Load Remover vs RTA Timing
3 years ago
Canada

Do you feel that the full game leaderboards should be timed using RTA, or should a load remover be used instead?

England

in my opinion, sort by rta by default and make load remover optional except top 5 or so submissions are required and retimed by 2 mods. if someone can make it, new load remover that detects a perfect match with the loading cycle, instead of black screen because its 8 static images instead of a changing fade out that can be messed up by really dark areas and have inconsistencies. only split by console like ps4-ps5-pc, because if that idea of a load remover works better than the current one, the only difference between ps4 and pro would be 4k res. ps5 would probably have better framerate and different cycles on stuff like lasers because of rta differences, no doubt there would be a 'definitive' edition with dlc too. and pc has too much to account for to compare with ps4/5

Edited by the author 3 years ago

Just to chime in with a clarification:

"if someone can make it, new load remover that detects a perfect match with the loading cycle, instead of black screen because its 8 static images instead of a changing fade out that can be messed up by really dark areas and have inconsistencies."

That is way easier said than done - you cannot simply compare some static images to the various different capture sources there are. You could do something similar to what AutoSplit does, which requires people to capture the reference images from their own capture source. However, that would increase the barrier to entry a lot by requiring users to perform some steps that can be very prone to error prior to a run. Different capture setups will never allow you to detect a perfect match unless you tune it to your capture setup. And as soon as you change things, you'll need to capture reference images again.

If you don't do that, you will have a much more inaccurate load remover compared to just detecting black screens as there will be people with different resolutions, different capture sources, etc., where the load remover will just fail because the "static image" is not similar enough. And if you make the detection criteria too loose, the load remover might fail because something looks similar to the load screen animation thing.

In the Crash (NST, Nitro Fueled) community I got around that by painstakingly collecting data from various different capture sources until the load remover was fully reliable. I'm not sure if that would be necessary for this game, given that detecting black screens should work fine?

If the black screen detector is done properly (it hasn't been done properly yet since it wasn't made for this game), I'm pretty sure you would not have issues with dark areas unless most of your screen is completely dark.

But other than that, I'm not a runner of this game so I won't actively participate in the discussion (I'd only provide details about potential load removers and their feasibility), just wanted to clarify some load-remover related things.

EDIT: about the accuracy of black screen detection: If you run the black screen detector multiple times on the same video to see if there are inaccuracies in across the same settings/run (I chose one of the leaderboards top runs for that experiment), you'll only get a difference of ~20-100 milliseconds. That means in ~13 minutes of real time, you can expect an inaccuracy of ~20-100 milliseconds with the same settings.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
New South Wales, Australia

So i voted against the LoadRemover in the first poll because i dont wanna use a LoadRemover Wah! But now that ive had time to think about it and hear some argument for both sides the LoadRemover assuming it works correctly is a better timing method. People should be getting accurate times regardless of hardware and if people are too lazy to use the LoadRemover then they can just submit RTA times. We shouldn't sacrifice the fairness of the competition and make people especially playing on base ps4's have to buy an SSD to compete so we can be lazy and not worry about using an LoadRemover. Anyways thats just my take on it as of right now. Im keen to see more discussion on the topic as we are approaching official release ( :

Edited by the author 3 years ago

I think the load remover should be used, having to buy a ps4 pro with ssd in order to seriously compete right out the gate seems very Pay to Win, and a lot of people will be running on base console with HDD, the goal should be to have a level playing field and a fair competition above all else.

Lower Saxony, Germany

Ok, we have to clarify:

If we were to go with RTA we would definetely split Pro and Base to make it more fair, the only investement to make would be an SSD Harddrive which you can easily get for 50-70 bucks.

From what i've seen, just about every speedrun community that runs on ps4 has used a LTR with success, i think dividing the boards between base and pro would be awkward, a load remover makes everything more uniform (and fair) imo.

Île-de-France, France

I prefer the LoadRemover. Even if it maybe takes times to have an good LoadRemover, I think there are different loading times between console itself. The LoadRemover can be used by everyone with every console. We just need some times to adjust the program.

Fudfood likes this
Lower Saxony, Germany

I myself would be fine with going both ways. But I'd tend for RTA. I'll explain both right here:

RTA: With RTA it would be a lot easier to handle for everyone. It's more convenient, we do not have to worry about timer inconsistencies and theoretically the whole game could be ran without a timer as from what I heard beating the game shows you your IGT which perfectly represents your RTA time. That way splicing could be prevented as well as the length of the video/a retiming of the run would be backed by the RTA timer. Retiming the runs would be long as well and we can probably expect to have a lot of runners. No matter how many moderators would be present, we can reasonably only retime up to 1 run per day if we were to do it very accurately. The only problem is the hardware difference, however my idea would be to at least split Pro and Base to let people be competitive. It would not be fair to require people doing a up to 400$/€ investment to be competitive looking at it realistically it will take no longer than 1-2 weeks until Base Runners can not reasonably catch up anymore. A harddrive investment isn't as big as decent SSDs can easily be bought for 50-60$/€, but that way we'd have it split into two consoles and can keep it competitive for a huge majority of runners.

Loadless: Going Loadless opens up different possibilities, but also causes some problems. The biggest one is that once we get a lot of run submissions, which would be foolish to not expect that, we will have a gigantic backlog no matter the amount of moderators we have. To prevent that, we'd have to be able to get a perfect loadremover that cause no issue whatsoever. However Loadless would allow us to keep competition on one board for every single runner. Everyone would be on the same playing field, has the same chances for WR and we'd have Base+HDD competing with Pro+SSD. That's about as much positives as I can come up with personally though. Thank you for reading, I'll edit this message if I can think of more.

Jenovaqt, AdrianMamba and 2 others like this
Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

I prefer RTA because it's more simple to handle to everyone, runners and mods.

Of course if we had no issues a load remover would be ideal. But we already have some in the demo which is 15 minutes long. I know that the load remover wasn't meant to be used with Final Fantasy VII Remake, but it'll require some changes, more testing and probably we'd find some hard screens in the game. For example, if there's a screen that is black but is not a load, then two players can go through that screen and no matter how fast they are, the timer would be paused. It's not fair to the fastest player in this situation.

Some runners already had difficulties during the demo, for example, the load remover not capturing the video from SLOBS, some bad configuration from the runner, or some problems that we are not sure what the cause is. Independently if OBS Studio or SLOBS is better (I prefer OBS Studio, but it's a subjective question), runners should be able to stream from whatever they like. We can always re-time runs later, but re-timing long runs is not fun.

Also, if after running the game with the load remover we find that there's a problem with it and the runs need to be re-timed, it'd be a huuuuuge amount of work. As the runs should be long, it'd be more easy for problems to slip through.

So yeah, RTA + split PS4 and PS4 Pro sounds good to me SeemsGood

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Spain
Deleted by the author
Île-de-France, France

I think everyone forget something.

In one year, the game will probably go on PC. So how are we gonna do to time? Everyone will have their own PC with their own loading time.

You can split PS4 Base & PS4 Pro for now but it just delay the issues. On PC, there will be some gap between each people and it won't be fix by changing "just an SSD".

So even if we go RTA right now, I think we should still be focus about deleting the loading time from the run.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

For PC it's much easier to make an accurate load remover, because you can read memory addresses and detect a loading screen more accurately.

When we get the PC version, I hope we can make an accurate load remover and I can even help with that (I made one for ff9).

Edited by the author 3 years ago
AdrianMamba likes this
Lower Saxony, Germany

If we have the OC version it will be it's own category with it's own Timing method (most likely) as the games memory can just be read. That procedure makes it 100% accurate. There is nothing we're delaying by doing that.

AdrianMamba and fhelwanger like this
United States

"...we do not have to worry about timer inconsistencies and theoretically the whole game could be ran without a timer as from what I heard beating the game shows you your IGT which perfectly represents your RTA time."

If the game actually includes its own in game time, I feel like that should resolve any timing issues. Use that. Those timers don't run during loading screens, and there's no real reason to get more accurate than it's own in game time. Most games that include those, Celeste and Cadance of Hyrule come to mind immediately, use those as the default times to make rankings.

Lower Saxony, Germany

The difference to games like Celeste and Carance of Hyrule is that the IGT in this game is RTA. It counts during loads. It also stops when you are idle in a menu.

Netherlands

Loadless for console is in kind of a predicament since removing loading times manually is a royal pain and sounds like more of a hassle than a real benefit for console runners, especially when you are dealing with lengthy runs like these. That said, if it's not accurate to the frame (such as in situations on PC where the timer automatically stops through LiveSplit) it's probably better to consider not to.

Besides that, I don't think splitting PS4 Pro and regular PS4 is gonna be a great comparison when you run RTA. The only real benefit a PS4 Pro offers besides 4K is the "boost mode" which slightly ups frame rate a little bit (since it has a more powerful GPU), but also comes with a rather standard 1TB 5400?ish RPM SATA II hard drive which will result in about the same loading time speed as a regular hard drive in a regular PS4 would.

I'd say if you want to separate hard drive speeds, could probably look at a HDD/SSD variable. Filters can be utilized to filter that variable if necessary. Then again, at some point I would just advice to not track this at all since competitive runs will see a SSD anyway and SSD's are slowly progressing to become the new standard anyway in nowadays hardware, look at the new Xbox and probably PS5.

Edited by the author 3 years ago
Lower Saxony, Germany

No, the Ps4 Pro is a lot faster than the Base PS4 is. You can see that if you watch the demo speedruns.

United States

daravae the PS4 Pro definitely has faster loads then base PS4 and it's much more of an invesment then an HDD or SSD

Lower Saxony, Germany

That's correct. The way it has been handled now is that the consoles are split now into Pro and Base. We figured that splitting it even further would clutter it up to much (Especially with a definite PC port in the future) so we decided that if you are really dedicated into coming out on top it seems to be a reasonable investement as you can usually get them for 50-70 €/$/whatever you use. We do have filters at least for HDD and SSD. It's obviously not the same representation, but it's better than nothing.