Effective April 28, 2022, we are implementing new timing rules based on community feedback. The timing for run start and run end have changed as follows:

Start: Upon confirming your dog's name (Previously: Selecting "Start Game").

End: Upon the first black frame after affirmatively choosing to leave Pupsville at the end of the game (Previously: Upon the first frame of the end credits appearing).

These new start and end points offer quality-of-life improvements for runners; namely, the freedom to choose the dog breed / name of their choice without taking a time loss, as well as the elimination of load times before/after the end cutscene (and for many versions, the end cutscene itself). No gameplay of consequence occurs before or after these points.

These changes were proposed, discussed, and then unanimously approved by participating users on the Discord.

The change to the end point does happen to nullify the only currently-known major timesave between regional releases - Wii JP's ability to skip the end cutscene, a consistent 20-to-25ish-second save. It should be noted that prominent Wii JP runners were among the first to propose and endorse the end point change; in no way is the timesave being wrested away in bad faith.

Existing runs have been manually retimed to the new specifications and will be updated on the leaderboards accordingly shortly after this post is made. No changes to rankings will result.

Happy running and as always, we welcome your thoughts, questions, feedback, etc.!

There has been increased interest in emulator submissions for THE DOG Island recently; however, rules regarding emulator runs have long gone unestablished because it's a contentious issue with few easy answers. We are overdue to fix this, so I'd like to gather the community's opinions.

I've set up a poll for this purpose: https://www.strawpoll.me/45897738

The results of this poll won't necessarily determine the rules we go with right away, but they will be very helpful toward coming to an informed decision that the community can be satisfied with.

To further elaborate on the situation, here is a response I gave in the Discord recently when asked whether or not emulators were allowed:

"Prefacing this with an apology that I've been swamped at work and haven't had the time to answer questions like this (or, uh, run the game for close to a year) - Presently, we don't have a policy in place regarding emulator runs, though Auaora and I did discuss it a while back. I was initially opposed to emulator runs because emulation introduces a lot of room for both intentional manipulation and unintentional advantages over console play; these are more-or-less solved for regarding older consoles (fifth-gen and below) as emulators for those consoles approach 100% accuracy, but emulators for newer consoles are not quite there yet. Many Wii and PS2 leaderboards disallow emulators for that reason, and I sympathize with that. But Auaora rightfully pointed out that emulation greatly expands accessibility to the game (as well as to the most speedrun-viable versions of the game), and as someone who personally values game preservation and accessibility very highly, I can't disagree with that. What we are specifically trying to avoid is emulator runs having consistently faster load times (or other advantages) than are attainable on console, as that would unevenly skew the playing field. If an emulator run has demonstrably similar load times to its console counterparts, I don't have much of an issue with it, but the potential for abuse remains, which gives me pause. Checking every run against equivalent console runs for load time consistency would, of course, be very labor-intensive, and load times differ even among identical versions of the game. There was talk of potentially having a separate category for emulator runs, though we did not commit one way or the other. One thing we agreed upon, though, is that loading the game from flash media (USB, SD, etc.) on modded consoles should be disallowed, because legitimately disc-loaded retail versions of the game would be categorically unable to compete with flash media load times. tl;dr it's a tricky issue and we haven't yet come to a consensus on it; we welcome everybody's opinions as always."

Long post incoming - tl;dr the PAL in-game timer acts weird, it's both good and bad, and I'm spending way too much brain power on differences of less than half a second

While verifying Winter_Doggo's recent minigame runs, I noticed that the in-game timer seemed to run slower than real time, as if the PAL version hadn't been adjusted to ensure that minigames still measured real time despite the expected gameplay slowdown.

I was right about it being slower - upon inspection using video tools, it indeed seems like IGT on PAL runs slower at more-or-less the same rate that is expected of PAL gameplay vs NTSC (roughly 5/6 slower).

This is good for PAL players because it means that PAL's slower gameplay speed isn't punished by the in-game timer, allowing PAL and NTSC players to compete evenly for IGT categories (though I suppose one could argue PAL gets a slight advantage via having more time to react, but that's getting too pedantic IMO).

I was wrong, though, that it hadn't been adjusted at all. It appears that on PAL (PS2 and Wii), the centisecond portion of the timer inexplicably rolls over twice per in-game second and thus... doesn't actually measure centiseconds. NTSC versions (PS2 and Wii both, again) measure proper centiseconds as expected.

This behavior creates a minor hassle for PAL IGT runners in that the actual run time will be faster or slower than what the timer shows at face value depending on whether the centisecond portion is on its first or second roll. If my math's right, it means that centisecond values from the first roll should be divided by 2, and centisecond values from the second half should be divided by 2, and then 0.5 seconds should be added on top of that.

For example, the .22 in Winter_Doggo's 0:29.22 on the Bumpy Road Sled Race occurred on the first centisecond roll, so it's really a 0:29.11 (0.22/2 = 0.11). But the .72 in Winter_Doggo's 1:53.72 on the Advanced Racing course occurred on the second centisecond roll, making it a 1:53.86 ([0.72/2] + 0.5 = 0.86).

I'm no math whiz, so my calculations may be quite wrong. I'll take the time to make sure before updating the existing run times. Regardless, no difference should exceed half a second, and NTSC players need not worry about any of this to begin with.

As always, I welcome any insight on the topic!