Hello!

I've already been talking about this in the discord but I wanted to post here as well :) For Mario Day this year (March 10th = MAR10) I'm putting together a Super Mario Challenge Any% run using the community's best IL times to see what the theoretical fastest human time is for that category. I'm currently still going through and checking ties between levels, but I'm getting closer to finding the fastest video for each level.

That being said, I will only be using videos if I get permission from the owner. If you have one of the fastest times, I'll be reaching out to you hopefully tomorrow (late on 3/8) to see if you're ok with being included in the video. The plan for the video is:

• Upload it to YouTube on Mar10 day
• Have a watch party on Twitch to watch the video and compare it to the current WR Both of these would be on my own YouTube/Twitch channels. If for any reason you are not ok with that, please don't feel any pressure to allow me to use your video.

Things I'll be asking you if you have one of the fastest times (I'll link you to all of the levels you have fastest times in):

• Are you ok with me using your IL video for this purpose?
• Are you ok with me leaving your audio in or would you prefer I swap it for just level music?

I'm calculating times using RTA instead of IGT for this since Any% is run in RTA. I'll put up the full list of times I've calculated so you can see where each of your videos falls. If there's a tie, I'm going with the earliest submitted video. If I don't get permission from someone to use their video, I'll keep going down the list until I find someone whose video I can use.

Thanks everyone! :D

[Original thread title: "Discussion: Thoughts on changing timing for 100-man to eliminate load time discrepencies?". I changed it to reflect where the discussion landed.]

Hello!

Load times have been a headache for this game for a while. The system, game cart type (physical/digital), and even SD card all have an effect on load times. This is a problem for every category in the game, but it's especially noticeable in the shorter 100-man categories where even a few seconds can separate leaderboard spots. As a result, we'd like to consider changing the timing for 100-man categories such that load time differences are no longer a factor.

There are a number of ways we can tackle this, but the general proposal is to change the official timing to be the total time spent in levels + some set time value per level that represents a standardized load time. We would keep the RTA time on the leaderboards but add a column for this "standardized time" and sort the leaderboard on that value. This would even out the game and allow everyone to be competitive, regardless of their set-up.

Basic poll on this idea (please participate - poll closes Wednesday): https://strawpoll.com/hy6wyucqr

Some more detailed points that are up for discussion:

1. What should the per-level standardized load time be? The reason I think we should add a per-level load time rather than removing them entirely is so that there's still a penalty for skipping levels similar to the penalty that would exist in RTA timing. My thought here would be to take an average of load times on the fastest known system/cart/sd combination so everyone gets that advantage, but would love to hear other thoughts on this.

2. How should individual levels be timed? We can standardize on RTA timing for the level (for example, start time on the last full-black frame before the level starts to appear, and end time on the first frame where a score shows up on the flagpole/axe/goal tape), which would be the closest to today's timing but which would be the most technical to retime and could be intimidating for newer runners. Alternatively, we could use in-game time (final timer - starting timer) which is much easier to use but reduces some of the sub-second skill expression. For the in game time we could also consider adding standard loads for screen transitions (3 seconds for a pipe, 3 seconds for a keydoor, and 1.5 seconds for a door, for example) so that starts that are faster RTA are still faster IGT. Thoughts?

Please let us know by responding to the poll (https://strawpoll.com/hy6wyucqr) and leaving your comments either here in this thread or in our discord channel - this affects our most popular category so we'd love to hear from everyone who's willing to share before making any changes :) Thanks!

Hi!

Hope it's ok to ask a question from a different community here, but I'm a mod for another 3DS game (super mario maker) and load time differences are killing us. I'm looking for a better way to account for them and found that this community is using a set value added based on system, which is something we've been talking about doing as well. Problem is, from what we've found it's not just old/new 3DS that matters, it's also whether the game was physical/digital, and what SD card is used in the 3DS system. If you don't mind me asking:

1. Do these same differences show up for this game?
2. If so, any ideas on how to account for them?
3. How did you get your set values to add? (averaging a set number of runs? something else?)

I'm hoping we can do the same thing you're doing here with real time / load time leaderboard categories, but I'm worried with SMM that we have a matrix of times to add based on combinations of the above. Any ideas you have and would be willing to share would be much appreciated!

(for reference, here's everything I've found about load times in SMMf3DS: https://www.speedrun.com/smm3ds/thread/pon5h)

I think many of you have already seen this, but for those who haven't a number of community members sent in clips that were compiled into a montage highlight video for Mario day :) You can find the video here:

We coordinated this on Discord - if you haven't already joined our server you can find the link in the menu :) Happy Mario day everyone!

[UPDATE: You can ignore this thread if you're running 100-man easy as load times are removed for the leaderboard]

TL;DR: If you're planning on running challenge mode and haven't bought the game, buy the digital copy - it's significantly faster. If you can, you also want a New 3DS instead of an original one.

Backstory: After Polonxy first pointed out that the load times in my challenge mode runs were significantly slower than his, we've been talking about ideas as to what could be causing the difference. After a bit of research (and $25 for the digital version of the game) the answer came down to playing on a digital vs. physical copy of the game. Below is everything I've learned about load times along the way.

=== What DOES affect load times ===

Digital vs. Physical

The digital version of the game is significantly faster than running on a physical copy. I compared load times for videos I recorded on the same system with the same settings using the same capture card (so the only difference was the game) and used certain key frames to precisely measure the difference in load times between the two copies of the game. I timed the first four levels in world 1 and the transition to world 2 in challenge mode with game files that had all medals for those levels completed. For each of levels, the load times at the start of the level were about 1.5 to 2 seconds faster on digital, and the load times at the end of the level were about 0.5 to 1 seconds faster on digital. In total that worked out to about a 10 second difference over the course of world 1 alone. Assuming the rest of the game is similar with a 10 second difference for every 4 levels, that works out to a 3-4 minute time difference over the course of the any% challenge mode run. Here are my specific timings if anyone would like to check them out: Polonxy also found a separate thread that touches on this issue: https://www.speedrun.com/speedrunning/thread/dv0eo/1#0pk4p

New 3DS vs. Original 3DS

This one was harder to compare since I don't have an old 3DS with a capture card, but for this one I went and did my best to hand-time every video submitted for the 1-1 IL any% category. My numbers here are less accurate since I couldn't go frame by frame and the videos had varying quality, but I still found a difference of a bit under a second between the two 3DS versions. I slowed each video down to 0.25 speed to help improve my accuracy, and I timed from when Mario lands on the loading screen to as soon as the level started to appear. For New 3DS submissions, that was generally around 9.5 seconds. For Old 3DS submissions, that was generally around 12.5 seconds. The delta at 0.25 speed was 3 seconds, or about 0.75 seconds in real time. If anyone would like my numbers on this one let me know, but I'll skip posting the full chart here since it was more of an informal timing.

Level select vs. Challenge mode

This one was unexpected, but levels load slower when playing challenge mode than they do when picking them out of Coursebot. I tested this out on a variety of levels, both early and late in the run, and they all show around a 2 second difference when loaded from Coursebot vs. any%, with Coursebot being faster. Here were my numbers for the delta: 1-1 :: 1.8 seconds 13-6 :: 1.8 seconds 15-2 :: 1.8 seconds 18-5 :: 2.1 seconds

=== What does NOT affect load times ===

Thankfully most other things. In general, load times are very consistent. When I was testing whether my capture card settings were causing the lag (they didn't) I timed a single level's load time over and over. Out of the 7 load attempts, the fastest and slowest level loads were only 2 frames (or 0.033 seconds) apart. I did the same for a second level and got loads all within 1 frame (or 0.017 seconds) apart. This is a good sign that there's no significant randomness affecting load times.

=== Where load times don't matter ===

• IL times - since those are timed using in-game time, load times don't matter at all.
• Pipe transitions - I timed those out between physical and digital as well but didn't find any meaningful difference.
• Between worlds - I timed out the transition from world 1 to world 2 between the physical and digital copies and they were identical down to the frame.

=== Where there are still open questions ===

• 100 man - I don't know if the load times vary for 100 man levels the same way they do for challenge mode levels. If anyone has ideas on timing that let me know. It's a tricky challenge since load times, while consistent per level, do vary between levels.
• 2DS vs. 3DS - There weren't enough 2DS times for me to get good data based on the IL submissions for 1-1, but it seems that there likely isn't a difference in loads between 2D and 3D.
• Capture card - Same as 2DS, there weren't enough capture card times to get data on the differences. Based on loose timing the loads seem to be equivalent, so it's likely it doesn't make a difference.
• SSD - If digital vs. physical turned out to be a wash, then the SSD was the likely next source of load time variance. With just the informal times I did for the 1-1 ILs I didn't have enough data to make a call on whether there was evidence for this. If anyone has data here it would be awesome.

Was learning 13-2 any % and looking at the small outcropping housing the solitary mole right at the beginning, if Mario could get on top of there he can then skip the second half of the level. He can't naturally jump that high, but it seems like it might be possible to get up there with a boost from something like a p-switch jump. I'm not great at those and haven't been able to get it to work, but thought I'd ask in case anyone can help figure out if it's possible.

Hi! Apologies if this is a dumb question - this is my first time trying to speedrun a game so I'm new to everything. I have some level ILs that tie or are WR times but I've been holding off on uploading since I wanted to wait until I could record with screen capture so the videos would be clean and easy to see if anyone wanted to copy strats. At this point though it's going to be a while before I can get a computer to make that happen. If I upload now with phone video (readable for verification but not great looking) and then later manage to get a clean video of the same level with the same timer, will I be able to update the video for my time, or am I stuck with my original video forever? Thank you for helping!