Run Submission Verification Tools
2 years ago
Minnesota, USA

I wasn't sure where to go for this but figured if anyone had or knew of the type of resource I'm looking for this would be the community for it.

It was my understanding with how close some of the times are on the SMB leader boards that run validation can be done down to the frame to ensure accuracy of the run's time.

I mod for the Final Fantasy 1 NES leader boards and a meme category has become fairly hot lately. I want to make sure that I'm approving times as accurately as possible and was hoping that someone knew of any tools to assist with that. The run is just shy of 2 minutes and some of the guys are getting so fast at it that their runs are starting to get close enough together that human error in starting/stopping the timer could be the difference between a position on the leader boards.

Ireland

somewes.com and VirtualDub are useful

Edited by the author 2 years ago
abrahamw999 likes this
Colorado, USA

Hello,

We use several tools that we time runs with. The big one is that we have all the final Bowser patterns mapped out for competitive times (for any%) and can reference those to get the final time using the NES console framerate. For other categories, we commonly retime using software such as VirtualDub.

Something you should take into consideration is how you want to handle that accurate of timing. We time our runs using the NES framerate which is 60.0988139 FPS. The caveat to that is it takes a little extra work to do that when timing just on video alone since max recorded video framerate is generally limited to 60 FPS flat. I also mod for SMB3 and we just use the timings from the video over there instead of converting to NES framerate, so it varies by community. It's just probably something you'd want to decide now rather than later to maintain consistency in timing and not have to change stuff later.

If you have any other questions or need an example, let me know.

AndreiSas01 likes this
England

I mod clash of clans and we use https://somewes.com/frame-count or the SP Retiming tool https://github.com/Slush0Puppy/retime to time to .ms from the submitted video links

Be careful if you are timing from youtube submissions as they throttle bandwidth, a lot of the time we only get 28 to 30 fps :(

Edited by the author 2 years ago
AndreiSas01 likes this
Minnesota, USA

Thanks a lot, I'll take a look at these tools and see where it gets me. We're not at the point where we need to get to the exact frame but there are a few runs that we have posted that could swing by a fraction of a second one way or the other and with out something like this it could be impossible to tell. Even getting the run time accurate with in a tenth of a second will help a ton.

United States
CyrusPlays12
She/Her, They/Them
2 years ago

hello @Avin_Chaos hiw are you

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Requirements for High-Level Any% Runs

Any% (NTSC) runs below 4:57.000 must now fulfill additional requirements in order to be verified.

  • The run's full session must be included in the submission description.
  • For emulator runs below 4:57.000, some form of input display must be visible for the duration of the run. A hand-cam or input
4 months ago