, another on wii, etc, then sure, it would make sense to separate. As it stands, though, there is no such demand; hell, we don't even have half a dozen active runners across all possible combinations of hardware and categories, so there isn't much of a point to split.
For the rest of the series, I can't say anything. At best, I have ran Digimon World DS, and while I do plan on doing some testing on emu VS console, I have not yet done so to request any changes or defend current practices.
Yes, there's a super secret discord for the digimon speedrunning community:
(Actually, it's not "super secret", but I like to add some drama to my life).
Obviously, you can use window / monitor capture and capture that. Likewise, you can add a browser source and crop it there.
However, is there a way to capture the video directly? Instead of getting the entire page, just get the video stream?
@SinfulByNature Just submit both? Submit both of them, nothing bad can happen. At worse, only one of them gets in. At best, who knows, we might even get a NG+ Ultra Hard race (someone else submited that already).
This is for the marathon sections. When going through submited runs, it would be useful to be able to sort runs according to the various criterea (game, estimate, runner, country, time of submission, etc) rather than just being stuck the order the runs were submited in.
Sounds like a pretty obvious feature to have and implement, and I'm quite surprised it isn't here in the first place.
Is it okay to run emulator? I'm thinking of submitting a run, but if was to do it, it would have to be on EMU. It saves ~3min out of 3h due to load times, and while I don't see a problem (in fact, if it saves loads, I think that's how it should be played), I know most don't agree with this mindset, hence the question for submission.
There isn't one for this game specifically, but we do have a Digimon discord: https://discord.gg/0VODO3ww0zeT1dSU
*UPDATE (Jul/21/2018): -Rewrote the script and added more comparison videos. -TLDR: "Recent" releases of Dolphin are slower than console, but the original 5.0 is faster. As such, the current proposed version for running DW4 on EMU is Dolphin 5.0-8307 (link below) https://dl.dolphin-emu.org/builds/dolphin-master-5.0-8307-x64.7z
For starters, PS2 is slow. Like, 25s loads. It's insane, don't touch it with a 10 foot pole. I haven't tested running PS2 on EMU, I so I couldn't say if even then it's unbearable, but it's probably still not worth it anyway. For the Xbox version, I don't have access to a console and there's no Xbox emulator, so I wasn't able to mess with that either.
This leaves us to the Gamecube version, which I've tested it on an actual Wii as well as Dolphin EMU. As per the TLDR bullet point at the beginning, the original 5.0 release of the emulator loads considerably faster than console, potentially saving various minutes by the end of the run. However, at an unknown point between versions 5.0 and 5.0-6803, the game started loading slower than an actual console. This also held (albeit at a different load time) for versions 5.0-7953 and 5.0-8307, and I'd expect it to be the same for everything in between and even for 5.0-8486, which is the current latest release at the time of writing, but I have no tests to back up that claim.
As such, and due to how recent the emulator is updated, it is recommended to run the game on 5.0-8307. EMU loads the game rather consistently, so choosing a single version and sticking to it keeps an even playing field for everyone. There's also the fact that Dolphin is updated very frequently, so keeping tabs on every single version would be a moderation nightmare. I don't expect to change versions, unless we discover something (I have a theory of numenume river being impossible on 5.0 and doable on 4.0) OR the devs release a new version fixing the text bug on EMU. On that note, I've submitted a bug report (link below) which was acknowledged, but so far no fix has been implemented; if a future version fixes that, it might be worth retesting for loads and switching. https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/11087
Lastly, let's talk about testing methodology. I've devised a quick test that can be executed rather easily by anyone, just pick up the game and fire the emulator (no need for saves). The route consists of the following loads: 1-Start game; 2-Loading Commander room; 3-Loading Gate area; 4- Loading Shop area; 5- Loading Main are; 6- Loading Shop area (again); 7- Loading Main area (again); 8-Loading the Tutorial; 9- Loading Death Valley; 10- Loading Gob Gob Room (get there through means of OoB).
To have Dolphin show frames, go to Movie -> Show frame count. I start the time at the following frames: 1- The frame the "Press start" text disappears; 9- The frame the cursor dot completely disappears from the screen; 2~8 and 10- The frame the selection box enlarges. For every load, I end the time the frame the screen turns black for the fade in effect.
IMPORTANT: All numbers bellow were taken in a 30FPS format, even though Dolphin and the videos themselves are at 60. As such, if you do your own count that shows "480" frames, you'd have to divide it by 2 to compare your loads to mine. The reason for that is because the capture card I used to record my console tests was limited to 30 fps, so I decided to halve Dolphin's frame counts when comparing the 2.
(Thinking back, that was a bad decision, and I should just have doubled the capture card's count rather than halving Dolphin's one, but now is too late to change that...)
Lastly, if anyone would like to add their own test videos to these, especially if they are about the Xbox or PS2 EMU, just make a forum post below or ping / PM me on discord and I'll add them to the main body.
Dolphin:
Wii:
PS2:
The notifications is lower than it was supposed to, like this:
Already tried to Ctrl+F5 and it didn't fix it.
Just a few games I know on top of my head:
Crash 1 (any%) is faster on NTSC-U than J, even though levels are easier and one of them is much shorter on J. Reason being the animation at the end of a level, which you can skip on U with death abuse, but can't on J. Ironically, J is faster for 100%. Resident Evil 3: China version is the best PogChamp Yeah, China version. Not J, not U, not w.e, it's freaking China. Digimon World 4: The text shows up all at once on both J and U, so there's no difference at all.
So while J is usually faster, that's not always the case.
PogChamp
After Lord knows how long (thx Pac...), the Show All menu is fixed! YAY! Shouldn't have been broken in the first place, but now that it's live, I can finally use the site again! Thx Pac (not)!
Search bar is still completely broken, though.
Crash Bandicoot 1. Mainly 100%, those are super fun runs to watch.
Crash 2 is also up for grabs, but to get the best possible times, you need skill. And A LOT of it.
- Rafael. I run only Digimon World 4, no intentions to run anything else right now (outside of some memes for special occasions...).
- Because I REALLY wanted to see a run for a game I liked a lot, but no one would do it. Then I decided to do that myself, getting really motivated after I found glitch that would cut 40min of gameplay.
- If the runner plays the "normal" game first and then speedruns it, I'd say regular players and runners are playing the same game. But there are a few folks that never get to play a game and jump straight into learning a run for it; in that case, then it definitely feels like there are 2 separate games here.
8)Being fast is the name of the game when speedrunning. However, you can still do it in style. If not during sections in which you don't lose time by doing things your own way (not every game has those), you can at least add a lot of personality to a run (or game even) with your commentary, stream overlays or chat interaction. There are a few games in which I watch certain runners but don't watch others for that very reason: I like / don't like their runs.
Could an admin change my account to Fire1520 (same as my twitch name).
I'm yet to understand why the new layout is still up and running.
It's BROKEN.
I just noticed the problem with the notifications (reading back, other people have pointed this out). I'm kinda fine with forcing people to use the new layout and get feedback. It's a bit rude imo, but I'm fine with it.... but if you are going to do that, at least make sure the thing is even working in the first place!
Look, plenty of complaints already: pull down the new layout and revert back to the previous one. Do it NOW please. Release it back when you are ready; in the mean time, let us have a working site rather than a mess.
Also, please stick a huge "we have a new layout, give us your feedback here" billboard at the top of the pages. Have it display "hey, we made an update yesterday to fix issues, give us your feedback" or something. At least while we're still in open beta (which is what's going on right now), please have that message up.
Am I the only one with a broken "show all" button on the stream pages? When I click to show all the games, nothing happens.
Sry for the late reply.
For the Bios, I've tried both SCPH1001 and SCPH7502. For the GPU plugins, I've tried both OpenGL2 and D3D plugins, they all fail on both my AMD iGPU and Nvidia card on 2 separate PCs.
Everything else was whatever the default was.
For ePSEX 1.95 and below, it crashes as soon as I tell the ISO to run. For 2.0 onwards, it just plain works, regardless of Bios or GPU plugin choice.
So, I'm having trouble running the game on ePSXe versions lower than 2.0. The program instantly stops responding.
Why is it that 1.8 or lower is required?
