Suggestion: Use RTA (at least for PC)
2 years ago
Argentina

When you finish the battle with Miranda should stop and the could be after you select the difficulty

United Kingdom

The fact its impressive is the one of the reasons its essential for a speedrun. Even RE7, RE2, RE3 pretty much every RE game has had the requirement of having inventory management. Yeah RE8 doesn't have quite such an impact since key items are separate, but let's say you dont manage your inventory and pick up too much stuff, its not fair to be able to sit there for 15 minutes organising your routing mistake, you should be timed on it.

Cursed, am I right in thinking RTA won't work with an autosplitter? Or will an RTA timer still be able to latch on to the game?

Kentucky, USA

really unfortunate with the inventory pausing IGT but I guess RTA is the only way, gonna be unfortunate that someone may not compete simply because their loading is losing them to much time.

Florida, USA

Yeah, an autosplitter should still work perfectly fine. And with load remover that wouldn't be an issue @xerian

Ideally, the load remover will just recreate the timer that's in RE2R in terms of behavior. Basically reversing the current behavior.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Argentina

In my opinion RTA should only be use on PC you got the splits but for console better with the IGT

United States

Being basically brand new to speed-running(RE8 will be my first attempt at this whole thing) i don't really know how much of a say i'll get in this, or how much my opinion matters, but i feel like RTA W/O loads is a solid way to time this. The timer also pauses when pausing to skip cut scenes IGT, and even if it's fractions of a second, if you're constantly fumbling you could theoretically be on pace with someone else IGT despite being further behind RTA. I don't know how much the timer moves while mashing pause and constantly pausing and unpausing, but it feels like it adds up fast.

United States

"zgl is typing..." - some of you are going to get that, most probably not. Lol.

I was about to make a separate thread about this but I realized that it’s just another point to consider in the argument of choosing RTA or IGT.

In RE7 we have a number of Retries that we use to manipulate different aspects of the game. Some alter Ethan’s running speed, some “teleport” Ethan forward saving a couple seconds, and some help avoid enemy pop-in and iFrames. I bring it up because I was testing this out in Village and there are some teleport “Restarts” that exist, (example: ) but they may not be able to be used and that will depend on the timing method for runs.

IGT reverts when you use a retry. This includes at death. So, if you die and continue, any IGT progression that occurred from the time of your auto-save to the time of death is wiped away. If you hit restart at any point, all your accrued IGT since your last auto-save is wiped away. See example VOD here: This puts us at a loss of two things if IGT is used, the ability to die and continue a run afterwards and the ability to hit restart for any strategic purpose.

I saw some comments about RTA with Load Removal being messy, it really isn't when referring to the auto-splitter. The wonderful Mr. @CursedToast has been designing these auto-splitters for a while and is more than capable of delivering a more consistent and accurate LiveSplit time using the auto-splitter than the dev's have given us with IGT. We use his auto-splitter with load removal as the official time on PC for 2 different runs in RE7, the No Guest House categories, which are a community creation, and the End of Zoe categories, which do not have an IGT displayed at the end of game stats screen. On console, NGH uses a very awkward IGT subtraction method for official timing and EOZ uses RTA with some messy manual "load removal" for PS users. The way CursedToast designed the auto-splitter for RE7 actually removes some of the "pay to win" aspects of the run on PC because of how it handles starting and stopping the timer compared to how IGT does it. IMO PC speedruns would be in the best position if it's using RTA with a auto-splitter that does load removal.

That is not so cut and dry for consoles. RTA doesn't have a simple load removal option on console; therefor, everything from the decided starting point to the decided ending point is included. I saw a comment mentioning grouping consoles by like storage devices, consoles with SSD's in a group and consoles with HDD's in another, but this doesn't really work if you are using RTA because these consoles have such disparity between the individual consoles. Hell, even the PS5 has disparity with itself. I made a video showing the PS5 playing two different versions of the game, one version being the PS5 version and the other being the PS4 version, to show how the hardware doesn't really dictate parity:

The results of this video are that the sections that are load related and have absolutely no Human Element to cause disparity between them give a 17.733 second difference in the first ~90 seconds of a run that would begin at the point of clicking the difficulty, and this is running on the exact same PS5. The Series X has faster loads than the PS4 version shown in that VOD, but it doesn't have the instant loads for this game like the PS5 does. When we tested load time related things on RE7, we found that a base Xbox One was slower than a Xbox One S which was slower than a Xbox One X, and if someone uses an external HDD or SSD it completely changes the loading times yet again for each version of those consoles, not enough to take advantage of most of RE7's retries but for the sake of looking at RTA it would've been significant as up to 25 seconds difference on one single load between a base Xbox One and a Xbox One X with the stock internal HDD's. I don't have RE Village on Xbox yet, probably won't have the funds for another copy for a while so I can't break down the differences as in depth (I have a Series X, One X, and base One I could test with), but watching some streams you can see the load time difference between the PS5, PS4, Series X, One X, and One S. I haven't seen any streams on Xbox One base console or Series S. Ultimately, what I'm getting at is if console goes RTA, the times from each individual version of each console means PS5 is free WR's over everything else, Series X is likely the next block, with Xbox One X, PS4 and PS4 Pro, Xbox One S, and Xbox One base console following if all skill related things were equal and likely in exactly that order.

With all of this being said, it's entirely possible that the loading differences can have an affect on IGT as well. I'm working through the PS4 version of the game now so I can get the IGT timer on my pause screens since PS5 save data doesn't share with PS4 (/sigh), and hopefully I can get access to a Xbox copy. I'll try to get some data on how loads affect IGT from every version I do end up with though. I think even if IGT does get affected by loading times, it won't be nearly as significant as the time differences we will see between the consoles in RTA and because of that I think if the decision is made for console to go RTA then the only fair option would be to split each console off individually, unless someone comes up with a quick and easy way to get load removal on console as well. If the decision is to stick with IGT for consoles, then I think "Restarts" should be banned from use on console as well as continuing from death since whatever IGT progression you have is erased.

tldr: In this individual's opinion, PC should use the auto-splitter and be RTA with Load Removal. Console RTA is pretty grim looking, but IGT seriously needs to be tested to see how borked it is between different hardware. Console has no good choices on the table, again IMO, in terms of official timing. Nothing in this post even touches on the other flaws of IGT or RTA that have been listed already in this thread.

.#blamezgl

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Hozen, maxylobes and 4 others like this
Arizona, USA
Briarwoodsz
He/Him, They/Them
2 years ago

I agree with RTA cause of the menu pausing, I've seen how that works for minecraft runs and I'd rather it not become common for people to sit and think for 2-3 minutes while in the item menu instead of just playing the game

Mhyke likes this
Missouri, USA

I don't know i this was discussed yet, but I found out that the elevators in this game are essentially load screens. Which is very very bad for console runs. I tested 1 elevator on a ps4 pro vs ps5 and it was around a 50 second difference. Sadly I think console runs may need to be split into separate leaderboards like re4 or at the very least a split between current and previous gen

United States

RTA and load removal should work fine for PC.

Console is going to get rekt regardless of what happens though. IMO, if console goes by IGT, retrying from death would have to be banned in order to prevent people from rolling back their IGT, and inventory/menuing would need strict enforcement on how much time can be spent "off the clock". I would say it needs to be incredibly strict, for instance, shopping with the Duke kept to 1 minute or less. To keep it fair, retrying from death should then also be banned on PC as well to keep things consistent. Unfortunately, I don't really see an easy way to go the RTA route with console as there would be NUMEROUS issues with load times between platforms and likely would just result in chaos amongst the community. That being said, RTA across the board would probably be the cleaner and more accurate method in the long run. It's a shitty situation, but something we would just have to deal with for this game.

Florida, USA

@Kaori_3 That's the first I've heard of this. That's big. Putting together fair leaderboards for this game (for console) is going to be like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

Edited by the author 2 years ago
Kaori_3 likes this
Québec

so what if there's a no death run in some any% attempts? would you considered that as valid run if they only use IGT over RTA for Console overall?

United States

@Kaori_3 There are similar situations to this in RE7 and RE3R. We found a fairly simple solution that I would hope the mods would allow for this game, so long as console ends up being IGT. Basically, you allow the runners to pause to let the game catch up with you. In RE7 and RE3R, some sections of the game would just stop you and bring up a loading screen until the game caught up. Both of those games also had certain doors and elevators that you had to wait at so that the next area could load before you could open them. RE3R has sections where the game “gets behind” and doesn’t load the upcoming area but still allows you to go into it before it finally pops in after you’ve entered. RE3R also had trouble keeping up and would make runners pause after the “horde mode” so that they could skip the cutscene faster. All of this stuff was solved for those games by allowing console runners to perform a premeditated short pause before these known bad loading areas and give the game a buffer to load correctly. If this game is not timed IGT for consoles, then this wouldn’t be a viable solution here but, while cumbersome, it would be viable for IGT.

Aside from that, another thing I’ve noticed that would be an issue only for RTA on consoles is that on last gen consoles there is often a slight forced load when opening the pause screen, inventory, maps... basically any menu you have to open can have this slight load occur and you have to wait for it to end before being able to do anything. Since IGT stops when these menus are opened, it wouldn’t affect IGT timed runs, but it would create more disparity between consoles with RTA since the length of that forced load time seems to be varying in lengths in each of the last gen platforms. I haven’t noticed it at all in Series X runs/playthroughs I’ve watched and it doesn’t happen at all on PS5.

I’m starting to get the impression that consoles should go IGT even if there are some less than ideal but easily fixable issues with the timer stopping for various things. All it takes to get rid of people spending extra time without IGT moving is making a console specific rule, for PC as well if it doesn’t go RTA, that says all menuing or merchant visits must be done hastily and tactfully or it could result in rejection. People are going to be buying the same shop items and upgrades and doing the same menuing a lot, this is a speedrun after all, so the expectation that they generally know ahead of time what they need and can be swift at doing these things is not unreasonable. Moderating this game, no matter what decisions are made regarding timing or any of this tbh, is going to be some real work. GL to whoever the group of folks are this time around.

NuZ and Kaori_3 like this
Missouri, USA

So pausing fixed the elevator issue, but now the problem would be how many elevators there is and how long you have to pause for each one. it definitely needs more testing but if consoles go to IGT maybe you need to show your time after each elevator for restart abuse.

NuZ and zgl like this
Phoenix, AZ, USA

Dont know if this is accurate but in dmc5 you can skip cutscenes faster at higher fps or with better hardware because they load in information mid cutscene should be tested if going rta potential fix would be rta l;aodless but it also p[auses on cutscenes

zgl, Hozen, and CursedToast like this
Florida, USA

That's exactly what I've done @Waifu. Currently in alpha testing with @captain_ezekiel

zgl and Waifu like this
England

just throwing in a +1 to using RTA, IGT in this game is weird and scuffed.

RTA is gonna be subject to general weirdness surrounding PC hardware but I still think it's the better option long term. Basically, I expect timing to be sort of scuffed either way but since IGT ticks during cutscenes but not during shop menu it has like no worthwhile advantage over Loadless RTA in this game lol

zgl, Waifu, and CursedToast like this

RTA seems inevitable, just hoping there will be a load remover to avoid any hardware bias. That of course means splitting the PC and console boards, but judging from RE7, that would've happened anyway.

Phoenix, AZ, USA

@CursedToast awesome that seems great then i am all for rta lrt

zgl likes this
United States

Yee let's get to making sure we got that 5000 APM menuing speed counted to the frame. I'm joking though. I'm cool with whatever is decided as long as I have an autosplitter I'm happy.