United StatesI figure this is a worthwhile thread to start, considering I can't seem to easily find much about sword climbing quite yet. I came across a video of sword climbing being performed, but when I tried doing it myself, I wasn't able to replicate it, so getting the relevant info out on a public forum seems reasonable at this stage (especially considering it's the trick that separates the two main categories right now).
First off, what are the required inputs for sword climbing? Second, does the sword throw ability need to be at a certain level for sword climbing to work properly?
If you want to attempt this for fun, go for it! We won't be adding this as a category on the src leaderboards though.
Gotcha. There was no category rule specifically referring to OoB, so I wasn't sure if it qualified. Whether or not OoB is considered a glitch isn't exactly consistent from game to game, so thanks for clarifying its status here.
While doing runs the other day, I stumbled across this OoB on the climb up to the apartment:
I tried to replicate it afterwards to see if there was a way to perform it earlier (since if you have to fall from further up the building to perform it, it obviously wouldn't be worthwhile). I quickly came up with a way to get out of bounds sooner, as demonstrated here:
First, you need to go left once you get to the ventilation duct on the cat's building, instead of right like you normally would to jump from Taffy's building. Then, you need to perform a jump onto the duct on the opposite side of that corner (between the 6 and 11 second marks). The jump can be a little finnicky, but it's not particularly difficult, at least in my experience. (I found that jump day 1, but haven't seen anyone else use it, and since the Taffy jump turned out to be a little faster, I didn't think it was worth bringing up sooner.)
You then climb the intended way until just before the apartment where you see the crow. Once there, you need to climb up to where the plants are located in the corner outside, and hop onto the fence. This was the hardest part in my testing, as you need to find a lineup where the cat doesn't immediately try to jump off the fence. If you've accomplished that, approach the wall parallel to the clothesline. It seems like that wall has some pretty wonky collision detection; some of it may come from the clothesline being so close to it, but regardless, I was able to get out of bounds in multiple locations along the wall.
Once you're close enough to the wall, you can jump off the fence and either onto the clothesline, or somewhere along the wall itself. From there, it's possible to get out of bounds. However you get out of bounds there, you should be able to immediately get over to the section of the building where construction is taking place, and easily jump back in bounds, skipping a noteworthy amount of the climb past the crow.
I have little doubt this is going to be a rough trick to get consistently, but it definitely saves a handful of seconds over the current climbing route if performed optimally. As far as I can tell, it should help most in the Glitchless Any% route, with potential to help in the longer categories as well. I'm not sure if the method of getting out of bounds here is considered a glitch (the wonky camera doesn't exactly make it easy to tell what's going on, after all), but regardless, I thought this was important enough to share.
Also worth noting: I performed both of the clips shown above at a frame rate cap of 60FPS, so do with that knowledge what you will.
Best of luck to everyone who decides to implement this in their runs!
My pleasure! I got hooked on the idea of running this game almost immediately after beating it, so I'd been giving plenty of thought to different categories and such. I appreciate you responding so timely and openly!
Just wanted to throw this here since I've already completed a run of this game, and wanted to voice ideas on what categories should be included.
Firstly, I think there should be a split between NG and NG+ runs, since starting from a fresh save file means you begin with the standard dodo (which is by far the slowest) and have to buy additional dodos if you want to move any faster. If you're starting form a completed file though, you can immediately start runs with either the cosmic or golden dodo, which gives you max speed right out the gate.
This brings me to my next point: Since you can beat this game without going through every single level, having three main categories seems appropriate. The first category would be Any%, where you play through however many levels it takes to beat the game. This would have to be NG only though, since having a NG+ file means you could potentially already have access to all the levels already. The second category would be All Levels, where you play through all 60 levels in order. This could be played with either NG or NG+, since the only thing that would really change between the categories/subcategories would be what dodos you use. I've already completed a run of All Levels NG+ for reference, where I begin time upon hitting the play button on level 1, and end time on the frame the level 60 completion screen appears: The third category would be All Stars, where you complete all 180 objectives in the game that award you stars. Either NG or NG+ runs would work here, though NG would be much easier to track, since the star count would begin at 0. NG+ can still meet the objectives, but since a completed file may already have a non-zero amount of stars unlocked, there'd have to be extra scrutiny in the verification process if included on the leaderboards.
Those are my ideas on how the DP leaderboards could be handled going forward. I know the leaderboards have just recently been added, so I wanted to make my thoughts known while they're still fresh.
As a follow-up, apparently this also happened to KragSonOfHorace on his stream:
The more cases we have to look through, the better the odds of finding out how this glitch works, so I'll probably be updating this thread with any instances I manage to find until we figure out how to replicate it consistently.
So this happened during an offline practice session:
I have no idea what caused this, but this could potentially be HUGE if we can figure out how to replicate it consistently.
The other categories are currently under the "secondary categories" tab. If you click the arrow above where it says "Submit Run," you should be able to see them.
Simply put, we didn't realize there was a mobile version until now. A mobile category has now been added to the leaderboards.
I'm the one who thought to refresh the page initially, so thanks! And yeah, I'd totally forgotten when DDRKirby talked about the shortcut as well, so that's gonna be super helpful for these runs.
I think the boards look fine as is right now, but if they're changed later, I'm not gonna complain.
I'm fine either way, honestly. I think making a quit & load subcategory would make the most sense if there is a split, but whether or not there's a split in the first place should be determined first.
For the purposes of the speedrun.com leaderboards, level viewer tools such as that will be banned.
For now, we're not going to verify any new All Ninjis runs until we get this situation resolved. We're currently working on making a poll for the community to vote on though, so stay tuned for that.
