mod of myst here, im fine with the idea of having realmyst as its own game.

i wanted to piggyback off starbird's point about inclusivity because i feel it's really important. we have a runner with a muscle disorder in the discord who hasn't submitted any times yet but has been learning and practicing both PS2 and PS4. he's said both in the public channel and in private to me that turbo has been a huge help to him and that he'd have extreme trouble completing runs without it.

so regardless of what we end up ruling in terms of how the board is set up, i'm completely against banning turbo outright. the idea of gatekeeping people out of the community just to preserve the integrity of mashing or whatever is absolutely a losing trade to me.

i guess it could be category based. if you think it shouldn't be allowed in the shorter runs, i guess im willing to have a discussion about it (im still pro-turbo right now). but glitchless has a lot of text mashing with the visiphone that i think turbo should be allowed for.

it's also worth noting that with my turbo controller, i text mash slower with turbo than when doing it manually, so it's literally a time loss for some extra convenience and leniency on my hands. but i understand this is dependent on the controller.

similar to the new rules on the myst leaderboard, since scummVM is included as an official version on the recently released 25th anniversary collection, you no longer have to submit scummVM runs as emulator.

since the recently released Myst 25th Anniversary Collection includes the ScummVM version, i am now fully considering ScummVM to be an official version of the game. therefore, runs submitted on ScummVM are no longer required to be marked as an emulator when submitted. thanks!

here's mine: https://my.mixtape.moe/tkuahn.asl

there's a few changes i wanted to make for it, mainly that it doesn't auto-reset after quitting the game. it's also kind of sloppily coded because i was just mainly just using it for myself. but it's functional for pretty much everything. just remember to set your livesplit mode to game time.

batch files for demos are easy and pretty quick. here's the batch file i use to do runs (e1 SM as an example)

chocolate-heretic -record 0rec -skill 4 -warp 1 1 -shortticfix -demoextend

here are my proposed rule changes for both individual episode and full game categories:

1. change episode runs to 8-level IGT from now on, runs will be required to either include a demo or have a visible IGT autosplitter (i have one i can upload, i just need to work out a few kinks with it) to be accepted. existing runs without demos will be grandfathered in and will be manually timed on levels where IGT is not visible.

2. change full game runs to RTA RTA isnt ideal because different source ports have different load times, often being faster than DOS. but in the case of full game, there isn't a really good solution here; you can't record multi-episode demos and i dont like the idea of requiring all submitted runs to use an autosplitter. however, since this is a longer category and the load times generally add up to only a few seconds over the course of an entire run (as opposed to an episode run where a few seconds can be a huge difference), i think RTA is fine here.

please let me know what you think of these changes and any concerns you have. if everyone is fine with it, i'll go through and retime all the old runs on one of my days off. 7-level IGT is just terrible and we've already stopped using it for the most part in the small heretic demo community that still exists.

also, if anyone has any questions about how to record demos on chocolate heretic, i can upload one of my example .bat files. it's really simple to do, plus it's nice to have a "pure" record of your run without worrying about frame drops, mic noises, bad video quality etc

yeah, i'm just going to change it. keep doing IGT7 for now, and on one of my days off, i'll go through all the runs and update their times.

also, please upload demos with your times from now on. i dont know if i'm going to make it a requirement, but it makes it 10x easier to get the exm8 time if you upload a demo. just throw it onto a google drive or something, or dropbox. if anyone needs to know how to record a demo i can make a tutorial. i also have an autosplitter for heretic so we could make it an either/or deal; either you upload a demo, or you upload a run with the autosplitter. either way would make it much easier to time exm8 and e4/e5 runs.

if you're on chocolate doom just remember to use -demoextend and -shortticfix. if you're on vvheretic+ it should be fine without any extra settings.

the heretic demo community already stopped doing 7 level IGT so i'd be in favor of changing it to include the final level. theres like a thousand ways to get the final level time from a demo so theres no reason to still exclude it from the final time.

the main issue is that a lot of the times posted now don't have demos, and we can't get their final level time without it. we can manually time i guess but that's a lot of work, and switching to RTA doesn't make sense in this game because all of the valid source ports have minor differences in load times and stuff compared to DOS.

if the other mods are fine with it i'd be willing to switch to 8 level IGT and i'll make it a project some day to go through all of the existing runs to time exm8.

so, a few things i feel like i should document in this thread regarding the new route:

first of all, the chest flag that is set when we open the 100 meseta chest in the piata basement becomes the event flag for watching the elsydeon cutscene after shifting 8 bytes. so all we have to do is go to dezo and go into the ship and the game will start the reunion cutscene. shoutouts to mor_mot for figuring this out at the exact same moment as me because we both had the idea at the same time lol

as for how we actually get to dezo, it involves using jiseed's "rykros warp". as i mentioned earlier, the way this works is by moving the value in F408 (saved Y position) to F400 (world index). so, the planet you get taken to is dependent on where you save. if you save right in front of the tonoe cave entrance, that byte will be set to 01, so the next time you use ryuka, you'll be taken to dezolis. if you save slightly lower, that byte will be set to 02 instead, which is the world index value for rykros. so for this route, the key is to save right in front of the cave entrance.

EDIT: another detail i forgot to mention: the 8-shift macro is created by shifting a corrupted macro into another corrupted macro. this means that in order for it to work, you need to have two corrupted macros adjacent to each other before shifting. i recommend keeping macro A blank when doing this and instead using macros B and C. this is to prevent the contents of macro A from being shifted into places you don't want it to go, such as the battle speed/menu speed slots. if that happens, you can sometimes end up with a battle speed or message speed of several thousand, giving you essentially a softlock. changing the battle/message speed on the menu won't fix this because the menu only affects the first byte; if the second byte was changed by the shift, you won't be able to fix it and you'll be stuck with an absurdly slow battle/message speed.

WEW

uploading the run shortly. new route is clean as hell.

okay jiseed, i was finally able to replicate your setup, and i figured out what was going on. i assumed that since you were getting an 02 from F408 into the slot at F400, that one of those earlier shifts was causing that area to shift once during a small shift, so when you did the big shift, it moved it into F400. however, it turns out it works differently than i anticipated. i think that because the macro changed, you somehow created a macro that does an 8-byte shift instead of a 4-byte shift. pretty fucking cool. i'm gonna look more into it and see if anything new can be done with this. maybe this will solve the edge problem? who knows.

EDIT: so, this means you need to be extra careful with your inventory. instead of items 1-3 being your party members, it'll be items 3-7. keep that in mind when setting up your inventory to make your party. i just did it and my party ended up being demi, woodcane, escapipe, escapipe, escapipe lol

thanks for the vid. i've been looking into chest flags and opening the edge, but here's the problem i'm running into: if the edge is open, the principal won't talk to you to let you start the iggy quest. if you open the antidote chest in the piata basement, then shift twice, you'll open the edge. but then you can't leave piata to actually go there. trying to find a way around that right now but it's tricky.

even rykros warping doesn't help. as soon as you get back to motavia, you're warped back to piata. the game checks the flags for the start of the game literally every frame that you're standing in the motavian overworld, and if they aren't set, it warps you back to piata. god damnit sega lol

we could set that flag using a shift, but in order to do that, we'd have to accept the fissure of fear quest. in order to do THAT, we'd have to beat zio and open the spaceport. maybe a viable route, but it just sounds too sloppy.

EDIT: actually i forgot, it's not a viable route because if you beat zio with the corrupted macro, the game will crash. if you clear the macro before zio, there's no way to get it back, and thus no way to shift.

i guess i should also mention how i'm shifting the flags twice: i did it by putting a telepipe in my party. putting any item with an ID above 80 seems to have the same effect as having FF in your party, so you can shift with it. so if you set up the first shift in a way where you get a telepipe in slot 4, you should be able to go outside piata and shift again after killing iggy (corrupted macro crashes in the basement unfortunately). but whether or not it lets you do this seems to depend on which legit party members you have, and what their stats are. for example, if my party was alys, chaz, hahn, telepipe, gryz, the shift wouldnt work. but when i swapped gryz with demi, it worked fine.

okay so i figured out how the planet warping works. F400 is the byte that determines what planet we're on, and what planet we'll end up on if we use a telepipe. if you set this to 02, we'll warp to rykros. gonna try to figure out a consistent setup to do this with characters who can finish the game

EDIT: removed a bunch of dumb incorrect speculation i should have actually tested before posting about lol

i'm having trouble reproducing the multiple shifts you're talking about. the only time i can do multiple, they're too small to even effect past the 500 range. can you post a video reproducing the effect you're talking about? i want to see what's different about your setup.

that sounds awesome! i'm going to experiment with it. regarding doing a shift in the cave, mor_mot and i have been doing it by waiting for either a surprise attack or a group of Carrion Crs. even with those, it still requires luck (surprise attack requires chaz to wake up, carrion crs require chaz to wake up AND requires the surviving carrion cr to use thread instead of attack) but it's more consistent than just hoping.

figured i'd update this thread with the findings me and mor_mot have been doing with jiseed's latest discovery.

so basically what's going on is that the game is shifting a whole bunch of bytes to the left by 4. this has a massive effect on the game, as you can imagine. even better, we found out that depending on the party order and some other factors we don't quite understand, you can change the scope of the byte shift. for example, chaz in front with rune in 2nd position will shift almost all of the bytes in the entire region of ram dedicated to stuff that goes in your save file. specifically, it seems to shift everything from F000 to F800, approximately. the implications of this are huge. here are a few of the ones we've found:

1. the first 3 items in your inventory get shifted into your party order. so you can basically use this to get whatever party members you want, including a massive range of glitched party members that were previously inaccessible to us. a lot of potential testing to be done with those glitched members.

2. your meseta gets shifted into your inventory. this is huge. we can use this to get whatever two items we want (it's possible to get a third but it would require a ton of meseta grinding). in this case, the most useful two seem to be the psycho wand and the hydrofoil, acquired by setting your meseta to 14,744 (or 39 98 in hex) before performing the byte shift.

3. all affected characters' EXP gets shifted into their level. this affects character stats in a lot of weird ways that are hard to understand. gryz gets byte shifted in a way where levelling him up corrupts a whole bunch of stats, not just of his but of other characters too. if we level up gryz after doing the byte shift, rika will level up to 99, for example. if chaz is around level 5 when we perform the byte shift, chaz will also level up to be quite strong afterwards. again, this is hard to understand, and probably requires more experimentation.

while there's still a lot to be done and experimented with, i already came up with a preliminary route that i think is worth testing out:

• play normally up to tonoe
• set up inventory so the first three items are lthr cloth, lthr helm, lthr crown (gryz, rika, demi)
• skip gryz, get the alshine
• ryuka glitch to aeido, then go through the cave
• use alys and rune to make a nawat macro, then go through zio's fort and fight juza with rune
• get demi. then ryuka to zema and get rika
• set up meseta to 14,744, then go to valleymaze and perform a byte shift with chaz at level 5
• flags get reset, returned to the start of the game. go inside and talk to alys
• use a telepipe to ryuka glitch past hahn and give gryz 1 level
• go back and replace gryz with hahn (if we don't have hahn, the iggy cutscene will crash the game)
• kill iggy again, then take the hydrofoil to zio's fort
• use an escapipe to hinas glitch past the magic barrier, then go through nurvus and fight zio
• after zio, go to zelan and get wren, then return to motavia
• fly to df3 and kill him
• do rykros normally
• afterwards, go to kuran and kill df1 to get the ice digger
• go to espmansion, get elsydeon
• go to motavia and walk through the edge. due to messed up flags, we dont have to fight PD, the game thinks shes already dead, so gg

EDIT: nvm, some stuff about this route is wrong. chaz needs to be level 2 or 3 but with level 1 stats (dont update them), hahn needs at least 750 exp to become super hahn.

sure, but it'll invalidate your IGT. but honestly IGT shouldn't matter in a multiep run anyways since you cant even record demos in them.

Hey, I figured I'd dump some of the information I've been researching here regarding opening the menu while walking (sometimes called "encounter skipping", but i prefer "menu stepping" because it has some other cool benefits besides avoiding encounters). It's possible none of this is new info, but since nobody is using it in runs yet, I figured I'd put it somewhere anyways.

First, let's go over the obvious: Menu stepping is when you open and close the menu while walking. This has two main benefits. First of all, it will avoid any encounters. Second of all, if done correctly, it will avoid incrementing the step counter. If you're unaware, the step counter is an internal value that determines your chance of getting an encounter. The simple explanation is that the more you walk, the higher your chance of getting an encounter becomes. Hidapipes slow this counter down by half (or 1/3rd, if in the Jet Scooter), and menu stepping stops it entirely. Finally, it lets you move and open the menu at the same time, saving a few frames each time you need to access the menu.

There are basically two types of menu steps, slow and fast. Fast is when the menu opens as soon as you press C, and slow is when the menu doesn't open until the party comes to a stop. The camera position is the determining factor; if the camera needs to scroll, you'll get a slow menu step. Otherwise it'll be a fast one.

This distinction is important, slow menu stepping is slow. It basically gets you the equivalent of a slightly below-average walk most of the time. Fast menu steps, on the other hand, can be just as fast as normal walking. In other words, if you pay careful attention to the camera positioning, you can take advantage of fast menu stepping to get several steps in with 0 encounter chance and keep your step counter from going up, at absolutely no time cost. It's not a huge game-changer or anything in terms of encounter luck, but it helps.

Here's a quick cheat sheet to help you in terms of camera positioning. From the default camera positioning after most encounter and map transitions, you're free to menu step this many times in each direction: Up: 4 Down: 1 Left: 5 Right: 4

In addition, here are the maximum steps you can get in a row if you scroll the camera all the way to one side Up/down: 5 Left/right: 9

Finally, here's a video of it in action so you can get an idea of the rhythm you need to use to menu step optimally. My timing in this video isn't perfect, but it should get the idea across.

Hope this is helpful!