Are any runners going to be attending AGDQ 2019 coming up?

My Mario Kart DS 32 Track submission was accepted into the marathon, so I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do for my couch commentators, and seeing if any other runners are going is the sensible first step.

It would be cool to maybe do a race live at the event at some point too!

Hi everyone, I've created a discord server for runners if they'd like to join and have a central place to discuss the game, talk strats, or set up some races.

Here's the link: https://discord.gg/xebdjhX

Additionally, I'm added a discord tab on the left sidebar, under "Guides", so it's just an easy click there to join. See you all there!

The when it's set up now is probably the best we can do it for now sadly, unless the people who run the site can make an easier system for this. And yeah, going OoB won't be helpful for tag or balloons (not that I could think of at least) so it's fine not having a OoB/No OoB specification. The character menu part does look somewhat bad, but there's probably nothing we can actually do about it for now.

Hopefully people start doing some ILs and submitting! I was working on one yesterday and I'm going to do another today, so I'll probably submit those tonight. I'm going to get my buddy Etch to maybe submit some stuff here too, though I don't think he'll be around for another week or so, and I'm not sure whether he'll take the time to do it anyway.

1. Time Trials and Grand Prix are pretty different honestly. Of course, GP has other racers, and GP is faster due to other factors. There's the obvious example of rings being faster and using boostpads and whatnot. Also, for flaps, in GP you can accumulate a ton of rings and wait to get speed shoes and start a lap so you're going extremely fast, which isn't possible to do in TT. However, the biggest difference isn't items, but weather. As far as I know (from playing the GCN version), TT and Reverse are always played in clear weather, meaning you can fall into the water. A lot of characters can't go over water, and even those that can (like Super Sonic) are slowed down a bit by it and can't really drift off of walls because of the slowdown, meaning you have to constantly jump with him. This changes strats and routes significantly with some characters, so yeah they're pretty different.

2. Yeah I mean I plan on beating all of my old records anyway, so it shouldn't be an issue. It would just suck leaving off the times of competitors from the past due to not having video proof, because video proof ten years ago was just a whole different beast back then.

3. I agree with those being fine for No OoB, and I'm sure others wouldn't reject. Just figured it was good to clarify before people start submitting stuff and then we change rules and cause a mess.

Nice! I remember trying to make IL leaderboards on a Geocities website years ago when TSC said they wouldn't make separate charts for No OoB. As I could tell from Daily's recent experience with talking with TSC staff, they have no plans of changing that. With that all being said, there's a few things I want to bring up, and ask in general.

1. Not only are there times on TSC, but I believe there's also times on Cyberscore. And on CS, they also separate by character, and have every mode: Grand Prix (3lap/flap), Time Attack (3lap/flap), Reverse (3lap/flap), Balloon, and Tag. Ideally we would just take times from all of those charts and put them on here, because I doubt most people will take the time to submit. Honestly, most won't even know these leaderboards exist here. Another thing related to this is now that we have a third set of leaderboards (although these have No OoB which is nice), it kind of makes leaderboards on separate sites redundant and the decentralization of information isn't really the best.

2. Regarding times that already exist, I know I have a bunch of old videos for some of my old PB's. The quality is god awful because they're from like 2007 with a garbage camera, but they exist. I'm sure I also have records that have no video proof. Would these times with no video proof be not allowed on the charts? What about the times with the awful quality (where you can't even really see the time)? Here's an example:

3. Okay, so I posted that video specifically for a reason, because we'll need to sort this stuff out asap. Go to about the 0:11 point in the video, you see I do a jump that goes through a wall that normally shouldn't work. I just want to clarify whether something like this exists, since there's also a similar trick on Radical City reverse. I assume it'll be treated as No OoB based on the precedent set by the Knuckles helix skip in speedruns, but I figured it would be smart to bring it up now.

I think that's all I've got for now!

I didn't know there was even a forum post here until Prismatic just told me a little while ago, so I'll add my thoughts.

Like Daily said, me and him have discussed on numerous occasions that we would strongly prefer RTA over IGT for the leaderboards. Back when this whole discussion came up, I was added to the Sonic moderator Skype group in order to give my opinion. I maybe sent three messages before my opinions were seemingly shot down immediately, despite the fact that not only was I one of the most active runners of the game, but I have also played this game competitively for nearly ten years, and I had discussions with Daily (and maybe Bertin? I can't recall) regarding this issue, and nobody who ran the game wanted IGT. I could understand if there was a super valid, clear-cut reason for using IGT, but when it's split fairly even, I would think the people who actually run the game and are affected by this would have the ultimate say. But yeah, the mod group was extremely adamant about not banning PC, and the only option they cared to move forward with was IGT leaderboards (which a bunch of Sonic games use, and rightfully so, so they must have felt their experience with other Sonic games qualified them to make the decision here).

I still continued to run the game, despite having IGT being used for the leaderboards. I still ran splits, and often referred to times by RTA when speaking to people about the game. EVen recently, before I got the WR by IGT, I had beaten Daily's time RTA-wise but not by IGT, and it just puts us in a silly situation. It seems that IGT is moving people away from wanting to play the game as well, which isn't what we want.

Bertin mentioned the three possible options, and as you can imagine, using IGT would be the least desired by myself (and for all of us, really). I can see why banning PC outright is a bit harsh, but it's just so inconsistent. Daily could correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure he told me the loading times changed on PC depending on whether he was streaming or not? Obviously PC games vary on load times depending on PC builds, but having it change from other factors such as streaming it as well just makes it really awful. I've stated before, I'd have zero issues with banning PC, but I can see why people would be against it.

I actually have zero issues with separating it by console. We would have to split it four ways (GCN, PC, Saturn, Emu). I don't know how to set it up, but if you look at the Super Mario Sunshine leaderboards, you can see the first row of leaderboards consists of the categories, and the row below is normal/hoverless. We could implement it the same when, with the current categories we have as the top row, and then these four "system" splits as another row that acts as a subset.

The only issue I really have with separate categories for each "system" is the amount of runners for each. Let's be real here, a large majority of people run the game using Gem Collections, with a handful of people running it on emulator. Here's the splits by category:

Seriously though, you can see from those alone that this game is absolutely dominated by people playing on GameCube. Having PC on the leaderboards didn't make this game suddenly more accessible, or make more people want to run it. And I know it's not really that nice to say, but the people who did run on PC weren't very good, and didn't even try to push the game to it's limits. With the exception of theultimategamer95's is the only one that's even good, and that was the run we thought was questionable to begin with. We're trying to appease to a very small subgroup of people who don't even run the game anymore, and honestly probably wouldn't even know or care.

Also regarding fastest version, I personally am not the biggest fan of running something on a certain console or such solely because it's the fastest if that version isn't very accessible. If it's easy to get then yeah sure, go ahead. But as you guys know, the PC version of Sonic R is not accessible at all, and you can tell from the leaderboards that a large majority of people play Gem Collections, because that's easily the most accessible. While pushing the time to it's limits is cool, it's not really impressive to be saving a full minute or whatever on a 100% run without doing anything skillful or noteworthy (or literally anything in general) to save that time.

I've probably rambled on a bit here, so a quick tl;dr. I would strongly prefer to just ban PC and move back to RTA, but I feel like that option isn't going to be on the table when it's all said and done. With that, I would strong prefer to seperate by console/ or whatever then, and moving to RTA for all except PC (which would stay on IGT). Continuing the use of IGT would be my last option.

I would definitely be down, time permitting. I personally stream on Monday/Wednesday nights, and Saturday/Sunday mornings, so those are the times that work for me.

It would probably be easier to discuss this on Skype, but I don't really use Skype yet Keepo

Would anyone be down to have weekly races though? If so, what days work for everyone?

Also, I thought maybe we could alternate categories by the week, ie: All Gems one week, Any% the next, then All Gems again, then Any% again, etc. I doubt anyone will want to race 100% seriously, but I could be wrong.

If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to add them!

Hey all, I've gotten a lot of questions recently while streaming regarding the route that's used for Any%. While it may not be completely optimized at this point, the following route is the one that Petey and myself use:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PZC2su4XZny-IBsstxJrFVPJ8xVBApmQcD1ZDyjtGe4/edit#gid=0

I've never really used google docs, so let me know if that's messed up or anything.

Just wanted to reply now to say I've filled in the charts with everything I had. Obviously a bunch of the runners aren't registered here on the site, and also a bunch of the runs had no video proof, but the better runs tend to have videos. Some times were extracted from people's twitch profiles, so I couldn't get a proper date. Also, I set any run in which I didn't know the console to Gamecube, since that's by far the most popular version. There's a few I marked as emulator due to the load screen being a few seconds faster each time (which is what happens with emulator or homebrew'd sonic r).

If there are any problems or whatever, let me know! I tried to get everything in as accurate as possible.

I'll probably skip putting them on both charts for now if that's how you feel; it's something that could always be done in the future because the times will be available on the charts. I do see what you mean how it could look silly though, like even 100% runs could count toward any% if the person doesn't have an any% run, and that seems a bit weird.

I'll probably update the times later this week (Wednesday or Thursday) because I'm a bit busy with working right now and I do want to watch all of the VODs available to make sure everything is correct and see if anything is emu or externally loaded via homebrew or whatever else (faster load times).

If it makes you feel any better, I''m a mod at mariokart64.com and I've been writing news updates for the Mario Kart DS section for over seven years now, so I know a thing or two about modding and such. That being said, I don't need to stay mod beyond updating these times onto the charts, so if I get unmodded there's no hard feelings OpieOP

Hello everyone!

I know this forum is basically dead at the moment, but I figure I'll introduce myself anyway. My name is Keverage, though I've also been known as Kmacc on sites such as TSC. I've been running Sonic R since 2006 with IL's, so I know this game pretty well.

Since I got into speed running and playing this, I always wanted to have a definitive ranking for this game. I had considered making a google doc, but just never made the effort, as activity in the game is obviously low. With the emergence of this site, I decided to take on the task of compiling times for each of the four categories of Sonic R, so we can have a more wholesome ranking table.

I have a spreadsheet with a bunch of times from 20+ runners, which I got between searching twitch, youtube, pbtracker, and SRL. Some of the times (mostly the better ones) have video proof, while others don't (mostly SRL raced times). I just wanted to try and take a step toward getting every known time, no matter what the source. I just have a few questions that if a mod could answer, it would be greatly appreciated!

1. Is it possible to put these list of times onto these rankings even if the person doesn't have an account? Would it be necessary to get their permission to include their time here if they haven't submitted it themselves?

2. Is there a way to submit a time and make it go on two different category tables? ie: I submitted my 15:18 100% (No OoB) time. I don't have a standard 100% run yet, so would I have to re-submit that as 100% as well, or is there a way for it to just carry over? That would assume there is no time in that other category, or it beats that time in that category. I ask this because many of these people race mostly with No OoB, but technically No OoB fits the rules of standard any% or 100% as well, so times should go to both charts if they are No OoB and the players' best times for those.

I look forward to helping make the Sonic R rankings the best they could be. Maybe it'll even spur more competition, and people will realize this is actually the best Sonic game ever :3