EnglandAlready answered this on Reddit, mirrroring my answer here to increase exposure:
Do you guys care about ingame timers -For the full run, for parts of a run? Or do you just always use your own timers outside of the game anyways?
Yes, please do include an ingame timer. One thing that gets overlooked in speedrunning quite often is timing accuracy; if people are using an external timer, they will quite often submit an estimation of their actual end time ie. their final split was late, and they submit whatever LiveSplit displays rather than actually calculating the accurate time. Most of the time this "won't matter", but there is no reason not to assess the time accurately, and an ingame timer makes this not only simple, but also impossible to get wrong. Assuming that timer is accurate, of course.
This also levels the playing field between consoles; let's assume your game is going to be multi-platform, and will be released on Switch/PS4/PC. Without an ingame timer, all of these individual platforms will likely need to be partitioned into their own leaderboards, as there will be variable loading times between the consoles, and indeed between individual PCs!
Ingame timers for each level are also very valuable, because "Individual Level" speedrunning is a widely practiced element of the hobby. People not only want to see how fast they can complete the whole game, but also each constituent part of the game. Because these parts are often short, the level of optimisation is also correspondingly higher. This in turn makes accurate timing even more important, because where fullgame runs are likely to be separated by seconds, IL runs are likely to be separated by frames.
I have noticed that when a streamer does a run, they often have a time tracker besides them showing their current time relative to a previous or their best run. If I were to save you the hazzle of setting up code sniffers, what kind of information do you want, just .txt files for major clearing points, pr. level? You want ingame time in those?
This is a very nice offer, though I don't think you should worry about putting any special effort in to provide this information. As long as your game code isn't really cryptic to decipher, there'll be runners who won't struggle to find the relevant memory values. If you're sure it's no problem to provide this information though, typically we look for consistent flags that occur in the game code that can be used as useful split points, and don't occur anywhere else whilst the game is operating.
For instance, when we first worked on making an autosplitter for Sonic Adventure 2, we had to look for a way for the program to recognise that each level had been completed. The game fundamentally consists of a series of stages and boss fights, and when each of these stages is over, a fade-to-white animation plays that doesn't occur anywhere else in the game. This was our first idea for a flag the program should look for. We've now cut out the middle man by having the program simply look at the ingame timer itself, and split whenever it stops at the end of a stage. Some tooling was required to get it to differentiate between the timer stopping because of the stage ending VS player actions such as taking a death or pausing the game, but it works perfectly now. This is the most clear-cut route you can take with an autosplitter.
In terms of run validation, is it usually a issue? Would you want small things like in meatboy for example where there is a frame cycle you can track to combat video splicing. Or is that a non-issue, especially for a small title anyways?
Something like this certainly wouldn't hurt if it's easy enough for you to insert, but it's worth mentioning that if you're including features from the point above, this issue largely takes care of itself; if the runner's LiveSplit window is displaying information directly from game memory, such as when they finished each stage in a live run, this information is just about impossible to falsify or otherwise 'cheat'.
This a slightly broader question, but what do you guys enjoy most in speedruns? The discovery of new routes, so a broad game with lots of alternative ways of getting to the goal (like Mario odyssey before it gets "figured out") Skill and execution in a linear experience, so more like super meat boy, where the execution of each level is what matters and new tricks are of limited scope. Maybe something else entirely?
None of these will hurt your game as a speedgame. If people enjoy playing the game, they'll run it regardless of linearity or structure, so don't worry too much about this.
"The danganronpa series is a good one to speedrun."
Opinions DEFINITELY differ on this one. Same for any visual novel series, unfortunately.
"I want some way to compare between TGH, Vallu and Werster"
That is just not possible, on account of the fact that they run different games that are not comparable.
The only way in which it makes sense to directly compare runners is on the same leaderboard, and even then PB is not an absolute indicator of skill as it only tracks your single fastest completed attempt, not your overall consistency, knowledge, capabilities, etc.
The only reason "Traditional IGT" isn't used in SADX ie. the sum of all stages as it's done in SA2B is because there is no timer that runs during the hub world segments. Therefore, "SADX IGT" is the number of frames between starting and finishing the run, which is tracked via a Livesplit plugin and is necessary because the PC version does not operate at a stable framerate.
As for the rules, they're literally on the front of the leaderboard under "View rules".
Personally I'd just wait to see if a moderator corrects it in verification, because they should.
Yeah, this is kind of a ridiculous proposition.
Part of your responsibilities as a moderator is to make sure the stats for the game are being accurately tracked, and if you want to actively remove an existing WR and replace it with a worse run due to a subjective personal preference then yeah I can see why you've been accused of power abuse in the past.
"I know its not always the case, but living in europe and playing on original hardware, many games just run slower on PAL which makes it much harder to compete..."
Which is why it's always been the standard to get your hands on the fastest version and run that. That's simply how speedrunning has always operated. There are more options now than ever before to do that.
This forum is actually ridiculous when the majority of threads ask the same questions about how to do an RNG manip, which emulators they're allowed to use and where to get ROMs/BIOS images. There's no reason this can't be summarised in a stickied FAQ, then the threads in question redirected there and summarily locked.
Sadly the dimensions are a little small for my now-donator icon to get its point across =[
Gonna have to be a bit more specific than that, even assuming you're getting perfect spindashes it's real easy to activate speed cap in this game.
I've had mine lined up for months; it's gonna be the icon you see here as my donor icon, colour-shifted for tenure lengths. Blue/Red/Yellow in ascending order.
If you have any specific games in mind, you may find the game-specific leaderboards and the associated pages such as Forum/Resources more effective than asking in a general forum like this. There's no guarantee that game-specific runners monitor these forums.
Jesus, what don't you people understand about "Linking ROMs/BIOS files potentially opens the site up to liability"?
And yet you had time to post about it on here.
You do need help, but not to put out a fire.
