nah you don't have to submit every single PB you get. If you know you'll get a better time in a matter of a day or 2 just save yourself the time

The time saves weren't as big as I was hoping for in Thailand when I did attempts the other night (still absolutely worth doing though) but Australia's is huge. Alaska's time save is not very big at all as I expected.

I love that this is a thing though. Makes the run so much more exciting to watch at the highest level. The bonus stages that were once areas of downtime to relax are now definitely among the hardest stuff to pull off in the game and really balances the entirety of the run (5 minute long autoscroller aside lol).

Alaska's bonus stage is brutal. Even with near flawless execution of my route here the time save is minimal. Approximately 3 or 4 seconds. It is easy to bail out of it you are off to a bad start with this one and you aren't heavily punished for any more than a few frames for doing just that.

This is the best result I've been able to dish out here after hours of digging.

I'm happy to say that Australia's bonus stage is also done faster now by completing it too. And surprisingly it is easier to pull off than Thailand for an even bigger time save because unlike Thailand's lag fest of a bonus stage, the lag is minimal in Australia's bonus stage with this route. The cutoff point for time to be saved seems to be around 7 seconds remaining roughly going by the music.

I'll see what i can do about Alaska's Bonus stage but even the TAS can't do that one any better than a 28 so I'll have my work cut out for me there.

The cut off point to save time with a "Perfect" seems to be around 13 seconds remaining. Do better than that and you should save time theoretically speaking.

I want to test out the potential time save but I want to keep up the lab work and see what I can find in Australia's bonus stage first.

All good. I'll make the adjustment now

To start things off, we're getting rid of the variable and moving the runs with different characters into their own seperate category. The variable makes the creation of a co-op category impossible as the variable persists in all categories if it is allowed to continue existing.

We're also going to get all runs verified/denied right away here.

Yeah twitter is no go for trivia. That guy's last tweet was back in 2012. Our best bet in contacting him at this point is to pray he checks back in SRC within a month.

I think twitter is the best option to contact sekafirst though because 1+ year inactive with this site is no bueno for being able to contact people without some other social media.

Maybe try and reach out to them if they have a twitter?

But yes, we need some active mods here. 2 of the records here (Mage and Warrior-Maiden) have been stomped recently and it won't be long before the record for the Archer gets the same treatment.

The rule was put in place by someone who stepped down as a mod awhile ago. I tend to not enforce that rule with less actively ran and competitive games such as this one.

If it does bother you though, I'll ask him personally but keep in mind zeugman is french and I don't know him personally at all so there may be a language barrier there but I'll try and contact him for the information.

The other alternative would be to take down the rule since it's only serviceable purpose is as information to refer to in the event something occurs like say...the Ducktales 2 fiasco with Retroarch.

Just know that when it comes to streaming, it's all about the strength of your internet or more precisely your upload speed. Whatever the upload speed is at, adjust your video bitrate accordingly.

The power of your setup shouldn't really matter as that can be easily dealt with by lowering both your Base and Output resolutions (Settings->Video in OBS) so you can stream at a much less demanding 320p/480p quality. Also keep your fps at 30. Going for 59.94/60 fps will make the laptop work that much harder.

Until around a month ago I streamed off a laptop and the CPU does get pushed to its limits on it the way I had it so these are some ways I know of to fix performance issues there.

You absolutely can use the Blastem emulator. You can also use BlastEm core with Retroarch as well but if things are working good with the BlastEm emulator itself then just stick with it.

Anyway the discord for SoR in general is tied to Brawlers Ave. I'm under the impression the ones in charge of that discord don't want people publicly posting the discord invite link so I'll send it your way privately. Some steps have to be followed first after you enter if you want to use the discord though.

@VGCArchive Original hardware can do Left + Right inputs but it requires tampering with the controller and removing the "ball bearing" used for the D-Pad. It's generally a frowned upon practice to tamper with a controller to get a desired result (the Goldeneye Train mission went through this so I know) but I've stated before on discord that I would be okay with making a seperate category for it if there was enough interest to warrant its creation.

@CoolHandMike In most cases when people do load state to reset and start a new attempt, it's not done with the intention to cheat, it's done to cut down on downtime and jump right back in on a new attempt. Now perhaps the rule was put into place to prevent cheating via TASing, I personally don't know since this rule was before I became a mod for this leaderboard.

Regardless though, this rule has also come to affect people running on later official releases of the game that do run off an emulator (like PS4 for example) which as far as we know doesn't have TAS'ing capabilities (with official releases it's about detecting potential splices) which leads us to where we are now...which is some the mod team contemplating tweaking the rules slightly or just throwing down the hammer and enforcing the rule as it currently stands.

I'm open to either option but I do wish to know more about what Anthopants has found. Enemies have certain AI quirks that happen based around a player's every action and players can take advantage of that to get ideal results so we're not really worried about them. But bosses are a tougher wall to crack on that note. I know as an Axel player, you want an aggressive pattern from Mr. X to get him caught in the side special loop until a Donovan comes in with the uppercut.

If that is something that is affected based around a hard reset then I do feel that's reason enough to preserve the rule but others haven't been able to spot what Anthopants has either so I'm currently conflicted on this matter.

There is also the fact that sometimes Anthopants has to literally turn off the console because the RNG of certain fights feels set to the point that a hard reset doesn't seem to change it which kind of blurs the line between a hard reset and loading state off the emulator to reset the game and that makes it sound like they have the same function and purpose so what's the difference?

Now you all know why I made this thread lol.

Right now some of the mods are leaning towards at least making the official releases of the game (that do run off an emulator) an exception to the rule but I do think we all need to come to a consensus with unofficial emulators as well with regards to all this.

The reason this rule exists is to ensure no one is resetting through the use of "load state".

Resetting that way can potentially affect RNG among other things which is why many leaderboards (particularly NES games) enforce this rule. By not showing the hard reset at all, mods are left to guess if the game was properly reset prior to the attempt.

Now recently we've had a couple of runs rejected due to this rule and some confusion was had by both runners and mods alike so I decided to make this thread to kind of get a discussion going here.

Ultimately we can just re-verify the rejected runs but keep the rule as is and give a hard deadline day to beginning enforcing this rule for all runners moving forward or we can change it to be more lenient for accessibility.

Either is fine with me for different reasons. Now as far as I understood with the game, RNG is not set upon a reset but rather based on your actions in-game so being more lenient with the rule would be fine but there might be something I don't know about with the game that others might know which leaves the idea of keeping the rule as is a reasonable choice as well

Unfortunately for me to add double character co-op as a second tab in 2 player it would have to be set as a variable which is already taken up by the difficulties so I had to put it into the Misc. tab but it's there now if you want to do runs with that idea in mind.

After taking some time to think about the situation, the leaderboard will be reverted back to the old layout. However, that does not mean the discussion about a possible leaderboard split is over though. It just means we will start up the discussion from the beginning (once everything has been changed back) and see where everyone in the community stands on the issue before deciding what should be done. It's how the whole thing should have been handled from the beginning.

The hostility over this (moreso in Brawler Ave discord than here) was more than I anticipated and I feel at the very least some folks in the community need to cool their heads off a bit before we continue this discussion. Reverting it back should at least bring the situation into a calmer state so that is what I will do.

I urge that no one else other than me do this as it was ultimately my decision and mine alone to do this. I also urge that no more mods are to be appointed without going through me first given the tension of the current situation and what has been brought forward to me privately. I took on the role of a mod here as an individual that takes a neutral standpoint on the current issue at hand and I feel that is what this community needs right now more than anything else.

Please be patient with me. Please have faith in me. There will also be some updating to the rules as well that I think is necessary. Nothing super strict or anything.

I'm going to lock this thread now. When the changes have been made I will open a new thread confirming it has been done and to stay transparent state whatever changes have been made in the ruleset and see if the community is ok with them. From there, we can start this discussion over again in a more calm and civilized manner.

I do agree that this decision should've been discussed to the community prior to going through with it. For now though, the split should remain since it has already been done and if we have to revert it, it can still easily be done. We need more discussion on this clearly though.

From the sounds of it, we need console runners to speak out if they are truly discontent about being compared to runs done on emu as I think we all want the old layout of the leaderboard back as it looks much cleaner. If there is discontent, then there needs to be a compromise that actually puts emu runs in line with console runs and put this whole drama to rest. So here's what I think could be done currently...

To the mods, I think Tako/Tenebrae's setup for emulator rules makes sense and is plenty fair and not really strict at all. Since I'm a mod now I will go forward and make this change to the ruleset.

To those in the community that are heavily in favor of going back to the old layout, if it is necessary maybe take some initiative here. Maybe do some hard emulator research (for any emulators that are generally accepted), come up with some hard numbers and calculations and maybe that might bring emulator runs in line just like how people came up with a hard calculation to bring Mega SG in line with console and write that shit down in a google doc/pastebin or something. I see one of you in here has gotten off to a headstart on that. That's what I like to see.

Edit: Ok I was wrong about the discord thing, thank you Anthopants for passing me Brawlers Ave link.

You've replied back to me on another thread regarding the same matter, so I'll leave this memo here. The Shadow Dancer runners have discussed this matter at length.

TascoDXL does have a copy of sumpura's run however he is waiting for sumpura's consent before re-uploading it. If there is no response or sumpura wishes to not have it public, TascoDXL will remove his time. This decision was agreed upon by all the runners who took part in the discussion.