Hello , I had been running this game a bit before this was added to the website, so I'm really happy to see that this is here now. I think Mandagon has the capability to be a pretty good speed game but instead of talking about that I wanted to address a bit of a problem that I've found while running the game.
As far as I can tell the loading times whenever the main world has to be loaded (eg. coming out of the first house / whenever you cutscene skip) are completely up to how fast your computer runs. This stood out to me mostly when, while trying to record, all my times were almost 20 seconds slower. Mandagon is a fairly simple game graphically, but it does do some more complicated stuff then some platformers, so the difference in loading times between computers can be enough to change times. For instance, just looking at the difference between the first screens (or whatever people want to call that short first section) of the best any%run and the best 1 tablet run right now, the difference is almost 8 seconds even though the actual difference in their speed is less than 2 at most.
Either way, I'm curious to hear if you guys have been noticing any change in loading times while recording or have any ideas on lag reduction or possibly even in game time being used.
I was literally just about to post this. I was trying to do a 1 Tablet run, and I always ended up 15-20 seconds behind StarOfDoom. I watched to see what was different, and found the huge discrepancy in loading time. Here is the run where it took a clear 20+ seconds to load... Maybe we should have the run start after the player loads into the main area? Although I like how the start can set you far ahead or totally wreck a run, if it makes it impossible for players to run at a equal field we may have to think of a way around it. Do you know if this also applies to when a player enters the final temple?
My guess is that if there is any lag at the final temple its pretty small (or at least is on my computer). My guess is that the time taken is just to load in the entire game all at once. After all, the vast majority of the game takes place in the same world without any loading screens to divide it. When you load into any of the houses, or the final temple, the game probably still has to load, but because of how small they are and without any large aesthetics it probably loads them pretty easily. It might be possible to try timing runs based on in game time or just take off the times in loading screens altogether, but that would have to be a fairly big decision because it would require more difficult timing and re timing of old runs.
Same issue as Titan Souls (A similar game visually that I used to run)
What we can do is:
A. Manually cut out loading times. That would be a LOT more work for everyone.
Or B. Someone (maybe me, but i'm pretty new to it and it'd probably take a full day or more of work for me) could make a mandatory auto-splitter that cuts out load times automatically (if users don't want to use the auto-splitter, they can choose to cut out load times manually, or be on a different leaderboard than everyone else).
Those are basically the two options. The way Titans Souls handled it was not good; they decided to ignore it completely, which meant the PS4 times were faster than PC could ever possibly get, since the game was more optomised on PS4.
It's up to what you guys what to do.
@StarOfDoom I totally understand that, which is why I brought up that I enjoy the starting area as a part of the run. I don't actually know how to run a splitter on my Mac, it seems that most of the programs I use either don't allow me to change the hotkeys/have none or just won't open. I just go by the frame when adding the timer to the run. Stopping it at the corresponding frames for the run. Unless I'm totally failing at setting up these timers, I'd be fine editing it with the extra work. If other players opt for the other "splitter" option, I'll have to sort it out.
If you use LiveSplit(which you should, I ¤think¤ it's supported by mac), it's a built in function. Someone would need to code it though, which could be tedious.
The issue is, forcing users to manually cut out load times really can cut down on the number of people who want to run. It really can be a pain to re-time and cut out loads.
After a quick google search Llanfair seems to be a mac splitter for speed running. It doesn't on the other hand seem to have built in autosplitting, so it would require a bit more programming to get that to work. Personally I'm a big fan of having an autosplitter as opposed to splitting your own times, but having no experience in writing something like that, I don't think I would be much help in making one.
I'm looking into working on the auto-splitter, but I don't have much of a clue in what i'm doing either. We'll see where this goes ¤shrugs¤
