Hi guys, As you may have known, I have been using the Burnout 1 leaderboard on Cyberscore to track fastest lap and fastest total time for each track: https://www.cyberscore.me.uk/game/2

Would you all like to see these IL leaderboards moved onto Speedrun.com? A few points to consider: -If we have a leaderboard on speedrun.com and someone submits a new time to cyberscore, how will we know about it? What is the best way to keep our leaderboard in-sync or up to date?

-Should we initially copy over all submitted times from Cyberscore or only those which are verified or have proof?

It was requested for a place to showcase speedruns of Portal 2 custom chambers. I'll start us off with a segmented run of the No Elements series, ran by myself, Zypeh and Swagatron. Feel free to post videos to your own custom chamber speedruns.

No Elements Segmented Speedrun:

Link to Category: http://www.speedrun.com/Portal_2#Cooperative_Game

Hi, I am a moderator of Portal 2. Our co-op category has many submissions that probably shouldn't belong because Personal Bests do not override old runs unless Player 1 and Player 2 are the same as an existing run. For example, there is a run with Klooger as Player 1 and Betsruner as Player 2, and another run with Betsruner as Player 1 and Klooger as player 2. In addition to this, both Klooger and Betsruner have better times playing with other players. The result is that this inflates the leaderboard and people's ranking appears to be much worse than it should really be.

We would like add a display option on multiple player categories to hide all runs that are not a Personal Best for any of the runners playing. As long as it is the personal best of at least one of the runners, it should remain shown. I'm not sure if this will be difficult to implement on the site's backend... but I'm hoping it can be done. Please let me know if this is something that can be worked on by the development team.

Thanks, Znernicus

I know this hasn't been communicated well in the past, but I have realized that there may be several runners who think they are timing the game accurately but are not.

To put it simply: Livesplit is not accurate when demo recording is not used. Use Portal 2 Live Timer, or if you want to run with livesplit, time the demos after the run.

Explanation:

Demo recording has always been, and will always be the most accurate way to time runs. It is resilient to lagspikes, loads, etc. and has proven to be 100% accurate giving the exact number of ticks (1/60th of a second, think of it like a frame) that a chamber takes.

It was discovered in 2011 or 2012 that demo recording through a load causes roughly a 0.4 second delay. To avoid this problem, challenge mode runners would always stop their demo before the next attempt and begin one after they loaded in. This is the norm for challenge mode. However, in a single segment run there is no way to accurately get rid of this 0.4 second delay. The best way to get a consistent timing is to allow the demos to automatically continue recording through each chamber. In the case of a death, the best way to continue timing is to pause upon reloading and record a new demo before continuing. Unfortunately there is no way to make demos automatically continue recording after a death, but of course deaths can only lose time so there shouldn't be a lot of them to worry about.

During the course of the run (62 chambers, so 61 between-chamber loads) this 0.4 second (approx.) delay would amount to about 24-25 seconds. We accepted this in single segment timing because demos was (and still is) the most consistent method of in-game timing and also they allow you to later play back the run and render it in high quality.

Fast forward a few years and Sourcesplit (a plugin for Livesplit) was developed to remove loads from source games. This was extremely helpful for games like half life 2 where RTA was previously the standard. It "works" in portal 2 as well as it does for other games, but it's not like demo timing... it doesn't base its timing on the amount of in-game ticks that pass so it can differ and can be a few seconds off across a full run. Most importantly, if demos are not being recorded, the 0.4 second delay will not be captured in the timing and the time will not only be less accurate, but unfairly faster than demo recording. For some other source games (including Aperture Tag) sourcesplit is still your best option. For Portal 2, we already had something better.

I don't want to start removing people's times because they didn't know all of this (honestly, if you weren't around in the community 2-3 years ago you just wouldn't know), so instead I want to propose: -A penalty of 30 seconds to be added to those runs which did not record demos and used livesplit to track in game time. (to counter estimated 24.4 seconds of delay, plus generally less accurate timing method)

-A penalty of 5 seconds for those runs which use livesplit timing while demo recording. (To counter generally less accurate timing method)

Of course, runners who have demos can and should use the time given by Portal 2 demo timer or Portal 2 Live Timer so they would have no penalty.

I don't mean for this to be harsh, I just want to make our leaderboards more fair. I do apologize for the lack of this timing explanation being readily available and known, it's partly due to the fact that I am not as active as I used to be , and also partly because I never expected there to be so many newcomers to speedrun the game (which is a really awesome thing!!!)

I have not made any edits to submissions yet, I want feedback before I actually implement these ideas.