United Stateshttps://drive.google.com/file/d/1D49FMR-z7HSCBcRJSFj2JNnR7XXTZKyF/view?usp=share_link
In this video, I demonstrate a way to skip escorting the snowball through 4-Ex. This works because, so long as you're standing in front of a door and not too high up, you can go through the door; this means that, if you can place a keystone in front of the door and stand on it, you can get through that way.
Note that the 'ledge' under the door isn't actually a platform; the intended strat here is to escort the snowball through the level, and by the time it gets to the end it's big enough that standing on it lets you enter the door. Instead, using precise Reisen hovers and a backup peach you can place a keystone and get on it before dying to the spikes. If you can get on the keystone but you're too high on the door, you can short hop, land on the rock while it's falling, and hit [up] to enter the door.
I also tried using sloped ceiling clips; while you can clip into the ceiling and get above the door, you can only get back in bounds through a sloped ceiling, and the only ones of those are before the spikes, and collision in the region around the door seems solid. This could possibly be used to skip the back and forth sliding through the zombies, but I haven't pulled that off and timed it yet.
I'm not sure if this strat is worth using in 100%; while it's certainly much faster than escorting the snowball, it also requires bringing a Tenshi powerup, and I'm not sure if it's worth going out of your way to get one.
So I decided to try figuring out where the time differences were. I figured it was probably load times, and I could rule out within-level framerate by counting how long it took for 100 ticks on the ingame timer to elapse. Doing some quick and dirty timing by hand with livesplit, I found that, looking at Ohon's 15:43 it takes about 48.X seconds for 100 ticks, while in PerroVegano's 12:02 it takes in the high 49-low 50 second range (and got low 50 on a live timer on my machine). More careful testing is needed, but I was unpleasantly surprised to see up to a 2% difference. (I'm also a little disappointed that it appears to run a little faster than a nice 0.5s/tick on Win7).
If this was just a load time issue we could probably find a way to retime that takes those into account and reunify the leaderboard, but since it actually appears to be a framerate issue that can swing things by potentially up to 2% (even before looking at loads), this is much more uncomfortable.
So I play through Wine on Linux these days. Which category would that fall under?
No trouble with the submissions. SRC's notifications don't go anywhere I actually see them, so I don't always get to them immediately. Feel free to hit me up on Discord at gotonis#9390 or whisper me on Twitch if I'm taking too long to check and then watch through runs.
I was worried about an issue here because MLL includes a VSync option, which ties game physics to framerate. I usually shrink my monitor to low resolution when I play NSML so the game appears bigger without having to force maximize it, and I found that doing this brings my monitor refresh rate to 75 Hz for some reason. I'd been worried that since these settings interfere with MLL timing, that they might also interfere with NSML, but based on some 1-1 clears with low res 60Hz it appears NSML isn't tied to refresh rate and my fears were unfounded.
NSML was unaffected (because it doesn't have vsync, I guess), which means I only really have to redo any% Mari and Alice here, so no big deal. The idea I had was to just count the game's clock ticks against the timer, but I'm not sure if that actually works. I'll try out Steam's FPS indicator personally. I think for now I'll just try paying close attention to make sure things make sense; after playing at 60 a bit longer I should have a good idea how quickly certain stages are doable with P-speed most of the time. If stage 1 is done much faster than whatever my gold ends up being, or comes close without much P-speed, that should be a pretty solid indicator.
I decided to sanity check my NSML splits a bit. Setting my monitor size to small but keeping refresh rate at 60hz doesn't seem to effect my ability to play 1-1 quickly; my gold there is a 40.1 under the old refresh rate, which suggests I shouldn't be able to do much better than 50; I was able to get a 42.4 on an attempt with a bad star bounce under the new refresh rate (which beats out the 42.8 from my full run PB).
TL;DR framerate problems appear to have been a false alarm, at least for this game.
It has come to my attention that my monitor, for whatever reason, tends to set itself to a 75hz refresh rate once I get my resolution low enough. I tend to set my resolution low when playing NSML and MLL because not doing so feels slower, which until today I had thought was due to lag or something.
Because of this, it appears that when I play NSML, the game runs at 75 fps rather than the presumably intended 60, which explains weird timing differences over on the MLL side.
I suggest we look into the issue, and that, if deemed necessary, all of my 100% runs be stricken from the leaderboard.
So I checked and it turns out that for some reason my monitor goes up to 75hz when I lower the resolution. It would appear I've accidentally been playing both this and NSML at 75fps. RIP me, I guess.
This...actually really sucks for me. I feel obligated to enforce at 60fps limit, but I've been playing these two games at 75 for so long that 60 actually feels slow. On top of that, I've spent a long time optimizing golds that are now worthless.
I'll be changing the rules to frame limit at 60fps, but I'm not sure how to enforce that. Heck, I managed to break that rule without really knowing I was. I guess by comparing times to in game time, but IGT and real time seem to differ with Gamercal's too.
Yey. I'll be adding those in. Anyone want to do a blind race?
Also, what do we want for 'both' categories? I'm definitely adding 200%, but does anyone actually want to run double any% or double warpless?
Whoops. For some reason I thought I had the rules set to touching the mushroom. I think I had it like that to avoid issues with screwing up splits because you missed or something like that, which seems dumb in retrospect. I'll switch it over to that and retime as necessary. I'm not entirely sure what's going on for framerate, at least on my end. I have vsync on, and the game runs faster when my monitor is set to 1552x720 or lower. I'm not entirely sure what my refresh rate is. This does cause my splits to be faster than in game time. I'm not sure what this says about my framerate intended, but vsync at large monitor size causes the game to feel sluggish. I'll toy around with it; maybe the English version runs smoothly at full size without vsync. I'll wait on changing rules regarding that until we have more information.
After doing some timing, I haven't broken 3 seconds of timesave on my setup over not clipping, and usually I take some of that trying to position myself better. On top of that, I lose time picking up a powerup in 1-5 (it's an autoscroller, but you do get the short pause for picking up a powerup). This definitely isn't worth doing for 100%. It might be worth doing in any%, but it might be better to use bjw's faster but less consistent setup.
I think I might have cracked the code. https://drive.google.com/open?id=11Rxqrcv7mHXEnU32_axJHrqQ6R7irFDJ
I've gotten a pretty good success rate getting the clip by sliding off of this slope, and if you screw up, you don't lose too much time killing fairies and you can take a few tries. It probably won't be worth it to get it 2nd or 3rd try, but I haven't really done the timing on that yet.
Regarding the setup, from what I can tell you have to start just below the first corner, hold down, then jump right before the second to last corner and immediately hold right (and you should be holding the run button the whole time). It seems like there's a decently large range of where you can start sliding; presumably you'd compensate by jumping at a slightly different time, but it doesn't seem pixel perfect.
It doesn't seem to work while big, which is inconvenient for 100%, but a small reroute will let me work it in to the route without much change to item management. I don't think I'll route it in yet, considering after I get it I'd have the autoscroller, then all of the tight tricks in Alice's stage, then 2-1, but this definitely seems like a viable setup.
While I was practicing today, some strange behavior happened in the block room in 7-6 (4th house). I had the Tenshi powerup, but all of a sudden I was unable to summon rocks. This happened a few times, and I was able to record the event.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-lxFwygRehgbHMwVENjWTNacGs
It's possible that this only happened because I'm running the game through Wine. Has this happened to anyone else before?
That's not the only erratic behavior I've gotten in that room, though this is almost certainly a separate bug. I've managed to kill the cactus fairy in the top right in such a way that the cactus zipped through blocks to the left side of the stage. I haven't been able to replicate the zip, but it seems like it could be useful.
@bjw An "All Exits" (64 is the number of stages, I haven't counted exits) category wouldn't be very much longer than the category currently referred to as "100%". I am aware of 3 exits not included: the secret exit from 1-4 to 1-7, which is used in any%; the nonsecret exit in 2-7, which is just a 'haha you failed the puzzle' exit; and the one in...I believe 2-2, which is right near the secret exit and would just require going through the stage again.
It's really not worth it to have All Achievements and All Exits be separate categories, because they're almost the same. The only nontrivial exit not included is 1-4's secret exit, and I don't think adding it to the run is worth also adding the repetition in World 2.
If a rename is necessary, I suggest that the current category be named "All Achievements"
I believe that the names of categories should be determined by the game's speedrun community. It would appear that they have spoken, and as a prospective member I agree. The terminology is defined in the category rules. If you want to add another category, might I suggest calling it 'All Exits'? If a new category is being added, I don't think we should give it the name of another category that already exists; that would be confusing, especially to anyone unaware of the change.
I don't think All Exits is worth having as a category, as it does not add anything worth doing to what is currently the '100%' category. I also think that '100%' refers to number of things collected, or pause menu achievements gotten. If a name change is absolutely necessary, All Achievements seems to be the only one that works, but it's cumbersome. Reimu% stops working if somebody finds a glitch that breaks the requirements. Thoughts?
