This already sorta exists for the flight levels, but it would be cool for it to apply to every level, timing would start when movement is first possible and end when every collectable is collected.
The reason why the flight levels are individually ranked is because they have an in-game timer
I know other people have been talking about it, but if we get codes that could active the timer outside of flights, this could certainly gain more interest, and I would certainly be interested in it. Until then it's just a bit too much of a pain for anyone to want to bother with, checking the vid every time to see if you actually PBed.
both useful yes, just there tends to be more intricacy in the levels themself, save for High Caves with the alternate MC HW start, and DW wallglide.
I'm currently working on this. The hardest part is defining the timing rules. ILs have been existing for this game since the early youtube years, so I think it would be cool to finally have all the records in a spreadsheet and keep track of it. For the timing end I already have a good idea, it should end with showing the inventory (pressing select). Pause menu (start) also works I guess. Actually yeah, start should also be fine so I can use all the levels from the community golds as a "basis WR". Since the majority of them leave via pause menu (5 enter the vortex). The reason for this is, it would be a very safe visual cue. Because the menu screen is either there or not. This way it's a consistent/uniform end timing. Levels would otherwise end on a dragon, some on a gem, or even an egg maybe. And for the timing start of an IL - I know "on first movement" is probably the first thought. But honestly, it's really hard to get those consistent. They differ from level to level. In some levels you do a little flop when touching the ground. It's also hard to really know when Spyro actually touches the ground because of different/inconvenient camera angles. It's probably best to use a visual cue from the fly-in animation. Maybe when the HUD appears or so. I have to think about that still. I also don't know how Homeworlds, Gnasty Gnorc or Gnasty's Loot should be handled yet. There is no perfect way to do this, that everyone would be happy with. But having something is better than nothing I think.
Also, at least in the beginning, I wouldn't keep track of a full leaderboard - just the best time. We will see how far this goes and how many people are interested. It would be in the style of Tebt_W's Crash 3 spreadsheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10y1DZ0CZk2cG4PX6uAVjxyVV70kGtL9bx5H79hnVQWY/edit#gid=0.