@xSoapBubble recently brought up a good point - how does everyone feel about adjusting times for game crashes? I personally think this is pretty fair for the longer runs given how frequently this game implodes, but I have some times that would be affected by this drastically so I might be a bit biased.

If there were a way to fix it I might be less inclined - but there really isn't. I've tried an extensive number of things to get it running in a more stable fashion, and nothing works. You can take a look in the discord for a history of what's been tried. Might have more folks willing to run the game knowing that a crash won't affect them as much.

As for the timing we could do any of the following:

1. Deduct the time of the crash to the start of the selection of the next level.

2. Deduct the time of the crash to the start of the selection of the next level next level. If the crash happens in a level, deduct he time spent in the incomplete level from start to the restarting of the same level.

We could also switch to in game time, but I'm a little wary of that as it might lead to folks min-maxing the item system without consequence which isn't really in the RTA spirit, and it would also be incredibly rough to do for the runner and the mods on longer runs.

Let me know what you think!

This is a tough call. On the one hand accounting for the time lost due to a technical issue in a legitimate run is a fair thing to do. On the other hand this brings forth a system open to abuse. There's a fair bit of RNG in this game, particularly with enemy spawns. What's to stop someone from alt+F4'ing if they get bad rng and claiming a crash? To this end I vote no to applying this rule to shorter time categories. As for lengthier runs, I can see it being allowed, but that isn't my field so I abstain from passing any kind opinion on them.

I think in this case, it would be relatively easy to discern a real crash as it always crashes due to run time errors that are visible. We could exclude other events that look like crashes and make it a rule to capture the crash runtime error by either capturing desktop or switching to the error message in capture.

Perhaps we could be lenient in areas where there's no benefit - like crashes that happen coming out of a level since it's so common - there wouldn't be a benefit there as it always takes longer to restart the game and you've already passed the screens that take the most time. Plus you haven't seen any RNG yet. But that's the only case I can think of.

I do agree though, all of the runs that are under an hour, I see no need to include in this. There's almost never any crash that occurs in those due to where they fall relative to the amount of cutscenes, and ample reason to believe there might be attempted abuse in shorter runs.

I am in favor of deduct the time of the crash to the start of the selection of the next level, as in most games on SRC. I think it would be more honest for everyone. Still, it would be strange to deduct he time spent in the incomplete level from start to the restarting of the same level. I think even if it is triggered randomly, it can be beneficial in a bad situation. I've had it happen that the game just crashed without any errors, just closed and that's it. So checking the legitimacy of the crash can be difficult. Regarding the calculation of game time, I don't think this is necessary for the reason that inventory management still plays a pretty big role in speedrun, despite the fact that it can be quite random.

Interesting - I've only ever had runtime errors, so that's good to know. Yeah, I agree, given that knowledge, option 2 seems like a bad idea and would be too beneficial to for folks. So much so that someone might try to exploit it.