I made a short video by TASing Mission 1 with both Music Off and Music On to show the frame data involved

Music Off: Andy Turn 1 End: 1817 Flak Turn 1 End: 1979 Andy Turn 2 End: 2142 Flak Turn 2 End: 2283 Andy Turn 3 End: 2494 Flak Turn 3 End: 2638 Mission Complete: 2787

Music On: Andy Turn 1 End: 1817 Flak Turn 1 End: 2013 Andy Turn 2 End: 2208 Flak Turn 2 End: 2383 Andy Turn 3 End: 2626 Flak Turn 3 End: 2803 Mission Complete: 2984

The Enemy Unit timesave is obviously negligible on Mission 1, but the Turn Start timesave is pretty clear. With Music On, Flak's turns took 34/34/33 additional frames respectively, that 1 fewer frame on Turn 3 is supposedly accounted for by him only having 1 unit on that turn. I'd love to see if this Turn Start timesave ever deviates from this value, 30~ does seem like an accurate ballpark figure.

As the consensus among people who have logged runs of the game appears to be that Music Off being the standard would discourage them from continuing to play, I think we can move forward with tracking which runs are playing with Music On/Off, and decide what to do regarding a timing offset. I'm unsure about how exactly this should be handled as it's not a simple case of "Music Off saves X amount of time across a run", as everyone's runs are likely to take a different # of turns to complete. If we can get some objective data regarding how many frames per turn are saved by having music disabled and whether these frame values ever change (Frames saved on turn start + frames saved on unit moved), that would be a good place to begin. Assuming this frame data doesn't change, it wouldn't be very difficult to track in a spreadsheet, just time-consuming during verification, if we decided to go that route.

For now I've added Music On/Off as a variable with each run on the board tracked appropriately. If the above suggestions turn out to be impractical, worst case scenario is that Music Off can be banned for future submissions, it's not an elegant solution but I don't see a good alternative.

This is a really cool discovery, I'm surprised I didn't notice this sooner. My initial reaction is to say that there shouldn't be a category/variant split for this because as you say, this doesn't change anything about how the game actually plays in terms of strats/tech used or route followed. It's the exact same run, just using a toggle that happens to save a substantial amount of time across a full run. The music does add a lot of character to this game so I get why runners would want to still be able to play with it, but my own personal opinion is that in speedrunning we're already ostensibly going for an objective that is seen by a lot of people as "Not fun". Which isn't to say that speedrunning itself isn't fun, but we're running games to see how fast they can be completed. If anyone feels particularly strongly about this I'd like to hear, my own position on the matter is that this is just a meta advancement and we don't need a new category for runs that just weren't aware that this was faster.

Original Donor applies to what percentage of the site's total userbase, exactly? A very small one I expect, and those are the users who have demonstrated the longest-standing support and investment in the site's development. Was it really deemed necessary to scrimp and scrape over not offering those people automatic lifelong supporter status as a gesture of goodwill? Those individuals' support of the site extends far beyond their financial contributions; those are the people who helped build the site up and encourage communities to adopt this site as a home. Not every community was on board with using SRC, and not every community still is.

This is just ridiculously tone-deaf to me and serves as another demonstration of how the site ownership is far-enough removed from the history of the site that they've lost sight of some important things.

Made a one-time donation whilst SRC was under Pac's ownership for ad-free viewing Now under ELO ownership have to pay a monthly fee for the same thing

Nice grift lol

Maybe he's a Pokemon.

Oh boy.

We've gotta stop children from being able to use the internet unsupervised.

I do actually believe that this could serve as a helpful verification tool. As mentioned already, heart rate tends to spike at the climax of a run, when the runner is under maximum pressure, but in a case where the runner is cheating by playing back a spliced run, for instance, it stands to reason that they wouldn't undergo this sort of physiological change because they already know the outcome of the "run".

Not that this should become standardised, or a requirement to do runs. That would be a ridiculous requirement, but it is an interesting thought nonetheless.

"Best speedrunner"

EDIT: Was going to post a more serious response, but the forums now appear to have a relatively short character limit for new posts, for some reason. Good website.

tl;dr such a system is very surface-level and doesn't take into account many factors such as level of competition, effort put into a given game, or percentile weighting on a given leaderboard.

As questions are being raised surrounding this issue both on this forum and in the Sonic Speedrunning Community discord server, I'm going to take this opportunity as an SSC admin to address it here and hopefully provide a definitive answer.

The decision was taken to report Jaypin to speedrun.com staff after a user submitted evidence that Jaypin had taken footage of multiple of their ILs and submitted them as his own. The ILs in question were not listed on speedrun.com at the time of Jaypin submitting them, so detecting them as stolen runs was not possible via only looking at the leaderboards.

The evidence that they are the same runs is beyond reasonable doubt; side-by-side playback of the runs sync'd to the frame definitively showed that they were identical runs, all of which belonged to the user who filed the report as their upload dates preceded Jaypin's. There is also no room to interpret this as an accident or misunderstanding, as Jaypin went as far as to place his overlay over one of the ILs in question. After the evidence was presented to Jaypin himself, he proceeded to delete the videos in question from his channel.

This evidence was shared with speedrun.com staff, who were in agreement that the evidence provided was sound, and was a clear and deliberate violation of site rules, and so site staff took the decision to issue a site ban to Jaypin. It is also a violation of SSC Discord rules to either impersonate a user or pass their work off as one's own.

I hope that this serves as a clear explanation of what transpired and the reasons for the ban. I can only assume that needing to make a post like this indicates that Jaypin has not been forthcoming with his own community concerning the reason he was banned, which is disappointing to see. If you have any further questions about this matter, please contact me privately on Discord where I will be happy to speak as a representative of SSC.

Hi there, sorry for missing this thread for so long.

I'll indeed add Switch as a platform since it's now an official release.

"It’s not the best time but there is no reason it should not be checked by this time..."

How could you know that? Some games do have a quick turnaround time for verification, but it's not expected to be the norm. The most that can be said is that if you feel verification isn't happening fast enough, the game should have more mods/verifiers added if possible, but it's not like your run is going anywhere and you can just keep doing runs in the meantime.

You cannot.

Now, I realise that this thread is a year old and that this could well come off as nitpicky, but was there really no better choice of words for an important topic on a website of this nature than "Cheat sheet"?

C'mon.

For actual Hero Story/Dark Story practice, the best method is to use actual savestates in Dolphin.

This is because restarting the boss fights in many instances causes their AI or behaviour to change, such as Sonic 1/Shadow 1 running as soon as they gain control, or Egg Golem becoming increasingly unresponsive.

If you can really only use the PC version though, using the Boss Rush menu is obviously the fastest way to reach Big Foot/Hot Shot, then there are a few scenes in Story Select that start on a boss fight, such as Shadow 1, Hero Egg Golem, and Sonic 2 in Dark Story. Sonic 2 is perfectly fine to use instead of Shadow 2 as the fight is basically identical, but with your starting positions swapped.

Hi, thanks for your question.

Since there has never been a precedent for ILs being ran in this game we've never been inclined to add boards for them in the past. How would you envision them being set up, ie. full-stage/stage segments, timing method, etc?

This is unfortunately something I'm gonna have to be sold on as I don't believe as a general rule that boards should be added as an incentive to get people to run a category, but rather they should be added to accommodate runs that already exist. If you already had some existing runs/attempts to show, it would help your case greatly.

We're also interested in the decomp, and the plan is to allow it for use once it seems like they're done updating and bugfixing it. I see that the latest patch was 2 weeks ago, not sure if there's still active development going on, but once it's clear that it's in a totally finished state we will in all likelihood OK it for speedrunning use.

Wow!! Amazing find, and really encouraging to see how low the time may come with this.

Alright that's enough internet for me for one day.