EnglandYo, I had a friend go looking into the IGT to actually figure out how it worked and the results are as follows
- pauses on menus
- doesn't pause on loads (but this isn't as significant as you might think since the door scenes are fixed length and account for almost all of the loading anyway)
- does pause on the final cutscene
- doesn't always pause on unskippable cutscenes, sometimes does, depends on the cutscene, very fun.
- randomly tacks a couple of seconds on after the final cutscene???
- actually starts about 4 seconds before you gain control but way after most people start their timers, convenience thing I guess.
the kicker is the following:
- always runs at 30fps regardless of the game speed, so when your game lags, you lose time.
this gives emulator a distinct wildly unfair advantage from the jump because PSXJin is literally a lagless TAS'ing emulator and this game runs kinda like shit on an actual console. this comes as basically zero surprise to me but hey it might be news to some of y'all. This causes a discrepancy even outside of normal gameplay, because cutscenes lag and some of them count time lol. this is why emulator times consistently seem to have IGTs greater than RTA and console times the reverse, it's a lag thing.
i don't think IGT should even be used or PSXJin but since that's probably asking too much at this point, an emu/console split should suffice.
Aight cool thanks.
Yo, I had a friend go looking into the IGT to actually figure out how it worked and the results are as follows
- pauses on menus
- doesn't pause on loads (but this isn't as significant as you might think since the door scenes are fixed length and account for almost all of the loading anyway)
- does pause on the final cutscene
- doesn't always pause on unskippable cutscenes, sometimes does, depends on the cutscene, very fun.
- randomly tacks a couple of seconds on after the final cutscene???
- actually starts about 4 seconds before you gain control but way after most people start their timers, convenience thing I guess.
the kicker is the following:
- always runs at 30fps regardless of the game speed, so when your game lags, you lose time.
this gives emulator a distinct wildly unfair advantage from the jump because PSXJin is literally a lagless TAS'ing emulator and this game runs kinda like shit on an actual console. this comes as basically zero surprise to me but hey it might be news to some of y'all. This causes a discrepancy even outside of normal gameplay, because cutscenes lag and some of them count time lol. this is why emulator times consistently seem to have IGTs greater than RTA and console times the reverse, it's a lag thing.
i don't think IGT should even be used or PSXJin but since that's probably asking too much at this point, an emu/console split should suffice.
Aight cool thanks.
I ask because near everyone runs on emulator and a lot of people's IGT is actually greater than their real time which doesn't make any sense.
the scant handful of console runs don't seem to exhibit this, so I have no idea what's going on there
I'm making this thread for the Silent Hill 4 players to talk about what we should do about the Quit and Continue thing because it was mentioned on the Discord once briefly and then swiftly implemented without a whole lot of discussion surrounding the matter.
I've since heard a fair amount of reasonable complaints and dissent from the actual running base on the matter, so I'd like people who run this game to put forth their opnions on how to handle this? Separate category? Ban it entirely? Something else? Community thinktank, if you will.
because this matter I don't feel ever really got a fair discussion before it got passed and some people clearly aren't happy with it
My own personal opinion is that I'm completely happy to split the categories over it or disallow it entirely, whatever the general zeitgeist desires, it's just hard to tell what people actually want without a centered discussion point.
Go for it, lads.
Rules text updated to:
"These are the emulators that are accepted for submissions, other emulators may be rejected. All emulator runs are hidden regardless due to unfair input polling and general jank regarding PS1 emulation"
Emulator runs using allowed emulators are still being verified and accepted, banned emulators are still banned. The only change is emulator runs now don't display on the leaderboard by default, you can remedy this by clicking on the "Filter" button, if that is your preference.
The reason for this change is new evidence coming to light over a period of time that indicates emulators possess an inherent unfair advantage over console due to emulators having an inherently higher and more stable framerate than console Silent Hill, a game that can barely pull 30FPS on a good day.
Among other past concerns such as the lighting issues, the potential script abuse that has occurred in the past on emulated runs and the general consensus across a majority of PS1 speedrunning that emulators just aren't very accurate, the moderation feels that a final solution is necessary so that we aren't constantly overburdening both the moderation and players with additional onerous emulator rules trying to make it comparable to console when it seems to be a lost cause.
Thus, emulator runs are now hidden by default and will be for the forseeable future. The change to the leaderboard is purely visual and does not impact your ability to submit a run within the existing emulator guidelines and have it accepted.
Thank you for your understanding.
Not sure how well known this is, but I don't see it in any RTA runs. Lets you skip turning on the generator and that entire segment of the first floor.
So, it turns out this game was mildly censored in Japan, but in a way that looks like it'd make the run faster by some amount.
You can see in this video that the entire cutscene with sticking your hand down the decapitated cop's neck is gone, the key is just lying around in the open. This is just the change shown in the video, there may very well be more that aren't known.
I'd love to investigate myself, but you don't seem to be able to just swap between the two on Steam, it's an entirely different product that seems like it would require a japanese IP to activate and maybe continue playing? This varies by game on Steam and I'm not currently in the position where I can drop about £60 in yen to find out.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/530940/?cc=jp
On console you can probably just import the disc.
I'm wondering, does anyone happen to have access to this version of the game and can tell us what's different about it for the speedrun? It seems worth looking into.
It's timed RTA and emulator loads the game a ton faster than any actual console can because it's a PS2 emulator and they basically all do that.
I know this isn't really a serious speedgame or whatever but I thought this was somewhat commonly known, it's a bit depressing to see the leaderboard being dominated by emu times that are literally impossible to beat on the hardware.
Compare literally any of the emu runs to the console runs and the loading time difference is immediately stark and obvious. It should be banned, or at the VERY least made to be hidden by default.
https://discord.gg/0fgPp8yQXjcIdZ4w
I don't know why I haven't made a sticky thread with this already.
Following the rule change made for greater emulator accuracy, a very sound point was raised about the use of scripts that kept track of the item counter and kill counter, which may or may not have been used in 10 star runs currently on the board. I'm not clear on that.
Anyway, point is that the use of such scripts is obviously banned due to it presenting a huge advantage for emulator over console, as console cannot perform any kind of memory reading techniques. The current script that read these values only works on epsxe 2.0, so the rule was made to only use epsxe 2.0.5 such that this script wouldn't present an issue.
However, it's been pointed out to me that there are still ways to view the memory values for any emulator yourself via methods like Cheat Engine or making another script yourself and that telling if someone is using such a script in an emulated 10 star run, is unknowable. I agree with this, but am not sure how to handle it going forward.
There a few options, and I'd like to talk to the community and get an opinion on what they think is the best approach here:
1.) Do nothing and continue with the current emulator rulings, no kill/item script exists for the currently accepted emulators yet, but may in future. 2.) Ban emulators outright from the category, this would entail retroactively deleting both 10 star runs from the board, which would leave the category completely empty and to be honest, kinda pointless and vestigial at that point. 3.) Create a sub-variable/category that separates Emulator/Console for just 10 star runs, since 10 star is the only category that presents this potential advantage. This is a solution, but still presents a couple of issues of basically subtly ok'ing mild cheating via the script.
These are just the options I can think of off the top of my head, maybe someone has a much more elegant solution they can post.
As for my personal opinion, I'm kinda leaning 2 at the moment but I'm very much on the fence about it. I do not want to make a decision like this hastily, so have at em, boys.
This is kinda something I've wanted to bring up for a while but I notice a lot of runs come in on emulator, and they all seem to use older builds of epsxe for some reason and this has been slowly starting to bug me more and more because old versions of epsxe don't emulate the darkness and fog effects correctly relative to the console version and relative to other more up to date emulators.
Top: Old version of epsxe Bottom: New version of epsxe
the top has this weird glow around the objects because it's not emulating something to do with how the game handles lighting properly, which grants much clearer visibility to the player in darker areas of the game (Silent Hill being what it is, this makes up like half the game) compared to someone playing on the official hardware.
It's a minor advantage, but since all that would need to be done to deal with it is just asking people to use an up-to-date build of epsxe, or use Bizhawk or something, I don't think it's asking too much that going forward we no longer accept runs done on emulators that don't emulate SH's lighting effects correctly.
tl;dr : I want to add a rule banning older versions of epsxe due to emulator inaccuracy. Newer builds and alternate emulators like Bizhawk are still fair game.
someone bloody sticky this for me because i'm not a series mod
