For an IL table with subcategories, the landing page only shows the runs with all of the default subcategories.

Should it: ¤ Always show the fastest time under any subcategory combination? ¤ Have the subcategory drop-down boxes available for showing the table under a specific set of conditions?

edit: Another bug. Filters beyond the first default to only showing the default option. It will show all runs correctly if "Any" is selected afterwards, even though it seems like Any is already selected.

http://www.speedrun.com/bh2/individual_levels Click my run there (1:09 on 1-1) and it's not immediately visible.

Thanks! Fixing the IL section was a pain and I accidentally removed the 2 Heavenly IL runs while doing so- just glad I got to do so before many more runs were submitted.

Had to move all the runs that were under "World 1, any%" to an unused category so I could actually move them all where they needed to be moved...

Feature request: the ability to select which category is the default category seen when first navigating to a game page. You can already set full game leaderboard or IL leaderboard as default, so why not a specific category? This would be useful for games like Crash Team Racing, where the category sort is from shortest to longest, but the shortest category is a credits warp that has no activity, making the game look dead, while any% warpless isn't.

Currently, the only way to fix that would be to re-order the categories in some arbitrary manner with warpless first to be the 'landing' page for CTR.

edit: for anyone looking at this now, I was added as a mod and fixed it up. Assigning the runs correctly was a nightmare, though...

http://www.speedrun.com/bh2/individual_levels Note the 6 times on this page. (also note the categories that should be subcategories with the actual categories as each individual level / entire world)

http://www.speedrun.com/bh2/World_1#Any_No_invincibility Note that now the time is 7:27 instead of 1:14.

http://www.speedrun.com/user/Dawgup/individual_levels It gets worse here- I can't find a link to any of the runs here. Clicking any just brings you to the second link, which only shows 7:27.

I honestly have no clue what's going on with these leaderboards other than they're basically unusable in the current state.

This is a leaderboard that would work very, very well with subcategories. I'd be willing to set up the boards in more detail in accordance with the below, as well as add the ILs for each level in each world.

Any% | 100% (Standard category split) Base | Expansion (Standard version split) Unrestricted Difficulty | Heavenly (Standard difficulty split) Invincibility | Cheats | No Cheats New Game | New Game+ (Only an option for any%- would still take playing through all 50 normal levels in order, but with all handicaps/cheats/weapons/characters available)

As it currently stands, the board is a bit of a mess- especially the IL section that has one world set up- that, and there's no board for individual level times. Further, the timing rules are not currently defined, and for the individual world run, it does not state whether the bonus boss must be done, or if the levels can be done in any order.

If the game ran smoother on my laptop, I'd probably have given a run a try here. Still might for any% since I could stick with Normal there, and that should avoid lagging.

Also: 100%ing the game on Heavenly took me around 15 hours spread out over a couple weeks. Getting a star rank on Akron took around an hour of that alone- it's a very high skill floor for a run and I don't think I'd be willing to go through that again, personally. I'm currently 38th on the overall scoreboards- and that's without any scoring attempts beyond going for some 3 star ranks. I think that shows I know the game reasonably well :P

edit: and since it's more likely to be seen here, Bullet Heaven 1 has Epic difficulty categories. The game doesn't have difficulty settings- someone should fix that.

For a game with music, I'll have that playing. Even when grinding ILs so I hear the beginning of the track over and over again- I know about how well I'm doing by where I am and how far into the song it is.

For Chip's Challenge, though, where there is no music (in Tile World, anyway)... I generally have other game soundtracks in the background! Something energetic to keep my focus high, usually RPG boss themes and the like.

I proposed a similar, more robust idea here: http://www.speedrun.com/Speedrunning/thread/aivc2

Apparently something like this has already been done, but the algorithms are slow and there's unpredictable delay.

See title- I'm curious to see why people choose certain games.

For me, I was recently gifted Helen's Mysterious Castle. The night after I got it, I was looking for a relatively light, quick RPG to play through- and that looked like it fit the bill. It did, and I enjoyed the game enough to play through it all at once. From there, I looked up if there were any runs of it, and there were 2! Looking through, certain parts of the route seemed improvable, so I started rerouting the game. Finished my first run (of bad ending) just a bit ago, beating the previous record by nearly 3 minutes as a result of these changes.

I'd been looking for an RPG speedrun for a while and this hit all the bullet points I was looking for: ¤ Fun game casually (obviously, I have to like the game) ¤ Good soundtrack (I have to like listening to it) ¤ Low mashing impact (my mashing speed is pretty bad) ¤ Relatively short (so I can fit it in more easily) ¤ High action to downtime ratio (for high interest) ¤ Very few "luck or die" moments (obviously an annoyance- with my route there is one in the first 25% of the run and that's it)

This in particular nails the action to downtime- there are a few moments of cutscene that last about a minute each which serve as nice breathers from the fast running speed to avoid running into wandering enemy encounters. I've only finished one run so far but I can definitely see myself sticking with this game for a while.

tl;dr Helen's Mysterious Castle was a perfect fit for what I was looking for, tell me about why you run the most recent game you picked up. Or the most interesting pick. I just want to hear about the reasoning :)

"Spyro the Dragon - Starts on selecting save file" What about people who play without a memory card- no save file is selected, so timing never technically starts here.

It's a game by game basis and honestly, the timing start (and end- this is just as, if not more important) points should be mandatory as part of the rules, yet they aren't always placed. As nice as one universal timing method would be, that's just not how it is and changing EVERYTHING would require EVERYONE to agree on one method. Retiming would also become a huge hassle, and depending on how you've timed runs in the past, it might not even be possible to convert, or some runs would be unfairly punished by a rule change.

SM64 starts from console power on/reset- many other runs reset within the game itself. Jak 1 starts on control- after loading a 0% save file to skip a long intro cutscene. These just don't mesh together unless you go with the most lenient method of timing: first control to last input. And even that's only because any other timing method can be constrained down into that one, while it can't be expanded back out.

Alright then "doctorwoot", if that is your real name, let me tell you something.

You don't even speedrun. Stop looking for a problem that doesn't exist. Stop trying to create a problem that doesn't exist. Stop responding to the trolls who only seek to get a rise, and acknowledge the points of those who've actually been a part of the community.

If you do not comply with the above, you will be branded an (singular) idiot, if you haven't already.

Have a nice day.

I'd also add that the misc. category shouldn't align too closely with any official categories, either- noodles% was rendered obsolete by the Sorceress skip slashing the run down to any% two hubs, go to Fireworks.

Bone dance is somewhat close to this still, but the bone route is still distinct from what's done in 117% so I suppose it would get a pass.

Spyro 2 is already a bit of a mess when it comes to categories but some form of NG+ All Abilities would be nice to see- I remember some fun races with that way back in the day. (Gulp skip does somewhat reduce the need for this as now NG+ only affects Glimmer, Crush, Gulp and Dragon Shores, while all abilities would affect the SF hub route and remove Dragon Shores)

Other than those points, I think the misc. categories for the original trilogy are pretty well represented- maybe 64 orb and 149 egg to go along with 80 dragon, as both have been done by a couple people.

I actually get to temporarily win the thread!

Final Fantasy 9 "insanity%", clocking in at 1:05:25. Oh, that doesn't sound long? Well, that's because it's days:hours:minutes instead of the usual hours:minutes:seconds. My first attempt took 10 hours longer than that...

Of course, the category is something I made up (alongside Zorasknight) and is basically an RTA and beginner "friendly" 100% category for FF9. I find it a lot of fun and want to route it more solidly- I think that the time can get under a day.

For my longest 'official' category... I think the longest run I did there was Ratchet and Clank 3 100%, which took me just over 12 hours. I went in with no route and it was a race on SRL- the run was too grindy for my liking though, so I don't plan to do it again even though the record is sub 5. On that note, I also blind raced Chip's Challenge 2 the day after release, and took 13 and a half hours to complete all 200 levels. Optimally, it'd take around 3 or 4. The longest official category I've done more than once is Ratchet and Clank 2's "PBSPI" category, which is basically 100%. Though technically my runs were done before the definition was changed and they no longer count, my best time was around 7.5 hours.

I like long runs. Long runs are fun for me because they're more a test of overall consistency than grinding out a flawless run with all the risky strategies- though obviously, getting all the risky strats in a longer run would pay off more! :P

PAL: runs at 5/6 speed during gameplay. Load times are comparable to NTSC. Probably loses 7-9 minutes overall, hard to tell. NTSC-J: cutscenes can only be skipped with Start. NTSC-U: cutscenes can be skipped with Start, X or Circle.

Most people have the NTSC-U version or run it on emulator as it's the easier ROM to find. NTSC-U and J are functionally identical aside from the minor detail mentioned above. (as far as I know)

I noticed that recently the 'date' field was made mandatory for all games. Now, on principle that's a good idea, but some old runs have an unknown date. Either add an option for requiring date (because seriously, requiring the day the run was done on but not a video is quite the dumb situation for some games) or if date will remain mandatory, add an "unknown" option.

Cypryss did runs of that (without the life bottles) wayyyyyy back in the day (2011, I want to say)

No one else cared, but run what you want to run :P

Loadless timings are currently usually done in one of three ways, all of which can only work in a few specific scenarios.

1. The game is a PC game and has an autosplitter that removes loads by checking memory addresses. Obviously, this won't work for console.
2. A flat conversion is used- say console X takes 5 minutes of loading total, while console Y takes 7. You'd take the final times and subtract the amount of loads by console. This works alright for, say, Crash 4, but loads can vary between models of the same console, or even different playthroughs on the exact same console! This also only works when all runs have the same amount of load screens- some games will have different routes, or mistakes that add a load. (for example, Spyro EtD has a load after a death) Therefore, this method only works for some games, but when it does work, it works well.
3. Runs are timed RTA and then the video of the run is manually gone through to remove loads. This works with very high accuracy on every game, but also takes by far the most effort of these three methods as EVERY run will need to be retimed, as opposed to only timing one or two runs.

None of these solutions are ideal and I've thought about this conundrum a fair amount, and I think I've come up with two possible solutions that essentially automate option 3.

The first of these methods would be a program that takes a video of a run and automatically removes the loads, outputting a new video file with the loads removed. This has a potential issue of removing parts of gameplay that are actually loads, but image matching algorithms could be loaded with "this is a load". I'm envisioning inputting a list of images (or better, videos, but this would make implementation harder) that show what loads are (in the case of images, start and stop points) and having similar frames be removed. This probably wouldn't work too well, but was the first idea I had that showed some potential.

The second method, and the one I believe would actually work for 99% of games, is a cross between methods 1 and 3 above, using the idea behind the universal load remover. This could be an add-on to LiveSplit or a separate running program that just counts how long the run has spent on loads. It would rely on image matching again: I'm envisioning a UI that would allow the user to define a load as: ¤ A start point. This would just be an image file, and the user would be able to specify certain portions of the screen to look at. ¤ An end point. Same as above. ¤ An offset. Many games wouldn't allow finding the exact start or endpoint of a load, but this could be worked around by counting how many frames early or late the comparison frame is, and adding this value to the load time for a given load. For example, in Spyro games level loads start with a fadeout. This can start from anywhere in a level, from entering a portal or pausing and selecting "Exit Level". This fadeout has fixed time, and would be the offset before the consistent animation. ¤ Optionally, a similarity. If the load would look similar to gameplay, the user could specify that it needs to be 95+% similar to count as a match. If the angling can be different, then perhaps only a 30 or 40% match would count. ¤ The same method could potentially be used for universal autosplitting. This could be run either live, comparing to a preview window, or on a finished run, allowing easy retroactive retiming.

There are two main downsides to this idea: the first is the obvious one, that every load would need to be manually configured. However, this would only need to be done once, and it's slightly more work than retiming one run for method 3 above, and the definition of a "load" can be standardized by the community for each load. The other downside is almost as obvious: this hypothetical program would be a fairly complex technical challenge. I'd do it myself, but I don't have the technical know-how. But I have the idea and have been mentally tweaking the specifics of it for a couple years now, just never really shared it. It came up on the Sprash discord today and I figured I should post the idea in case someone wants to try to work on it or refine the idea.

So: any thoughts?

There's more to emulation than just emulating load times- specifically for Spyro 2, attempting to swim underwater (with Sparx) in Dragon Shores will crash the game on console but not on emulator. Emulators also have a lot of trouble getting lag right and usually end up lagging less. There has to be a standard somewhere for emulation accuracy, and it has to be what the emulator is trying to emulate. For a PS1 emulator, that's a PS1.

PS2 FDS is allowed because it's official hardware and that's as good a distinction as there's going to be for what is/is not allowed.

That being said, if there was a way to autosplit based on image matching/similarities, with the ability to set each image to compare to in the autosplit file... that could feasibly work for auto-splitting any game. It'd take a fair bit of work to set up (and I'm not sure how feasible it is to code) but it's definitely a way around needing memory addresses for autosplitting.

The 'show/hide emu by default' setting was fixed... but the fix set the default for ¤all¤ games to hide, even those that set it to show before.

I appreciate that fixes are being made, but would appreciate it more if those fixes didn't change existing settings.

Since forgetting this layout ever happened isn't an option, nor is using it in the future... the best option would be to roll back to the old layout UNTIL the new layout is fixed, rather than force literally everyone to continue using a broken site.

But that's not going to happen because... I don't know why it's not going to happen. Maybe there's some technical reason such as the old layout not being kept? That'd be pretty dumb if so...