As of 14.09.21 the timing rules have been changed and properly clarified, with RTA now becoming a primary timing method. IGT was always fairly inconvenient to use, with it requiring constant full game restarts for accuracy purposes, so it was a pending change for a while now. IGT will still keep its presence on the boards, but will be completely optional when it comes to putting anything in its field.

Followup change to that is a separation of Consoles and Emulator(s) for a more fair environment when it comes to adjusting to new timing, since the latter tend to have up to few seconds of advantage per loading screen.

Other changes include removing the 100% category due to lack of demand for one atm, and some minor cosmetical changes to the look of the boards in general.

Good day to any DS speedrun enthusiasts that stumbled upon this very post, where i'll finally try to do something that should've been done ages almost a year ago at this point.

To anyone who is unaware what the main issue at hand is when it comes to speedrunning this game, here is the link - https://www.speedrun.com/dont_starve/thread/spnpi To sum it up shortly, PC version of the game introduces an opportunity to anyone to edit their world seed and there's seemingly no good method to prove legitimacy of just about any submission at this point in time. This thing was known and even discussed a bit way back in the day, which led to the same thing i've done few months ago now which is splitting categories to seeded and seedless. But at the same time ages ago it wasn't quite a known feature and/or maybe implemented properly so eventually boards removed the said categories split since there were little to no runs at the time and none of them seemingly messed around with any of that. After some time i was abruptly left moderating this game on my own to my surprise, but there weren't that many runs throughout the years so it didn't look like there were gonna be that many issues when it comes to keeping these boards together, although even few years back i would definitely prefer to have more knowledgeable people as co-mods by my side seeing as i never quite intended for this to be my main game by any chance. Normally one wouldn't be exactly cheerful when saying that the amount of submitted runs throughout the years is low, but at times this felt like such a burden that i definitely felt this way more often than i did the other way around. That, obviously enough to some people, left to my piss poor rate of approving/rejecting the few present submissions, which i can't really be excused for no matter how much i apologise, but trust me, i'm really sorry, especially if that upset some people. As for the end of this wall of text called backstory, all i can say is that i tried to reflect upon my lack of activity that i mentioned and improve in that matter around april 2019 when i finally got rid of some of my irl issues which coincided at the time with the re-introduction of the issue that i mentioned in the beginning and was hoping would be long forgotten, but wasn't unfortunately. This was a huge mood killer, to say the least, and while i slowly got through whatever was submitted at the time later on, after i got a warning from one of the site mods, i obviously couldn't be sure myself whether any of the submission were legitimate or not, with the exception of at least one person that being @BorisTheCheese . Now i'm extremely unsure on what is the future of these leaderboards may be, or what is there to do to resolve this issue, other than trying to contact game devs and hoping they'll miraculously be willing to do something about this, which is while pretty much the only logical thing to go with right now, i haven't done because of apathy when it comes to simply looking down on these boards. The other obvious thing though which i should've done ages ago as well is try and ask for help from the very few people who were more or less active in the last couple of years and are far more knowledgeable people when it comes to this game and its DLCs. Coming up with better rules/categories and all that would be much easier if there would actually be proper speedrunning community present even if it would consist of 2-3 people. So this is what i'm gonna try to do right this moment: @MisutoM @BorisTheCheese And @Anyone else interested in speedrunning this game and who has a decent experience with it I need some serious help with moderation on these boards, i'm really hoping that it's not too late to ask for that and there'll be someone willing to step up and provide the help needed to brainstorm the way out of this unfortunate predicament. I would be willing to give the two people that i mentioned a moderator position in advance, but speedrun.com doesn't allow that unless they have enabled "Require e-mail authentication" in the settings, so i'll just post this trainwreck of thoughts for now and see if there's gonna be any feedback in the coming few days, if not i'll be attempting to make a contact myself, no matter how awkward that may be, it's the least i can do at this point. As the final note if anyone wants to contact me after reading through all of this you can do so by either DMs on srcom (now that those are a thing), adding me on discord, or DMs on twitch. I promise to reply to any on topic messages asap, which is something i need to mention since that usually isn't my strongest suit either, so to say.

Just discuss whatever is relevant here. I'll start.

I think it's time to all the few people who are interested in this game to actually decide on when RTA timing it supposed to start:

1. As it's being stated in the rules currently, when i'm making this post, which is on player pressing start on the title screen and getting in the main menu OR
2. As it's being actually used by everyone in their submissions which is when player chooses "start race" option in the menu

And although i've already made a switch to In-game time as a main timing method (since it seems to be pretty reliable not abusable and actually accurate way to compare people's times) that doesn't get rid of the question what should be done with the RTA timing which is why i'm brinding it up. If 1st option will be agreed upon then quickest upgrade purchase should be timed and added to all the runs to make things fair. If 2nd option gets chosen then rules should simply be changed plus that would make a "beat level 1 low%" category idea to become way too silly, unless there're people out there who are willing to go slow on purpose.

So yeah, Jaggerfroid and anyone else are free to voice their opinions on the matter.

Getting a pretty decent pb recently left me wondering how i could still be pretty far behind current best time on the leaderboards, so i did some comparison:

In-game time of all 5 races of 1st level me vs sk1pbase -

I could clearly see that i was faster, so next thing i did was checking how long it takes 2 most accurate and known emulators (among the speedrunning community) to get through the first frame of finishing the race till the first frame of the next race compared to the emulator that Sk1pBaSe is using:

Kega Fusion - BizHawk - vs. Gens32Surreal -

Frame by frame results of these videos from vdub -

Based on this comparison i'd like to ask you, Jaggerfroid, to list first 2 emulators as the only ones allowed for running this game in the rules, ban gens surreal emu and invalidate Sk1pbase's current pb run or make it a 14:16 as it's what it would most likely have been if played on a normal emu. Thank you in advance.

Creating this thread mainly because of the Genesis version having cutscene-ish thing between the moment you hit "proceed" and the moment first mission actually starts. Having that happen 9 times in a full game run can definitely make quite a difference. (i'm also not sure, but overall menuing on MS-DOS version seems faster to me as well) As a solution to this i suggest creating subcategories for those two versions of the game. (idk anything about Amiga version, so can't comment on that)

ILs, on the other hand, can stay the way i suggested in my current Harkonnen mission 1 IL submission comment, because that timing way is probably how in-game time actually works as well.

Also whatever the outcome of this is gonna be, it should actually be presented in the game rules, imo.