Finland[Rules presented here are identical to ones in the Game rules section]
Make sure to highlight/trim your VODs appropriately so that the run starts shortly after it begins! Submissions for top 5 times are subject to rejection if they do not adhere to a reasonable quality standard (e.g. no major amount of frame drops, video or audio stuttering or unrecognizably pixelated footage).
Using in-game cheats is banned unless specified otherwise.
Timing method: All runs except All Time Trials use Real Time Attack (RTA) timing convention, meaning they are timed using an external timer. In-game Time (IGT) is NOT used for these categories except All Time Trials.
Hardware: Runs performed using consoles with a physical disc copy go under the ‘Disc’ subcategory. This means PS1, PS2 and PS3. Runs performed using a virtual console digital PSN release of the game go under the ‘Virtual Console’ subcategory. This includes PS3, PSP, PSVita and PSTV.
Emulated runs go under the 'Emulator' subcategory.
Emulation:
Legacy runs are kept intact on the boards they were submitted to.
Accepted Emulators:
- mednafen
- LinuxOS Release
- MacOS Release
- OpenEmu (Alternative for Mac)
- BizHawk 2.8 or newer (Nymashock and Octoshock are allowed).
Legacy runs are kept intact on the boards they were submitted to.
Emulated runs MUST follow these rules:
- Savestates on emulators must not be used to reset runs.
- You must capture the entire window to show what emulator is being used or toggle help (F1) on Mednafen to show version number.
- You must also state what emulator is being used when submitting your run.
BizHawk users MUST follow these rules:
- Games can only run under the cue format.
- Config > Speed/Skip > Audio Throttle
To verify that you are running with Audio Throttle enabled you must hit the increase/decrease speed keys [+/-] it will display a message on screen.
If you're using the Octoshock core
- PSX > Options
- Select either mednafen mode option
"This 2023 revision aims to demystify CTR, to fix the writing, and to update the guide with better definitions and new techniques that have been discovered or defined."
"First it was written by Arsene Lupin and Kang in the early 00s, and then translated to English with the help of Thomas60. Later it was revised by LinkZer in 2006-2008 and translated to Spanish. In 2015, another guide in this lineage was made by Mistrrlove. Finally, Justin Zimmermann began writing a comprehensive guide in the latter half of the decade, but it was never finished. This guide was inspired by the above players as well as the video guides by players such as Ale Mastroianni, Redhot, NyXx, and Natty."
Author: Niikasd
Alright let's get a round two on this topic. It has been nine months since people voted on (not) having a filter for runs using classic shortcuts/no TA-skip.
Just to recap the vote, there were 19 votes casted, 11 for no and 8 for yes (3 for just filtering no TA-skip). Some active runners were too indecisive to vote and some who haven't played NMG category felt they absolutely need to have a say on the topic. Nothing wrong with that. Just shows that it's really divisive topic that sparks heated discussion.
Now that some time has passed people have had more chances to play the game with or without TA-skip and rethink a bit.
My thoughts on the reasons for a filter:
We are all looking for meaningful ways to compete in CTR. That's why we submit runs to leaderboards.
TA-skip is quite different from any other skip because of its huge risk, big potential time save of insane 70 seconds and finally no consistent setup. It all comes down to resetting enough to finally get past the level and surviving rest of the game. Sometimes you just get lucky and get the skip with no effort, sometimes you need to dedicate your time for grinding thousands of attempts to get decent results. Respect to those who are willing to do that and they do deserve their top placement due to dedication.
Some of us are not willing to throw thousands of runs against a wall to compete with the best players. We still want meaningful ways to compete in the game. And SRcom is perfectly capable of providing tools for it. Creating a filter to see what skips/play style were used in the run would be useful to all players since faster time does not always mean better gameplay. In my case I would definitely want to know what skips were used if I would compare two runs with a time of 50:55 for example. With classic style/skips that would be top tier. With modern style the run potentially got timesave of 70 seconds due to one skip and lacking on all the other levels. Only our standards have shifted but you cannot see what is going on on the leaderboard without digging deep. If all of us truly were interested in lowest time possible we would be grinding frames off of the warp glitch.
In the end it seems like half of the people taking part in the discussion want to compete in the game in a way that is enjoyable and not an insane grind fest. With the filter you could even submit and browse runs with both styles without having to search the mass of obsoleted runs.
So why not simply make use of srcom features and provide players more meaningful ways to compete in the main category. Of course NMG with everything goes would be the standard. No doubt.
Heck if the work for mods feels too big I can do it all myself. I have already gone through half of the runs since June 2020 anyway.
Maybe that's enough. Let's see if your opinions have changed on the matter.
This issue has been under discussion several times on both CTR speedrunning discord and CTR Time Trials discord so I decided to initiate a thread here so that the topic wouldn't be lost under ongoing other topics.
At the moment in the Any% NMG emu category most of the runs have been done with either Mednafen 1.26.1 and Retroarch 1.9.0 (beetle PSX HW).
Some of you may know that during this year I have been gathering data from both console runs and emulator runs. I compared how big of a weight hub movement and load times had on the resulting RTA time.
Mentioned IGT sheet can be seen here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KzfMfQpnNhN262IUZ9h-yf9zUT-jK0rldnO6oZcxvF4
Of course there might be a lot of variables I haven't looked into since hub movement is dependable on how optimized runners hub world movement is (plus PAL vs NTSC differences). Also lag plays considerable role here too. Dataset could be much bigger too. But in my opinion this comparison still gives pretty good estimate to which emulator performs better.
Fastest Mednafen hub+load: 17:51.470 (NTSC-U with 3 pauses) Fastest Retroarch hub+load: 17:32.550 (NTSC-U with 3 pauses) Slowest Mednafen hub+load: 18:10.460 (NTSC-U with 0 pauses) Slowest Retroarch hub+load: 18:01.010 (NTSC-U with 0 pauses) Mednafen delta: 00:18.990 Retroarch delta: 00:28.460 Average Mednafen hub+load: 18:00.914 Average Retroarch hub+load: 17:45.123 Average delta: 00:15.790
As you know, on console hardware side CTR speedrunning is a bit region locked so I made same comparison but with PAL vs NTSC-U
Fastest PAL hub+load: 14:43.940 Fastest NTSC-U hub+load: 14:45.910 Slowest PAL hub+load: 15:02.350 Slowest NTSC-U hub+load: 15:09.970 PAL delta: 00:18.410 NTSC-U delta: 00:24.060 Average PAL hub+load: 14:54.941 Average NTSC-U hub+load: 15:01.942 Average delta: 00:07.001
This makes it pretty clear that Retroarch has quite big advantage compared to Mednafen.
So point of this all is to raise discussion if only one emulator should be allowed for CTR.
At the moment All Time Trials ranking is broken. Runs should be ranked by In-Game Time by default. On top of that rta ranking fetches completely different submissions which is clearly a bug or not desired feature.
I couldn't find any discussion about this topic so here is a new thread.
As you know, 101% uses warp glitch twice which helps to skip gem cups almost completely. There was a brief discussion in Discord about splitting the category and as I remember people agreed on it.
What do you think about this?
