Greetings all,
Many in the Super Metroid community have been talking for a short while now about making a move from our current record keeping site (deertier.com) to this site. This site offers a number of advantages over the former, but we've also noticed a couple things that we're unable to do currently within the scope of this site's ability.
The primary concern is Ceres Escape times. Ceres escape times are expressed in XX"XX, as the time that's left in the escape sequence in the beginning of the game. From what we've seen so far, there are two issues trying to properly represent this on the site: (2) Times can only be sorted ascending, meaning the lowest time is marked as first place. For this category, we would need to sort the category descending, that is, the highest time is marked as first place.
My questions are, are we missing something and does the capability to perform these two things already exist, or would it be possible to get this custom functionality created on the site somehow?
Another smaller issue is the selection of region for Super Metroid. JP and US ROMs of Super Metroid are the exact same ROM. While JP would technically be the correct answer for selecting the ROM, we feel omitting the US version would be confusing to some people, and would prefer a custom entry for JP/US or something similar instead, combining both regions since they're the same ROM.
Let me know if you need any clarification on what I said.
That second one sounds like something nice for the timing update that is on the to do list. Maybe Lighnat0r can implement it with some quick coding but i guess it has to wait till the timing update.
A possible option for ceres escape would be to take the value the countdown starts at, and then remove the escape time, while having the escape time listed as an in-game time, and then sorting by RTA to get the correct ordering. It's a bit messy but it works within the current structure. (e.g. if the countdown starts at 90s, then a 32.45s escape time would be 57.55 real time, with the in-game time listed as 32.45 being the correct value)
Regarding your primary concern: Descending times is something we've wanted to support, but haven't taken the time to implement. The SMS community had wanted the same for a few ILs. I always have general concerns about implementing more and more features on top of code that hasn't been well modularized, but adding this might not make future work any more time consuming to clean up. Lighnat0r would probably have to comment on the feasibility of implementing this in the short term.
One option to support custom regions is to leave off the region flags and define a region variable. We have the new setting as of about a week ago to implement a variable as a subcategory, so you could isolate US/JP and PAL. ( http://www.speedrun.com/The_Site/thread/lac6h ) I think this may be a reasonably good way to address the specified use case.
I've added an option to set whether times should be descending per category.
Do let us know if you encounter any bugs with it, as kirkq mentioned the current code is fairly old and doesn't play well with adding lots of options without a rewrite.