California, USAEffective April 28, 2022, we are implementing new timing rules based on community feedback. The timing for run start and run end have changed as follows:
Start: Upon confirming your dog's name (Previously: Selecting "Start Game").
End: Upon the first black frame after affirmatively choosing to leave Pupsville at the end of the game (Previously: Upon the first frame of the end credits appearing).
These new start and end points offer quality-of-life improvements for runners; namely, the freedom to choose the dog breed / name of their choice without taking a time loss, as well as the elimination of load times before/after the end cutscene (and for many versions, the end cutscene itself). No gameplay of consequence occurs before or after these points.
These changes were proposed, discussed, and then unanimously approved by participating users on the Discord.
The change to the end point does happen to nullify the only currently-known major timesave between regional releases - Wii JP's ability to skip the end cutscene, a consistent 20-to-25ish-second save. It should be noted that prominent Wii JP runners were among the first to propose and endorse the end point change; in no way is the timesave being wrested away in bad faith.
Existing runs have been manually retimed to the new specifications and will be updated on the leaderboards accordingly shortly after this post is made. No changes to rankings will result.
Happy running and as always, we welcome your thoughts, questions, feedback, etc.!
I apologize that the poll doesn't seem to have worked as I hoped.
Considering the opinions that have been raised here and on the Discord, the increased interest in emulator runs, and the (way too long - sorry!) time elapsed considering the issue, I'm going to take the initiative to allow emulator runs as long as they do not contain distinct advantages unattainable on console. The addition to the rules will read:
"Emulator runs must not make use of any features enabling distinct advantages over console runs (cheats, memory logging, faster loading, etc.) subject to moderator discretion. Please include the name and version of the emulator you are using with the submission, and display the main emulator window prior to the run. Loading the game from USB / SD / etc. backups on console is not allowed."
I feel confident that this compromise accommodates the general feelings of the community as well as those who are looking to get into the game. But should anybody feel otherwise, or have any other questions or concerns, by all means, let us know!
There has been increased interest in emulator submissions for THE DOG Island recently; however, rules regarding emulator runs have long gone unestablished because it's a contentious issue with few easy answers. We are overdue to fix this, so I'd like to gather the community's opinions.
I've set up a poll for this purpose: https://www.strawpoll.me/45897738
The results of this poll won't necessarily determine the rules we go with right away, but they will be very helpful toward coming to an informed decision that the community can be satisfied with.
To further elaborate on the situation, here is a response I gave in the Discord recently when asked whether or not emulators were allowed:
"Prefacing this with an apology that I've been swamped at work and haven't had the time to answer questions like this (or, uh, run the game for close to a year) - Presently, we don't have a policy in place regarding emulator runs, though Auaora and I did discuss it a while back. I was initially opposed to emulator runs because emulation introduces a lot of room for both intentional manipulation and unintentional advantages over console play; these are more-or-less solved for regarding older consoles (fifth-gen and below) as emulators for those consoles approach 100% accuracy, but emulators for newer consoles are not quite there yet. Many Wii and PS2 leaderboards disallow emulators for that reason, and I sympathize with that. But Auaora rightfully pointed out that emulation greatly expands accessibility to the game (as well as to the most speedrun-viable versions of the game), and as someone who personally values game preservation and accessibility very highly, I can't disagree with that. What we are specifically trying to avoid is emulator runs having consistently faster load times (or other advantages) than are attainable on console, as that would unevenly skew the playing field. If an emulator run has demonstrably similar load times to its console counterparts, I don't have much of an issue with it, but the potential for abuse remains, which gives me pause. Checking every run against equivalent console runs for load time consistency would, of course, be very labor-intensive, and load times differ even among identical versions of the game. There was talk of potentially having a separate category for emulator runs, though we did not commit one way or the other. One thing we agreed upon, though, is that loading the game from flash media (USB, SD, etc.) on modded consoles should be disallowed, because legitimately disc-loaded retail versions of the game would be categorically unable to compete with flash media load times. tl;dr it's a tricky issue and we haven't yet come to a consensus on it; we welcome everybody's opinions as always."
I might be misreading (or have mistyped!) something somewhere - a first roll 47.70 being faster than a second roll 47.60 is in line with my calculations:
Second roll 47.60 -> [(0.60/2) + 0.5] = 0.80 -> 47.80 First roll 47.70 -> (0.70/2) = 0.35 -> 47.35
So that behavior is somewhat expected; it's good to know that the game acknowledges it internally as opposed to how it's displayed externally.
I apologize that this has peculiarity has held up some of your IL runs - knowing that the game acknowledges the "correct" time internally in a way that is consistent with my calculations gives me confidence that those calculations are accurate enough to verify runs with until we discover more.
This is an awesome optimization! But it's got me thinking - can we go even deeper? Some of the branching path animations are significantly shorter than others - the longest I've seen is almost three times as long as the shortest. I wonder if it's possible (or worth it) to optimize considering fewest choices AND shortest animations?
I recorded a playthrough of Phantom5800's fewest-choices route and stacked up the animations I encountered side-by-side. It may not be an exhaustive list of animations that can happen in the mines, but it's a start?
Long post incoming - tl;dr the PAL in-game timer acts weird, it's both good and bad, and I'm spending way too much brain power on differences of less than half a second
While verifying Winter_Doggo's recent minigame runs, I noticed that the in-game timer seemed to run slower than real time, as if the PAL version hadn't been adjusted to ensure that minigames still measured real time despite the expected gameplay slowdown.
I was right about it being slower - upon inspection using video tools, it indeed seems like IGT on PAL runs slower at more-or-less the same rate that is expected of PAL gameplay vs NTSC (roughly 5/6 slower).
This is good for PAL players because it means that PAL's slower gameplay speed isn't punished by the in-game timer, allowing PAL and NTSC players to compete evenly for IGT categories (though I suppose one could argue PAL gets a slight advantage via having more time to react, but that's getting too pedantic IMO).
I was wrong, though, that it hadn't been adjusted at all. It appears that on PAL (PS2 and Wii), the centisecond portion of the timer inexplicably rolls over twice per in-game second and thus... doesn't actually measure centiseconds. NTSC versions (PS2 and Wii both, again) measure proper centiseconds as expected.
This behavior creates a minor hassle for PAL IGT runners in that the actual run time will be faster or slower than what the timer shows at face value depending on whether the centisecond portion is on its first or second roll. If my math's right, it means that centisecond values from the first roll should be divided by 2, and centisecond values from the second half should be divided by 2, and then 0.5 seconds should be added on top of that.
For example, the .22 in Winter_Doggo's 0:29.22 on the Bumpy Road Sled Race occurred on the first centisecond roll, so it's really a 0:29.11 (0.22/2 = 0.11). But the .72 in Winter_Doggo's 1:53.72 on the Advanced Racing course occurred on the second centisecond roll, making it a 1:53.86 ([0.72/2] + 0.5 = 0.86).
I'm no math whiz, so my calculations may be quite wrong. I'll take the time to make sure before updating the existing run times. Regardless, no difference should exceed half a second, and NTSC players need not worry about any of this to begin with.
As always, I welcome any insight on the topic!
This is pretty puzzling; you did everything right and I don't see why on earth the game wouldn't give you the unlock. I can look into replicating the circumstances and see if I can find anything out, but right now I really have no idea.
In any case I'm sorry that it hindered your run 😔
It seems that at minimum the consensus on renaming the category "100% Scents" is unanimous, so I'll take care of that.
I'll preface all this by saying that I wasn't around yet when the full-game categories/rules were established, nor did I become a mod until after my 100% run, so Auaora probably has a more informed opinion on the matter than I do.
The StrategyWiki guide is an amazing resource, especially for 100% planning, but it isn't fully accurate (at least one optional quest is listed as mandatory, and the listed bug/fish locations failed me a few times when I went for 100%).
I don't personally know if it's possible to complete every single quest and/or collect every accessory in the game in one playthrough (maybe you or somebody else does!). When routing 100% I had some trouble getting locked out of quests before I could get the required items, but that could have been just because I was approaching it with the Any% route in mind. I don't know if every single accessory is obtainable during one playthrough, or if it'd require radical re-routing due to having to save Woofs by not using Boris as often, or what.
100% Scents might indeed be a more accurate name for the existing category, but as it stands, relatively few quests go unanswered during the course of a 100% Scents run (mostly the Circus quest line). The accessories seem to be the distinguishing factor, and I don't know how much research has gone into them other than the StrategyWiki guide, which includes the line "Each type of animal in each area has a different accessory, and will drop an item 10% of the time, on average." If accurate, that kind of RNG is abysmal and would likely add hours of tedium on top of a category that's already ~6+ hours to begin with. Take it from me; fishing RNG is quite bad enough!
I guess my tl;dr opinion is that the 100% (Scents) category is likely to remain as is, and a "true" 100% category would require so much additional research and ask so much of runners that it's unlikely to be implemented among our relatively-small community. I wouldn't personally be opposed to renaming the existing category "100% Scents" for clarity.
All that said, I'm absolutely willing to hear what others think about such an idea.
As you've noticed, we now have Sled Race and (flag) Racing IL categories up. Soccer will take a bit longer to implement as we are still working out the details.
