I ask because near everyone runs on emulator and a lot of people's IGT is actually greater than their real time which doesn't make any sense.

the scant handful of console runs don't seem to exhibit this, so I have no idea what's going on there

My RTA if you add on the cut scene after last hit on the final boss is never too far away from IGT, always within 30 secs or something. I imagine IGT doesnt count door animations or first cut scene but it's never crazily off RTA. As with most RE games, the IGT is a bit of a law unto itself. Also in case you are not aware, the menu pauses IGT so don't worry about menu nav and optimisation.

I know that playing the PAL version (50hz) effects the IGT so that the time is much lower then if you where to run on NTSC. It doesn't seem to work the same as other RE PSX games? For example, menus pausing IGT.

been doing runs on PS2 FDS and lol there's a nearly 2 minute discrepancy between RTA and IGT, it's so fucked dude.

how did people even arrive at the conclusion to use IGT for this

I believe it is because of the inconsistency of door loads, framerates etc across platforms and regions that it was decided to use IGT, the same as many of the RE speedruns. Everyone just runs the JPN version on emulators to give a level playing field.

This game has a frame based timer just like RE2 (original) so yeah the difference between IGT and RTA is normal and I'm fairly certain the IGT pauses in the inventory. Which someone could verify very easily by making a save state on the final boss and sitting in the inventory for a while.

The frame based timer is the reason PAL is fucked because the frame conversion wasn't changed, same with RE2 PAL

I just want to be clear about one thing with the IGT, the frame rate slowdown doesn’t make things fair it actually makes things less fair.

When I tested it, and the frame rate slowed down, the IGT was actually still ticking at 30fps. So if your game is running at 10fps due to slowdown every second is counting 3 seconds against you. That means that any mode where the game runs smoother is always going to be privileged over ones that don’t, by a pretty large margin. Three seconds per second is pretty hard to overcome, and multiplicatively more punishing than just having your framerate dip by the inverse of the frame drop.

I’m glad things got shifted around but this game isn’t slowing down the timer when your framerate chugs. It is, in effect, speeding it up. That was the core of my argument against IGT to begin with, because it’s actually disturbingly inaccurate, rather than extra accurate and extra fair.

Just to kind of... add on here, and despite not running the game I kind of just want to go over one thing because I've kind of had to read over most of the discussion but I am not speaking as a 'full mod' here but rather just as an avid Resident Evil runner who is quite familiar with the "broken" in-game timers some games in this series have.

It seems the end result was to essentially split console and emulator, which fixes the issue of emulator having the framerate advantage over console among other things, but it doesn't really assist in the issue that the timer itself just... seems broken?

According to the findings in the original thread it does not pause on load times, or most cutscenes (can anyone be specific that has looked into it which cutscenes?) but instead pauses primarily on menuing as said here: [quote]- pauses on menus[/quote]

which is an aspect of the gameplay.

So, despite the fact emulator and console are aside from each other, the initial point being raised was this timer isn't really the ideal way to track runs, because not only are some specifics still absent from the explanation but part of the execution of the run (menus) are exempt from the timing.

This all said, is there any rational argument that can be given here as to why this game would choose to use IGT that excludes specific sections of gameplay over simple real-time tracking?

Emulation lag and load times don't really matter (or, rather, aren't a good argument against real-time tracking) because:

[quote]doesn't pause on loads (but this isn't as significant as you might think since the door scenes are fixed length and account for almost all of the loading anyway)

always runs at 30fps regardless of the game speed, so when your game lags, you lose time.[/quote]

The game's timer essentially already appears to tick at a continuous, unaltering speed much like the IGT for RE3 PC, so it is already, essentially, a real-time timer just with some extremely large flaws.

(One thing that also confuses me is how certain runs has an IGT that exceeded the real time, as in, how does a run lasting 36:05 real-time from menu input > results (or the length of the entire VOD, even) have an IGT of 40 seconds above that? Baring in mind it is pausing in some instances and yet still the IGT can be exceeding real-time.

I would assume this is due to emulator exceeding the intended framerate/speed of the game. As in the game is running at a slightly faster speed than is intended and so it's ticking 1 second of IGT faster than 1 second of real-time is passing by. )

As a final note. Could this situation have been handled better? Of course. I do think users jumping in to the last thread, essentially jumping onto the pile was a bit uncalled for, but I also do think it is perfectly reasonable for discussions such as these to be held entirely within the site's presence, here on the forums to be publicly discussed. Discussions should be allowed to be had here, and moderators really should be open to doing so. There wasn't really ever a need to close the previous two threads whilst the discussion was ongoing, because by closing those threads you're basically saying that the doors for discourse on that particular topic is now over, when it very clearly wasn't. I wouldn't even say it is right now still, given the information supplied in that thread that still wasn't really addressed. Does this have to resolved right here and right now? Not entirely, but there is some pretty damning red flags in that information given regarding the timer I would expect more people to be concerned about, as @Valdrake posted above.

Yeah there isn’t a lot to account for the discrepancy other than the mismatch in framerate, and that causing abnormal behavior, which really means that unless someone wants to tear the code apart the IGT is still largely a question mark, which doesn’t seem like any way to mark a run.

Like at current we know that two runs that’re 35 minutes could be very far apart and unless that’s all menu’ing there’s clearly something weird going on, whether it’s what I think or what you’re getting at or something else, it definitely seems like it’s not an accurate metric.

Some leaderboards have a column for RTA time and IGT time. Having future runs require RTA and the IGT could be a thing, not sure if that would help at all? You can keep IGT as the main ranking method with this.