Took a fair amount of resets, but it's doable:

This is by no means exact science, but it is certainly possibe. Junkyard is somewhat repeatble, but cottage feels super random at the moment. Maybe there is a better setup for clipping there. Buggy run might be feasible with these.

Junkyard:

Cottage:

Hello! I've come to ruin all the fun.

First of all, this is a bit of a meme run at this point, so I'm not demanding that mods retime or invalidate anything and I'm not calling anyone out or anything like that. I'm just a bit concerned about what could happen if this gets any popularity as a speedgame.

Rules aren't very precise about how timing should be done. It says "Timer starts when you take control of your character after the initial fade-in". It feels like you gain control a bit before the fade in; if you hold movement keys during the loading it will fade with the player out of starting position already (so we might have to start timing runs after pressing 'play'). Even disregarding that, pretty sure xnubbeh and thebobbyv start moving before starting the timer.

The same with the run end time. "The timer stops as you get the last to-do marker on your screen" sorta implies that the notice in the top left should be visible on the screen, but the objective seemingly completes before that (the sound notification plays earlier). Pretty sure no one bothered with this to end their runs at the right moment (not even me, tbh. feel free to add +0.2sec to the run I submitted).

With such lack of precision it doesn't make much sense to even display miliseconds on the leaderboard. It might be difficult to determine which run is faster, for runs that are very close to each other.

So basically I'm asking you to consider setting stricter timing rules. Would be ideal if we had an autosplitter, but those aren't easy to make.

But this is just a suggestion to avoid possible issues in the future. If nobody feels it's necessary then I have no problems with keeping it the way it is.

Well if you have 60Hz monitor enabling vsync should do it. Otherwise you can use external software like RTSS.

After doing a quick test over a short distance, it does not seem to be faster. But I could be wrong, better check for yourself.

Yes, you can force games into windowed mode with dgvoodoo. I'd normally use dxwnd for this, but I couldn't make the game run nice with it.

Doesn't seem to work for me, unfortunately. Win7, Steam version, with dgvoodoo (doesn't work without dgvoodoo too):

I think Shogo uses the same engine version, and it has an autosplitter, but not load removal it seems. Having loadless time would be nice, but doing it manually is definitely too much effort for a game barely anyone runs.

Can confirm, my PC isn't something that I would call 'good', but difference with potato-vsync and fast is noticeable. I suppose it's a reasonable requirement, but what do we do with old runs? I had vsync off in all of mine.

I approve of points 1&2 and not quite sure about point 3. Option A seems bad. Option B is tolerable, but it's gonna be annoying to calculate menu time separately and add it all up, and I'm not sure people would want to bother with that. That leaves option C. If my calculations are correct, for a 30 minute run variable fps can make like ~15 seconds difference (less difference for faster runs). At the moment, there aren't any full game runs that are this close to benefit from precise frame counting. So I'd say use frame count for individual levels and realtime for full game runs, but I wouldn't personally mind using option B for that, too. Not sure if my opinion is valid though since I haven't run the full game yet, lol.