I'm a little late on this, but although it isn't necessarily a bad idea, I don't think there's any potential ruleset for the category that could be properly enforced—not one where it's still worth doing, at least. The world's just built around shortcuts too heavily. That, plus everything @Ventilo_ mentioned, means I don't see this happening even as a category extension.

I've implemented the 3rd option into the rules after unanimous consensus among runners. This thread will be left open for further feedback until the first run under this category is verified.

I'd like some feedback from runners on this. At the moment, no runs have been done for this category, but there are people planning to run it soon so now's the time to set the rules in stone.

I've thought of three options (if you have more ideas, feel free to share):

1. Restrict the mainland portion of runs to Paradise Cars only and the island portion to BSI Cars only. (In other words, make Full Game runs identical to running Main Game PCO + Big Surf Island BSICO.)
2. Restrict the mainland portion of runs to Paradise Cars, but allow both Paradise and BSI Cars in the island portion. (This is how the original game's Without DLC category works.)
3. Allow Paradise Cars and BSI Cars to be used freely throughout both the mainland and island portions of the run.

What do you think we should do?

That sounds complicated, does it mean BSI cars can only be used for BSI collectibles, or does it mean PC cars can't be used for BSI collectibles and you have to use BSI cars?

It's the same rules as Main Game + BSI. Although, it looks like the BSI rules are meant to match the original game's Without DLC rules, which would mean Paradise Cars are allowed there. Perhaps it's worth having a dedicated discussion about what we what Full Game Paradise/BSI Cars Only to be, because there's never been a run for that, hence all this confusion.

Edit: I've opened a thread.

the current all billboards and all super jumps categories are for the mainland specifically, which is why I think it should be the same for all collectibles (and by extension all smash gates)

So you're saying the full game all collectibles category shouldn't exist at all? Or am I misunderstanding? (I've gone ahead and added All Collectibles/All Smash Gates to Main Game regardless)

Do you think the run should end after all the mainland smashes have been counted by the game (so it shows 400/400 smashes in the menu and unlocks the carbon GT Concept) or would just getting all of them be enough, even if they don't get counted?

All smashes need to be counted for the run to be valid. I know there are issues with them counting, that's the reason this category wasn't added sooner, but if you wanna run it you'll just have to find a way to deal with it.

in my opinion BSI collectibles and mainland collectibles are 2 different things so it makes sense to separate them.

Do you mean the rules for Full Game PC/BSI cars only should enforce using Paradise Cars for the mainland part and BSI cars for the BSI part? I suppose that'd be the best solution to keep it consistent with other categories. I'll add it now.

This sounds more of a Category Expansion thing rather than a category being added to this page, but it is just my point of view.

Moot point, the category was added years ago. I wouldn't be against it being an extension, but that page is a mess and it doesn't seem like that'll change any time soon, so probably not a good place for it right now.

Vehicle handling, particularly drifting, is affected by framerate. The higher the framerate, the more the car will slide. In normal cars, it also slows down more during a slide. This isn't the case in drift cars, but I haven't done any real testing on those. TL;DR lower framerates are better.

Below are the results of some testing from the past couple days, performed using a CCXR with full eBay bonuses on Nürburgring GP Circuit. Each test pass simply consists of going around the first corner as fast as possible. The game is recorded, the recording is gone through frame by frame, and the minimum speed (in km/h) the car dropped to is logged. Minimums were chosen because using the average of each test pass would unduly minimize the differences caused by different framerates.

Full disclaimer, it isn't possible to test this with 100% accuracy, but I did my best and spent several hours doing a few hundred passes to try to average out any inconsistencies.

I'm no statistician, but this should be enough to get some idea of what's going on. The most important thing here is the average without outliers (average of the minimum speeds of each test pass), which shows a clear downward trend in speed as the framerate increases. This is also reflected by the minimum without outliers (lowest minimum speed of any test pass), which follows the same trend.

The maximum (highest minimum speed of any test pass) is notable because it actually stays relatively consistent. Unfortunately, I can't show this easily in data, but the reason is that these fastest test passes don't involve drifting. There still seems to be a slight downtrend with higher framerates, but I can't conclusively say that lower framerates are faster—more research is warranted.

Even assuming high framerates can be as fast as low framerates, the data proves their consistency isn't equivalent. Despite me being objectively worse at the game at lower framerates (due to a combination of heightened input latency and motion sickness), the minimum speed at 15 and 30 FPS was significantly higher than at 120 or 240. I attempted to show this in the rightmost column, standard deviation, with mixed success. The low-speed outliers only existing at higher framerates also supports this. (If you're wondering, 0 km/h is a spin—and I was unable to spin the car at lower framerates no matter how hard I tried. Maybe initiating a drift is more difficult?)

Finally, to touch on the sub-30 FPS numbers, these are below console performance and generally considered unplayable. However, I suffered through it to see whether scaling continues beyond 30. Long story short, they appear to have diminishing returns. Despite this, there were some results that were out of line, like the 121 km/h result at 20 FPS, and so out of caution I have to recommend that framerates below 30 FPS be officially banned from use in speedruns to maintain parity with consoles (and also to be fair to people who can't take the abuse of low framerates).

Anyway, that's all for this loveliness. Let me know what you guys think. Thanks @Night_95 for insisting the problem exists.

Edit 2024-03-10: Apparently all cars have a "skid type" and drift cars don't lose speed because they use the drift skid type. They're still less consistent at higher framerates, but the extra sliding might be beneficial if you're going for high scores.

Also, just to be clear, the decrease in consistency scales linearly with framerate. That means going from, say, 30 to 60 FPS is less impactful to your times than going from 120 to 240 FPS, even though it's visually more impactful. That's why I'd still recommend playing at 60 if you can't handle 30. Funnily enough, that also means ultra high framerates like 1000 FPS could make the game literally unplayable.

In theory this could be a misc category and I'm not against it per se, but it feels like it'd end up being more or less a normal license run but much slower because you'd be sticking to roads the whole time. If that sounds like an interesting idea to people then maybe it can be added.

Guess this is dead in the water for now, but FWIW I went ahead and tested whether FPS changes behaviour in the same way shown in the video. TLDR: it doesn't.

Using RivaTuner to switch between 30 and 144 FPS caps, there was no difference in any tested area. Even Tamdaght's very bump-heavy section saw no changes at all. If replays work the same in Dirt 2 as they do in modern EGO games (and based on my reverse engineering, they do), this means framerate has no impact on physics.

If this isn't convincing enough, you can try recording a macro for further testing, but I attempted it and the game ate all the inputs. So unless someone is able to produce clear, reproducible evidence to the contrary, we should go with the results of the replay testing and assume the framerate doesn't change anything.

Over the years, a number of people have asked why Any% and 100% categories don't exist for main game runs, so here's a quick explanation.

Prior to May 2020, Any% and 100% existed. Any% was Burnout License. 100% was Elite License. Simple, right? Not really.

Any%, by definition, ends when the credits roll because that's normally when the game is complete. In this game, though, getting the Burnout License does nothing. No special awards received, most cars locked, all events reset, collectibles not complete, and rivals still roaming.

The real reason the credits roll is that playtesters said the game was too long, and this was the concession: have Atomika set a low goal for the player and roll the credits after that low goal is passed.

So, the Elite License was supposed to be the end of the game. The real "Any%". All events are done, most cars are unlocked, and the gold cars are awarded, but not everything is done. That means it's not 100%. The Criterion Elite License is 100%.

So why not call them Any% and 100%? Consistency, for one. Shorter main game runs are already license runs, why would the longer ones not be? Also, existing runs titled Any% would confuse people if the label was shifted up one rung. So, categories got renamed to what they are now, which is generally less controversial.

Hopefully this clears things up for people. I'll be linking this thread the next time someone asks and yes, I'm only writing this because someone asked again.

Lowered graphics are less of an issue since we get infinite attempts to navigate the bumps in time trials. If the geometry changed or physical obstacles were removed by lowering the settings it'd be a different story, but I don't think that's the case here.

The FPS thing might be true. I looked through some debugging symbols for the game it seems like you can test it the same way as in the the video. There's no in-game cap but the FPS can be locked with RivaTuner. However, if lower FPS is really found to be advantageous then PC players can lock the game to 30 FPS and it becomes much less of a problem. Either way, having a separate category for it is overkill.

Thanks to the site update I realized there could be improvements in some areas, hear me out.

Because some glitches are PC only, a separation needs to exist, but there are no runs at all in the Console category. There are active console runners but I suspect they've been accidentally ostracized by this separation. So why not revise levels to have one category for normal runs and a secondary category for runs that use glitches? Not only would this allow console players to compete directly with PC players, it would also allow PC players to do runs without glitches and remain competitive. All platforms would be effectively identical. Glitch runs would have to be found and moved manually, but there aren't that many so it shouldn't be too much effort (I think the Hurrah Pass respawn is the only one currently, barring the yet-unused LA respawn). Not sure what the categories would be named, restricted/unrestricted, glitchless/glitched? Mods can decide.

There's the small matter of what constitutes a glitch, like how the huge Peninsula Run cut isn't technically an OOB glitch and wall riding/wall bouncing is technically part of the game's physics and not a glitch. Personally, I'd ignore those and use the glitch category for respawns, true OOBs and other glitches exclusive to one platform, but once again it's for the mods to decide. Anything would work as long as the rules are clear.

Also, if it wasn't obvious from the title, this is entirely separate from full game categories. Those play more of a role due to loads and VO skips along with the PC only respawn glitches. I guess it could be switched to LRT and have a similar separation to the above, but that'd mean recalculating times and putting significant effort in, so I won't advocate for it.

Anyway. Thoughts?

I grabbed screenshots of the top 10 on every in-game leaderboard on every platform. Sharing them here for those who want to compare their times.

Google Drive folder (don't know of a better way to host albums, sorry)

UPDATE—I've dumped the entire PS3 leaderboard as of 2024-04-09. You can find the data here: Google Drive

Couple notes—PC is generally best for comparison since people on PS3/360 often have times faster than what's possible via time trials. Only a couple times on PC are like this and they stand out enough that you'll know. The PS3 runs are real despite the times, which are possible because they went online and abused drafting to get better times.

Another thing is that PC has cheated times using trainers and stuff. You'll be able to spot these pretty easily most of the time. If there's some confusion as to whether a time is legit, you can compare to catty7073's times since most (if not all) of their runs are legitimate and they're usually near the top. Alternatively, you can ask me about it here or on Discord, because I was around when ghosts worked and mostly remember which runs were cheated.

Anyway, that's it, hope this helps some runners out there set some targets.

I've added this as a misc full game subcategory.

Would be happy to make a category if there were runs for it, seems like it'd be a fun one. In the past there have been concerns over the smash gates not counting when you drive through them, but if you're diligent in keeping track of the count you should be able to mitigate that.

Post your skill game runs in this thread. These have the same requirements as other runs - the platform has to be specified and a video with the time visible is needed. Runs are assumed to be glitchless for now, but I can add the other categories if runs are done in them.

You can find all the leaderboards on this spreadsheet - click me! The forums unfortunately have no good way of displaying the data, so this is the best we're gonna get.

I would but speedrun.com doesn't support it... sorry :(

All done. Let me know what you guys think and whether you think it's worth putting a variable in to distinguish car and bike runs from each other (it'll be pretty easy to implement if people want it).

Glad to hear changing the font size can alleviate the problems with them displaying. Unfortunately we're probably looking at less than 0.1% of users who know or care enough to do that, so the default behavior is still an issue.

Anyhow, I've just finished putting in the changes for the original game. It worked out a lot better than I thought it would, probably as a side effect of having the categories be all glitch-based rather than a mix. Remastered's page will start getting updated either tonight or tomorrow, depending on when I stop feeling dizzy.

I also updated the theme a bit, FWIW.

Based on community feedback, the following has changed:

• Car and bike runs have been merged into one category.
• Runs with traffic on, now called Glitchless, have a category separate from runs with no traffic.
• The traffic on/off variable has been phased out.

If there is demand for it, a variable to separate car and bike runs may be implemented. For now, it will be left as-is. (For reference, it is split in-game mostly due to technical and gameplay incompatibilities with cars, not necessarily because the developers wanted to.)

The Burning Routes and Burning Rides will end up merged when cars/bikes get merged. Sadly the Road Rules can't be kept split if that happens because of how the site sets things up, at least not without each run having its own variable, but there really aren't that many bike Road Rules anyway.

There are no settings for fonts, or anything really. We don't have much control over how content is displayed.

About the Any Glitch category, I suspect it not being displayed is the reason the category hasn't gotten much attention. Since we've gotten the reverse glitch for the Revenge Racer, that's going to become a much more commonly used category, especially for Road Rules.