Timing method change proposal
6 years ago
California, USA

Since we've programmed the load remover for Thief 2 to only begin timing when you've gained control of your character, and loadless time is the current metric by which the boards are organized, the loadless time actually begins when you gain control anyway, you don't technically need to start the timer at all until you gain control. It's not something I even thought about until you brought it up, but it will actually be better to change the Thief 2 rules to specify that time begins when you gain control rather than change the Thief 1 rules. It makes much more sense to start on gaining control, and maintains said continuity.

"Gain control / Lose control" is the most general and least arbitrarily-defined timing method possible. The only conceivable human interference is in the human/keyboard interface where you might hit either split too early or too late, but the player is never in doubt as to exactly WHEN they should be splitting.

When you start to say things like "when the eye starts exploding" or heaven forbid "when you're safe after doing x," you've just introduced an arbitrary and vague convention to the timing which can only cause problems. When exactly do you split? When the eye starts glowing? When Constantine stops talking during the glow? When the explosion sound effect plays? When Constantine hits the ground or when his body becomes a frobbable object? These questions are all rhetorical of course because none of them makes any more sense than the others or represent a clear "end" to the game. On top of that, for most of the above situations you can still shoot Constantine and fail the mission, and if the possibility for failure still exists you can't consider the game over. There's also no practical reason to end the time earlier, unless that 20 seconds at the end is so valuable that you want to quit out early. You still have control and the in-game timer is still running, so you're still playing. Defining when the player is "safe" after placing the eye is so arbitrary I don't think it can even be considered. You may deem yourself "safe" in a position that truly isn't, but there's no way of knowing you won't get seen until AFTER you've waited through the entire sequence anyway, so you still have to sit there for the entire duration anyway. This is a serious problem because players, guided by and in control of an arbitrary timing standard, will be trying to stop the timer as soon as possible, cutting closer and closer to unsafe positions to save time.

It also sets a negative precedent for "waiting" not just in Thief games but in games across all other genres. For instance, in Starcraft 1 speedrunning, there was a proposal to allow players to use a cheat code to skip the third Terran mission, which is a 20 minute defense mission. Thankfully that got unanimously shut down by the community who recognized it as an illegitimate and lazy attempt to skip a "waiting" segment. Imagine if we had the same for Eavesdropping where we would just skip it with debug because you have to wait for 5 and a half minutes and how ridiculous that would be. That's exactly the way I view early stoppages of timers to avoid the maw scene, except it saves far less time and is therefore even less important.

RiiFT likes this
New York City, NY, USA

Of corse it’s all arbitrary really. I just thought the discussion was worth having if everyone with an opinion would give their piece. Just making a platform for everyone to have their piece.

The timing starting on the gain of control makes more sense and I completely forgot the loadless timer can do that. Which reminds me, we need a smarty pants man to try and work on one for this game and gold if possible. Thanks for that reminder. Making all games pretty much use that as the starting method makes a lot more sense.

I proposed on the explosion, and I suppose to me it would be the explosion sound clip itself, mainly just cause I felt like it was pretty much the “end” to the game. Yes you can still fail obviously, which is a very big grey area for sure, but I don’t know. It would be nice to hear others opinions on that.

The whole “getting back to safety” thing was mainly taking the argument to its absolute extreme, and mainly just meant as another option for the discussion should anyone want to pick up on that. It is extremely silly, I agree. But just meant purely for the sake of debate.

Really the whole motivation for this thread was just for discussion, and was kinda spurred on by the idea to make it more “marathon” viable. I.e less downtime more gameplaying. But I guess they could just be neat times for donations and the sort anyway :p

Edited by the author 6 years ago
California, USA

I'll do a load remover for TDP/Gold, I just need to dig around in the pointers for a bit. What version is everyone running? I only have 1.33 (platinum edition discs). The load remover is dependent on a string which may or may not change based on version. So if I make one that works for me it might not work for everyone else.

Edited by the author 6 years ago
RiiFT and TheCount like this

I'm going to run old dark when I do run but not going to be for a bit.

Scotland

I run the Sold Out CD version on TDP which for me seems to work just fine. I don't know the version details of this copy however. You guys interested in autosplitters? I can have a look into creating some for the Dark Engine games if that helps.