Getting the two +luck locations on the way to Roland in the final mission is actually not a bad idea, I finally realized. In my current run I even went out of my way to go to the temple for +morale, but that's probably not worth it.

I don't think I have useful answers for the first two questions, hopefully someone else knows more. Roland is a crapshoot from my experience, but you can sometimes still win against resurrection or duplicate. Country Lords is also super random... sometimes the enemies don't do much, but usually they run all over the place.

Greater Glory has 6 dragon spots total, you can just look at a map (e.g. https://www.vgmaps.com/Atlas/PC/index.htm#HeroesOfMightAndMagicII ) or open the map in the game's editor.

Have fun!

Turning off the sound in the game's options menu saves a very significant amount of time. Disabling the music mostly shortens load times, getting rid of the sound effects mainly reduces lag during the stages.

As we know so far, this is specific to the SNES version.

Sum of all load times

• ALL ON: 4:22.4
• MUSIC ON, SFX OFF: 4:22.4
• SFX ON, MUSIC OFF: 4:09.6 (-12.8s)
• ALL OFF: 4:08.5 (-13.9s)

Rough estimate of total lag reduction during stages with ALL OFF

• 1:20 to 1:25 (for a 1P1C run)

If you would like to submit a run for a category that doesn't exit yet (e.g. other platforms, co-op runs, 1P3C, ... you name it), either post in this thread or just submit the run to the next best category and we'll make a new one.

Any kind of category discussion can also go in here.

Btw there is a Discord, if you're interested: https://discord.gg/VyXwVJRurj (just noticed the link attached to the leaderboard was expired)

It does work the same way as the other times. Start walking from the right pixel position.

You can look at O&B's feet and how far they are looking out over the gap from behind the blue bubbly floor: https://ibb.co/7p7GWFR (screenshot) Notice Olaf's feet are longer than Baleog's, so his foot needs to stick out slightly further.

On my end it's just installing the latest AGS release (https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/releases/), opening the game's directory in a terminal and typing 'ags' to launch it. The zip and exe files should be the Windows version.

From what I can tell with wine, the acwin.exe in the zip is the executable for the interpreter, so something like "acwin 'c:\path\to\game'" should work. Should be possible to just make a shortcut like that. I wish the manual page was more clear about how this works on Windows: https://adventuregamestudio.github.io/ags-manual/RuntimeEngine.html#command-line

~

IF this somehow works out and speeds are comparable, maybe a variable on the leaderboard ala Old Engine/New Engine/ScummVM would do the trick.

Alright, I compared OneShortEye's more closely now and I think I have something like an overview.

There are 2 sources of differences speedwise:

1. The differing length of screen transitions, as described in the first post. woofs+OSE transitions take 0.4s each, mike transitions take 0.67.
2. The overall animation speed. My game runs significantly faster than OSE's and OSE's game runs slightly faster than woofs'. This seems to affect all animations including the "comic panel"-cutscenes.

Looks like using the modern engine is fastest, but there are also signs of different playback speed from system to system. (Last thing I want to mention: it's definitely not based on CPU-speed. I have a 5-year-old 70€ Pentium G4560)

When BJ came out AGS was Windows only, I'm pretty sure. Over the years the engine has been ported to many platforms: https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags . Nowadays you can just install the engine and then run any old AGS game through that.

So, yeah... I could see that the more recent versions of the engine maybe just play some small things back differently. Or it just runs slightly more smoothly overall? Seems plausible.

On a sidenote, ScummVM is also in the process of getting AGS support.

Ok, I found actual difference in walking speeds now. I put my 4:58 and your 5:29 next to each other, screen by screen and on some screens my guy literally walks faster than yours. Even the reception dude in the cutscene walks faster.

If you're interested in bothering with this at all, you should be able to just put 'driver=software' under [graphics] in the acsetup.cfg in the game's directory to try and see if the game runs faster for you. As far as I understand it, the setup utility you have on Windows also just writes into that file.

But the main point here, I guess, is: we definitely have some version differences to work with in this game.

Thank you, that works. I fear I don't know how those settings compare either though 🙃

I fired up a video editor to compare some things more closely between runs and it looks like the differences involve more than just the fades to black. I'm not really sure what's going on though, because sometimes the transitions just start earlier on my run in software mode (compared to your run). Definitely getting the impression that software is overall fastest atm.

Do you hold down escape throughout the entire game? Because I got used to always doing that, except when there's inventory stuff going on. Maybe that even cuts some screen transition stuff short, but I'm just guessing here.

"image not found" behind that link

Updated post with fastest currently known setup: -Get the current version of AGS (see Guides section) -Set the graphics driver to software -Cases 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8: set audio to "no digital sound" to save extra time.

Playing the original 2.7 version has the shortest screen transitions, but the current (3.5 atm) version runs overall fastest with the software graphics driver and by a significant margin.

[Original post with corrections: tl;dr: the selected gfx driver unfortunately changes how quick screen transitions are in this game software>d3d/ogl

when I added thewoofs' time to my splits as a comparison, I noticed I always lose over 20s during the last 2 minutes of the run I then watched our pb videos side-by-side and noticed the fade-to-black transitions between screens were much longer on my end

so I played around with settings in the acsetup.cfg file and figured out the difference lies with the gfxdriver setting https://github.com/adventuregamestudio/ags/blob/master/OPTIONS.md#configuration-file-options AGS version 3.5 with driver=ogl = ~1.4s transitions AGS version 3.5 with driver=software = ~0.7s AGS version 2.7 = 0.4s]

@starsmiley Since you just @'ed "Mikethetv", maybe it is just a typo! There's no second t in my username. Sorry for the inconvenience!

@starsmiley E-mail authentication is enabled and I couldn't even turn it off if I wanted to, since I'm already a moderator on other LBs. Something seems to be not working properly.

I'd like to take over moderation for Whispers of a Machine (https://www.speedrun.com/whispers_of_a_machine). The only moderator on there has not logged in for 4 months and I tried to contact them via Discord (the only other contact method on their profile) and have not received a response after about a week. No activity on their YouTube for over a year either.

I have a run pending and on the board. I'm also a moderator on other boards and know the rules.

All category discussion goes in here.

This game has plenty of room for category creativity. I'm open to all ideas.

Hi! The goal here is to scroll the camera away from Erik, just before he touches the door. The door has no collision when it is not on screen. Once you're in the door, it just clips you down through the floor if you press jump.

Iirc, this clip here does not work on the DOS version, because that version has like a wider view-screen. If you compare footage of the SNES and DOS version, you'll notice on DOS you just get to see more of the level to the left and right. That also means you can't scroll away from Erik fast enough.

There was a different clip here in this stage though, that should work on DOS and also saves a lot of time. I'm going to have to ask Chansey for a reminder about that one though.

What would this even look like? No saving/loading during missions? Otherwise it seems there'd be so much correcting via quickload that you might as well do a manipulated run ;)

Interested to see a run in any case!

I'd like to request "Dungeon Below", please. Found an old recording, might as well add it.