Michigan, USANear as I can tell, it's equal or slightly faster IGT. You minimize the potential of any inefficient frames on the transition, and you can also buffer moving to the right after the trick. Every time I've gotten it in real time, I've come a tile to the left before I realize I got the trick, so I'm adding two tiles of lateral movement to the total trick execution time. I guess if you take (my) penchant for human error out of the equation, it's equal.
You have to be able to execute it in less than six seconds real-time for it to save time in the RTA categories. There was one time I got it with only two pauses, so I'm sure it would have still saved 3-4 seconds, but usually I spend close to 10 seconds getting the trick.
It looks like the spreadsheet has my original submission link for Any% IGT - can I update? I got a new PB, even since my last post in this thread! For now, it's TWR! But I expect the other two record-holders to PB soon - a new glitch added several seconds to save. In a theoretical perfect run, we're on the cusp of sub-6:00. :)
Hi! If you haven't seen it already, Battlefront II does have its own forum as part of its hub page: http://www.speedrun.com/swbf2/forum
It looks like nobody has posted there in a while, but if you start a new thread, they may come into point you in the right direction!
Good luck with runs, and I'll see you around!
Taiyo, I don't know how common Daylight Saving Time is over there, but that affects our relation to UTC... I always thought I was UTC - 5 in the EST, but right now I'm actually UTC - 4. 1600 UTC is 1200 for me, so I think it's 0900 for you... just wanted to prevent confusion!
That's amazing! And you show off how, once you're comfortable, you don't even need to buffer too many times. Actually, I would bet that it still saves a little time in RTA runs - just not as much. Especially if this can be applied in every such instance of this glitch, now we have, I guess, four viable places to start implementing this in runs.
As far as how this would interact with the rules, I think this is pretty clearly allowed as our rules stand, and it's not an arbitrary line in the sand. SOG is banned because the IGT does not increase while Yuri is off-screen, and the framerate drop breaks its accuracy. Savewarps are banned because the IGT is not visible while you exit the game file. Pausing (like to turn off autosave) is allowed because it does not interfere with the normal operation of the IGT. Therefore, even if pausing is used as a meaningful part of strats, that's just part of the meta-game. Now, if it was found that there was a two-frame delay before the timer starts again, and someone pause buffered through the entire game, and got WR with a sub-6:00 IGT that was 80 minutes RTA... then we might have to talk. :P
Taiyo, I sent you a Twitch message with an Instant Invite link a couple hours ago! I'll leave it up to prettz whether we have an invite link posted at all times in the forum. (There is one in the OTS Skype group thread, but I don't know if it's still vaild.)
To clarify, the IGT rule ¤does¤ create implicit rule barriers that substantially alter the run. I forget if you were still here when the major skip that makes them distinct got found - I think for a while it was called "Any% Broken." But if you sit in Crash Site for just under three minutes, you trigger a graphical overflow that breaks the game, allowing you to leave a screen without loading the next one. If you have the Gauss Gun, you can shoot the grey blocks, leave the screen to the left, climb up what is basically the geometry of A New Hope, and trigger the final boss fight. In other words, a 5-minute run that is 3 minutes of just chilling. Going off-screen stops the IGT from increasing, and savewarping takes the IGT off-screen. So, in terms of run impact, you could also call Any% IGT "Any% No Savewarp/Smoke Overflow Glitch."
On your third point, I hadn't meant for All Achievements to replace All Collectibles - I had thought you were talking about two versions of All Achievements, one with every collectible and one without. The latter version really only saves the Weapon Upgrade, and so I was simply posing the question of whether it merited a separate category. All Collectibles is a distinctly different level of completion from both Any% IGT and All Achievements. All categories have their own unique challenges - Any% IGT just requires laser-precision, and involves a late-game where Yuri is underpowered; All Collectibles has an utterly brutal opening until you exit the Alien City; and All Achievements seems to have a steady slew of challenges cerebral and technical.
SRL is nigh-unlimited as far as entrants. The current OTS record is 6, and we just had 5 on Thursday. Let's try to break that!
Double posting to raise a separate question. Please view my post above, about Taiyo's AMAZING Achievement% run!
This regards True Any%, or I guess Any% RTA to be clear. Even though it represents the "purest" vision of an Any% speedrun - take the game, out of the box, hose it down as fast as possible - I think it's clear that most folks don't enjoy running or watching it, and it serves more as a demo of one glitch than a summation of OTS speedrunning tech.
There is a precedent for games that have Any% as a misc. category. Could/should we do the same? This isn't just an academic exercise - I think it would center attention more on the categories we want people to run, by having one less tab in the way. What are our thoughts?
Excellent pilot run! Seeing it laid out like this, I am a lot happier with the idea of incorporating EVERY achievement in a category. Now I see the reasoning behind your philosophy - let's see what the runs actually ¤look¤ like, THEN get into the theory!
The reason that I was only concerned with "Diplomat" in my post is that I was worried that things like "...Thanks?" and "But How?" would seem more like meaningless diversions than serious augmentations to the category. Think of Paper Mario's "Chalkboard" category, compared with "All Cards." I had figured that "Diplomat" merited inclusion into "107%" because it at least bore resemblance to "107%" and "Have a Plan." It still required you do do ALL of something in-game, while the rest were conditions of varying significance. Boy, though, if you work everything in, it sure puts a whole new premium on routing! Walking into this category is going to be a breath of fresh air for OTS! I think, next week, I will do a run or two.
When it comes to the name, can I make a humble request? And, for that matter, can we apply this to Collectibles% as well - can we name this category "All Achievements" and rename "Collectibles%" to "All Collectibles?" It's only cosmetic, but I think it's more didactically and aesthetically pleasing to not append the % to every category. The ubiquity of the phrase "Any%" makes that fine, but I don't think "Collectibles%" is more clear to understand than "All Collectibles," for example.
I 100% agree with you about making this a main category, by the way. In fact, now that I've thought of it, an All Achievements run that also included All Collectibles may as well be called "100%," because there's no other metric to juice out of the game. Regarding splitting "All Achievements" into two categories, with and without All Collectibles, is that a significant enough difference in the run? It would probably affect which room you choose to sit in for 8 minutes, and it would change some savewarp/deathwarp options, but I have a hard time imagining a time difference of greater than 90 seconds in an optimal run of each category.
Furthermore, because this run is so successful, I think I'm going to relent on my push to have separate "Diplomat," "107%," and "HAPTKEYM" categories. If we were only counting those three in a "107%" category, it would make sense, but it certainly wouldn't make sense to follow suit and have achievement-specific categories for all the others, like "But How?"
TL;DR awesome work, Taiyo. I was skeptical about this run, but you've shown me the light. I think it deserves existence, as well as Main status. I think, given this run's quality, my proposed Misc categories are unnecessary. My opinion is that it should just be one category, that includes All Collectibles, and that it makes perfect sense to name it "100%." If we wanted one that was just the achievements, I think that should probably be a Misc category.
Great points, Taiyo, especially as it pertains to the three single-achievement categories. I was just feeling around for interest in more sub-categories, since that could add some variety to races for example.
Regarding 107%, I'm glad that you came back to the board, because your insight is extremely valuable, having actual run the category. These are great pragmatic points, and since I'm still a "new guy" here I had no intentions of upsetting the apple cart just for the sake of doing so. But if I can get more pointed on ¤principle¤ questions, strictly speaking, do you think that a 107% IGT run that includes Diplomat would be more true to the intentions of the category? That question, to me, seems like it would be the impetus for any change.
One other thing you brought up, that I often forget, is that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." And so it is a great point that we shouldn't be constantly overhauling categories that just stay empty anyway. The reason I made this an essay-length affair was that, while I would love 107% to be a thriving category, I'd rather have the changes in place ¤before¤ people come back to it. If we get five submissions, and then all agree that Diplomat really should be in there, I don't want to move the ground underneath the runners!
Thank you, everyone, for chiming in so far! Maybe my next contribution to the discussion should be to actually record runs, both with and without Diplomat, and maybe "pilot runs" of my proposed single-achievement categories, to know firsthand whether they'd actually be good runs.
Shoot, just noticed that the link for my Any% IGT PB video doesn't work anymore. My current PB is a cleaner and more exciting run anyway - here is a new link! http://www.speedrun.com/run/7yl6l1xy
Double post alert! Ban Busker!
A while back, I made a tutorial for the Lost Mountaintop Out-of-Bounds skip (LMOOB). I have since improved at both executing and explaining the trick, so I decided to make a tutorial to cover all three places to circumvent the came boundaries: Lost Mountaintop (LMOOB), Forgotten Ruins (FROOB), and Jumping Over (JOOOB).
https://secure.twitch.tv/beardedbusker/v/77535132
If the Beginner Tutorial makes sub-10:00 realistic, and my eventual Intermediate Tutorial brings sub-8:00 into play, consider this my Advanced Tutorial. Executing these three OOB skips should make sub-7:00 not only possible, but consistent!
I updated some tutorial materials I had made, and so I will post those here! Forgive the double-posts, but I think it'll be a little cleaner to have separate posts for each video.
First, here is a beginner-friendly route for Any% IGT, which just showcases the "baseline" path through the game. No skips or boost jump exploits are used. I make a few mistakes, and stop to explain some things, but sub-10:00 is absolutely achievable here.
I will soon re-record my intermediate route, which introduces boost jumps, air jumps, GBJ, and CJS.
I am unqualified to answer Q2. Regarding Q1, just wanted to add that a lot of times games from the same genre share common trends, even if they run different engines. Take tile-based 2D platformers - wall ejections are a fertile ground, so any time you have a tile that is not a four-sided wall, it's worth exploring whether you can get "stuck" in walls. Clipping in 3D platformers is similar - corners and texture borders are often gateways to new possibilities. Trial-and-error, exploring obscure nooks that the developers might not put time into, and lots of repetitions will eventually yield an aberration that you can reproduce!
You sound pretty great, yourself! Hope that the try is rewarding! It's the journey, not the destination... even if the hobby is about reaching a destination faster. :)
Hello, OTS runners! This post will be long. (Busker? Wordy? Never!) I will put a TL;DR at the end with the questions I'd like to discuss!
The new warp glitch and game editing are much more exciting, but there is another big discussion we have wanted to open up to the community for a while now: what to do with our 107% IGT category, and whether there could be any other interesting categories beyond our "Core Three."
Out There Somewhere does not acknowledge 100% completion, and so the community presently uses Collectibles% as its most thorough speedrun category. However, there are still two (and with my route, three) whole sectors of the game that go unexplored in Collectibles%. It seems the community sensed, long before I got here, that there should be a more "completionist" category as well. Perhaps Prettzl can fill in the story, because even from reading the forums I am lacking in knowledge.
Enter 107%. There IS a Steam achievement called "107%," which is strictly related to the number of screens Yuri travels in a single play-through. 107% then became the category name for a speedrun that would incorporate all of the elements of "beating a game into the ground." You explore everything, collect everything, kill everything, cue credits. Great, right?
There's one thing missing, though.
Along with "107%," there are two other Steam achievements that could be regarded as "completionist" achievements that add substance to a play-through. (Contrast this with the achievement for getting 30 teleshots on-screen at once.) "Have a Plan to Kill Everyone You Meet" is for killing all enemies at least once in a play-through, and "Diplomat" is for talking to all Aliens in a play-through. For some reason, the "Diplomat" achievement got dropped at some point, and runs were completed, submitted, and approved without it.
To me, it seems strange to name a category 107% and require anything more than the 107% achievement - unless you go all the way with it, which would surely require "Diplomat" as well. I brought this up before and the consensus was, "That makes sense, but why change a dead category? If we added the Diplomat achievement to the ruleset, none of the runs on the leaderboard would be valid. Then, we would just be wiping a leaderboard that is important to the community history, including the legacy of a retired OTS runner."
I agreed on this point, and I proposed a plan: not one, but FOUR Misc categories. One called "Diplomat," one called "HAPTKEYM," one called "107%," and one called "Completionist%," to include all three of those achievements as well as all collectibles. The response was "...Okay, but if nobody is even running these, why bother?"
Then TIHMMW churned out an amazing run of the current 107%, and suddenly the category wasn't dead.
I still think this community could benefit from runners branching out to other categories, and I think they would be especially useful for future races. I guess the bottom line is that I am not satisfied personally with 107% the way it stands, and I see an easy way to create a unified, stable ruleset incorporating the Steam achievements. However, it would have been senseless to wipe the category while it was dead, and now it would be kind of unsportsmanlike to change it so soon after TIHMMW mastered it. So, without further ado...
TL;DR
There is one achievement that is left out, seemingly by mistake, from our 107% category, as well as a few other holes in the ruleset. There are many changes that could be made for the sake of unity, but they might be more trouble than they're worth considering how lonely the category is.
- Are you interested enough in this category, or any other, that we should change or add anything?
- Do you think the "Diplomat" achievement for talking to all Aliens in one run-through should be included in our most "completionist" category?
- Why is 107% an IGT category? Should it stay that way? I'm actually mostly asking Prettz, Rezoons, Timbouton, and the people who were here before me. I have no clue whatsoever.
- Would you have an interest in categories that isolate individual achievements from the three that reward "completionist" tasks? (Kill all enemies, visit all screens, talk to all friendly NPCs.)
- Would you consider running 107% as it stands now? Would you prefer the current 107% to one that requires the "Diplomat" achievement?
This is far above my head, and unless someone convinces me to start making levels, I don't think I will tinker with this at all. Here is the Reader's Digest of my thoughts, to each of your three questions:
- I used this analogy in Discord. The OTS Community is like a backyard bonfire. We have a nice flame going, and the best way to keep it going is to resist the urge to keep adding and moving logs. It's a small fire, so it's unlikely to escape the fire pit and burn down our house. We just keep a water bucket nearby, just in case.
In other words, I propose we do absolutely nothing, because Prettz already demonstrated how hard it would be to verify, irrefutably, that a run was not tampered with. Anything we could impose would be more trouble than it is worth, and may not even achieve that goal. Cheating happens even in games with large communities; when someone notices, it is dealt with, but the community survives by being enthusiastic and altruistic.
- As I believe Ghuia brought up in Discord, even subtle changes will show up in rooms that have fairly constant timing. We know what jumps are and aren't possible, so you're not gonna sneak an extra pixel of jump height and "discover" some new trick. We have tweaked strats in rooms that don't have big exploits, so it will stick out like a sore thumb if somebody barrels through Amazing Horseshoe. There's nothing to do but sprint in Fresh Air, so movement speed would be obvious as well.
If it's subtle enough to escape us, then the runner is probably skilled enough without cheating that the net gain would be a second or two at most - in other words, the runner's time would be better spent practicing to shave a couple seconds than tinkering with the game. I think most runners would realize that, even if they WERE interested in cheating. (And if they're interested in cheating, they're probably interested in quick glory, and so are speedrunning something else.)
- I think, unfortunately, this is still a pretty resolute no. Even if my points above make it seem like modification is no biggie from an enforcement standpoint, it still stands to reason that we should set the expectation that you run the standard build of the game. I hope that's not frustrating for runners like Natos and Timbouton, who have already made incredible levels. Is it a pain to keep a separate set of game files handy for when you want to speedrun and when you want to run custom? Even for purely cosmetic changes, I can't think of a way to justify a modded game file.
Hope this starts/continues a discussion!
Kobe, you're making me blush! :) When I get back to streaming next week, by the way, SWYDS is one I was considering playing blind! I'll have to consider it as an "appetizer" speedgame.
Not to beat a dead horse, but right now OTS is on sale as part of the Developer Alliance Bundle, which includes three other platformers: Camera Obscura, Polarity, and BEEP. On sale for $1.49 US until July 18! I'm learning Polarity, which has a thriving leaderboard and great speed-tech. I tried (and failed) Camera Obscura, which does not have a community but jongyon darn-near optimized it, and it is an awesome speedrun to watch! BEEP... to be honest, I find it kind of meh, but it has a cute art style and a few runs here.
http://www.speedrun.com/ots I will never, ever stop recommending this game in this forum! :)
