Norfolk, EnglandUpdates on Grow Home: I got these earlier in the week but hadn't got around to posting them in the thread yet; my Any% PB is now 17:36 and my All Star Seeds PB is 28:22 (so my PB for that is now actually under the estimate!) These are now both under 2 minutes off their world records; the All Star Seeds PB had a really bad ending too so that should be easily improvable. Links below:
Any%: http://www.speedrun.com/Grow_Home/run/48791 All Star Seeds: http://www.speedrun.com/Grow_Home/run/48792
I would probably be up for this but knowing me I'll forget! Dunno how a handicap system would work though. Times aren't a real big issue for me, around that time seems good, maybe make it on a Sunday instead though? People might be less busy.
@Cereth: that's a Twitch issue they haven't been bothered to fix yet - https://github.com/justintv/Twitch-API/issues/289
On top of the time I improved earlier, I also did a few runs of Grow Home, and because of the way the game works, I can practice both of my categories in one go. I shaved off ~40 seconds from my Any% PB (now 19:18) and have now actually set a (proper) PB in All Star Seeds (31:27). That latter categories time is still over the estimate I gave for ESA though, so I still need to practice that one more. Links below as before:
Any%: http://www.speedrun.com/Grow_Home/run/48462 All Star Seeds: http://www.speedrun.com/Grow_Home/run/48464
I just shaved off over 2 minutes on my PB for The Simpsons: Hit & Run with an alright no-reset run, bringing my PB down to 1:55:26. The ending went rather badly though, so I'm pretty sure I can take off another 3 minutes before the next cuts. I posted it on the leaderboards, but I'll link it here too, just for reference:
http://www.speedrun.com/The_Simpsons_Hit_and_Run/run/48402
If I get very consistent at getting these types of times, I'll be able to lower the estimate a little, but for now I don't wanna do that.
OK, well I tried this myself, and all of the two times I got through without dying, I still got the police on me. Either it's not consistent, it's patched in whatever patch I'm using, or I'm not fast enough. I'm on whatever the patch was BEFORE the online heists came out.
I am about to finish up submitting all my stuff, but I would like to note that Nord put my name in his Dog's Life Any% submission, in relation to doing a race with me. I am probably not going to submit this because I have trouble with some of the skips, and don't think I can do it safely at a marathon. If he is good at this and it gets in, I am willing to do commentary for the run of course. Just to clear up any confusion if you wonder why he put my name down and there is no submission by me.
EDIT: Also a quick note that a game I have submitted is called "Grow Home", this is not "Gone Home", even though on a quick glance the name might look similar. I was gonna put this in the comments and forgot.
There was a new update today, and it seems like the main/only thing that was added is new skins, but as the update announcement says: "New skins do not have new abilities, they are aesthetic only". I guess this means you could use them for Any% speedruns if you want to, so I might need to rewrite the rules a little.
As I said in my original post, they added him in the last update, which was 4 days ago.
You unlock him by completing the data bank in the pause menu, which is also a new thing in the update.
Fun Fact: the Native B.U.D. skin was already a Steam trading card before this, so the devs already intended to have this as a skin before release I imagine.
Thanks for testing that stuff out (and setting a new WR at the time Kappa ).
I thought about how we should categorise this and decided to just make an "Any% (NG+)" category. If you wanted to try this with All Star Seeds too, I could make a "All Star Seeds (NG+)" as well, but I won't do that until someone wants it. For NG+ you are allowed to do anything you want with the skins you've unlocked, so you could use both, at different times, if you felt you wanted to. I've added your time/video from above to the new category as well.
I thought that having this one category for this would be better than having a load for each category AND each skin, if someone chose to use another one. Also a lot less arbitrary.
I've also updated the rules on the other categories to say you can start a new game while having an old save file, as long as you don't use any skins you have unlocked on the old save file.
I dunno if this is a new update thing or not, but I just noticed that if you start a new game after collecting all the star seeds, you can put on the Ninja skin in that new game through the menu, although putting it on and then starting a new game doesn't keep it on, unfortunately. The skin gives you the ability to jump twice as high, so maybe this might help a little bit? Someone should play around with it and see if it does, and if they want to run it I can add it as a separate category.
The update also added another locked skin, which I shall assume you get by completing the new Data Bank collection, but I don't know what that is yet.
EDIT: Seems like the new skin is called "Native B.U.D." although I don't know what it does yet.
Unless they've done an update in the last week or so (which I'm sure they haven't) then I tested this the other week on a fresh Steam install of the game and it works perfectly fine, so I'm not sure why you're getting this issue. If there is a way you could send me your EXE, I could check it against the one Steam gives me to see if there's a difference? I'm not sure what else the downgrader checks.
(Long post; if you just wanna see the strat, watch the first video.)
(You should probably ignore the timer in the video; see the timings below.)
Seeing as our current strategy for the mission "Pay Ray" is very RNG heavy in more ways than one (making it very inconsistent) I decided to try and find something else we could do to make the $1500 as quick as possible.
A couple of days ago, tduva brought up the fact he ran through a donut stall to get into a "mini-game"/side-mission (which isn't on the map), where if you lose the cops you get some cash, and when he did it in 2006 he got a lot of money, but said that obviously wouldn't be very useful when we need it in 1978. Then I remembered that there are ones in 1978, and they unlock at the same time as the rest of the side-missions (I'm pretty sure the cutscene for Pay Ray even mentions there are side-missions that aren't on the map). I then remembered there is one of these very close to your Hunts Point garage, and this strat was born.
What you have to do is get a bike before "Pay Ray" (as you would usually try to do as we usually use one for that mission). If you get it the mission prior, store it in your garage, if you got it before that, go into your garage and get the stored one.
After this you need to warp to Hunts Point (which I seemed to have more luck doing with the map; doing it through the garage messed up once and kept me in the same place even though it thought I was at Hunts Point I think).
Once you're outside the Hunts Point garage, drive towards where the stall is (see the video) and run into it, which will put your heat at the maximum and spawn some cop cars nearby, and then try to escape the cops as fast as possible (I find driving on the sidewalk helps lose them). If you do this really well, you will lose the cops quickly (after this keep driving to make sure they don't catch up again) you will get $2000 straight away (and sometimes an extra $10000 for perfect driving, but that was rare for me in testing). If you do it a little too slowly, it will give you less, but I never got less than $1000 when doing tests. If you wanted to continue the run you can just turn around and do the same thing again to get more, which is slower, but is still probably quicker (and more consistent) than the strat we were already using.
Once it gives you the money, you can then warp away as usual and complete the mission and then continue on. This sometimes seems to require you to warp to a garage to get the mission to spawn for some reason (this happens with the old strat too), so do that if needed.
Now the first thing that concerned me was cops and traffic RNG, but the cops always spawn in the same spots at the strat and my testing showed this to be very consistent.
For the timing, I timed from spawning at the garage until the game awarded me the money. You will have to add ~30 seconds onto this to compensate for the rest of what you need to do.
The first testing I did was from a new game. I did this 3 times and had a bike every time, and 2/3 of these times I got the $2000 quickly (under 1:00); the other time I only got $1000 but could've maybe gone back. The second testing I did was from doing the same thing over and over from a saved game (although I didn't purposefully reload it, I just kept warping back and trying again mostly). I did this 7 times and 5/7 of these times I got the $2000 quickly (under 1:00), one time I had to go back to get the extra $1000 (2:10) and the other time I got $1000 far away and felt like going back was not worth it.
So as you can probably guess, this strat seems very consistent, as long as you do the strat correctly, and can save a ton of time (my best split is ~2:00, which would save 0:30; my PB/WR is ~3:50, which would save over 2:00).
Now you're probably wondering about this "TAS" strat. In the first run I did from the start, I found out that knocking the stall over (which starts the mission) and the cops chasing you has a very small gap. This means if you could perfectly time losing a cop (which I got on the way there by accident) just after starting the mission but not spawning the others in, you will complete the mission straight away, getting you the $2000 and the perfect driver $10000 bonus too. Even though it was amazing at the time, it would probably only save ~17 seconds or so, so don't think it's worth looking into, but it sure was cool. See the video below for this amazing strat(!)
For some reason the forum broke the video recently, maybe me reposting it will work:
Someone did run Road Rage on console ages ago (they did those missions you can do) but I can't remember who it was.
Thanks for that information, that makes sense as to why it's not exactly 60fps then. It's not really an issue like I said because it's close enough to do it's job. To me the "stuttering" I saw looked like it happened every 1/2 second; is that anything to do with the fact it's getting rid of 2 frames every second to show it at 60fps?
GTA San Andreas does have issues with it's frame rate when you uncap it as well; not as bad as the other ones but still enough that we have to have it turned on for speedrunning. It's locked to 25fps, but from what modders have found out, I think that's down to the timing being wrong in their script (if it's changed to the correct timing, the game correctly locks to 30fps, and the game actually uses 30 by default as the figure it multiplies the timing by).
I'm not so interested in the hotkey functionality myself, so I'll leave that up to other runners to figure out if that actually would be beneficial or not. Feel free to test if the game bugs out or not if you change it on the fly though if you want to; would be interesting to know if that happens.
I'm just glad someone made a mod that builds this functionality into the game instead of us having to use an external tool. Using an external tool also makes the loads slower which was quite annoying for some of us. So thanks!
EDIT: I just did a little testing and if you move the frame rate around the 60 mark it stutters differently, so I do imagine it has something to do with it not syncing with my monitor correctly, which is common from what I remember. You could try making it be exact if you wanted and see if it's too taxing or not, but I'll leave that up to you to decide if you want to test that at all. I found that setting it to 50 seems to be a good compensation to make it not annoy me, and is smooth enough for me to play.
Also, I don't know if you changed any other of the required hacks in this update, but I used to have major issues with this game stuttering a lot (even though external programs reported the frame rate wasn't fluctuating) but with your new launcher, it doesn't seem to happen anymore. Either it's a coincidence or you actually did something. If so, thanks!
Thanks for releasing that update just for us. Kappa
In regards to the multi-twitch thing, do you mean all streams on one stream? If so no, we'll all just be streaming the game separately, but you could something like http://speedrun.tv/ to view us all at once when we actually do the race.
To the others: are we gonna do a Skype call for this? I hope so.
By the way, if you guys want somewhere to talk on the SpeedRunsLive IRC, I own the #simpsons channel. Could make things like this a bit easier if you just want to talk without having to post a thread.
Yeah I could probably do it then, seeing as it's not gonna take hours (hopefully).
It was made (and "ported" I hope) by Radical, who are Canadian if I remember rightly, so being converted from a PAL version wouldn't make much sense, compared to something like GTA San Andreas, where the team is from the UK (that game's in-game frame limiter is 25fps apparently because they messed up timing in the script.)
There's no hotkey setting right now, but depending on how it's done I imagine it could be possible by whoever made the hack, or by someone else if we had the source. Any reason you'd want this? I guess it's something to do with taking advantage of the physics in certain places right?
