Use of in-game time
3 years ago
Tasmania, Australia

At the end of each run there is a message displaying your time in seconds (e.g. "223 seconds!") above the option to enter the credits. I don't know how accurate it is or why it isn't currently used instead of real time. For reference, the current Android WR would be a 4:13 IGT and the PC/Web WR would be a 3:43 IGT. I don't know how it works but I assume timing starts when you spawn into the game and finishes when you finish talking to Lana at the end of the game. I feel like, as with most games, real time isn't very fair and equal. My PC can be slow or laggy sometimes, especially during loading up the game after pressing New Game. I was timing runs using the real time method and my times were sometimes almost a minute slower than the PC/Web WR but were using the same or better strats and only being 5-10 seconds slower in IGT. I think the implementation of in-game time as the standard timing method would make the leaderboards fairer and more equal, remove the need for having a timer on-screen, make timing more accurate and standardised, and open running the game competitively to people like me with slower devices. At least adding a column for IGT but keeping the real time column as the default sorting (for a fair comparison) would still be ok. Can someone explain why in-game time isn't used? Am I missing something? Thanks.

Edited by the author 3 years ago

I can't speak to why this board was set up for real time vs IGT; you'll have to track down one of the super mods to ask that question. From other games I have run (mostly console), IGT is not always preferred when available. The reasons for that differ from game to game. In some cases, IGT does not cover all parts of gameplay, leading to strategies that take much longer in real time but are faster in IGT. In other cases, IGT is fundamentally inaccurate, and thus RT is preferred. Each community works this out over time, sometimes changing several times as new information is discovered.

That said, if your setup is running the game much slower than others, that itself could be an unfair advantage. While it slows down your real time duration, it also affords you more real time to perform the game actions for a given IGT (assuming IGT is accurate). I'm not sure if you are doing your Android runs on original hardware or on an emulator, but that is something to consider. From console communities I've worked with, emulated runs are generally accepted, but they need to be run at original hardware speed. Runs with emulated speed are significantly slower or faster than original hardware would be rejected independently of whether the board was configured for RT or IGT.

Finally, for PC games where load times differ significantly between machines, I've seen those communities account for this by removing load times from the real-time duration of the run. This is often done via auto-splitters that integrate into the game itself. Given the description of your setup, I'm not sure if load removal would account for all the slow down you are seeing.

TCM likes this
Tasmania, Australia

I don't know how accurate IGT is and I have no idea how we could work that out. I assume it would be reasonably accurate though, based off what I've seen. I'm running the web version so maybe using the standalone instead might be faster? In any case I don't see how load removal would be a bad thing or why we shouldn't do it. There's this tool I know of that I think would work well here: https://github.com/Slush0Puppy/retime If this would be done I would suggest ending the run when the in-game time pops up rather than after an ending is chosen, or even upon talking to lana, as there is no gameplay after this.

I would still be happy running real time whether load times were removed or not though.

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