Why not make pacifist a category variable? Then you can have pacifist for any category (not just meltdown).

Are there any significant differences between PC and N64/Emu that would justify the split?

It would be in Single Player -> Practice.

In the newest version the coin requirement for the penguin star was lowered to 300 from 1000.

It is a fairly precise trick; you have to grab the star at the same time you land on the ground, which apparently can only be done when your pitch is high enough. Thankfully it does work with a sideflip dive if you do it in the right place.

Deathwarps kinda ruin measuring by ingame time. Also, as far as I can tell, console has an advantage of about 4 seconds per race because of the blackscreen (Mr. Blonde's video doesn't have any blackscreen before races), so unless there is more than 4 seconds of lag per race, emulator is still slower.

Ok looking at the videos further, it seems the GO sign for the first race happens in Mr. Blonde's run at about 13 seconds and the GO sign for the first race in Golg's run happens at about 14 seconds, so maybe emulator is faster if there is a second or more of lag.

Oh, counter factor 1 does indeed work, the blackscreen is only 4 seconds now. Well, I might come back to this game then, since I can now actually compete since I don't lose so much time per race.

So I noticed that GolgAhri's runs only have 4 seconds of blackscreen before each race, where I am getting about 10-12 seconds of blackscreen before each race. It would be nice to save those 6-8 seconds per race, so I want to know what emulator Golg uses, and what plugins that allow this to happen.

I normally use Project 64 1.6, since that is the standard for speedrunning in most other games, but it seems for XG2 there may be a better one.

Interesting thing about that... I was testing out the PC version and it seemed to be faster than usual. Turns out 1 minute on the clock in game is only 45 seconds in real life (with the game speed set to 100% in the settings). When I did the same test on emulator, the clock in game ran at the same speed as livesplit. This is actually really noticeable with the countdown before each race.

By these measurements, we may have to set game speed to 75% in the settings to make the game run at normal speed on the PC version.

This won't matter for IL runs because those are measured in IGT, but for full-game runs, playing on PC and setting the game speed higher would be instant time save, so there would have to be some kind of verification for each run that the game speed is set correctly (it wouldn't be that hard to do, you could just compare the in-game timer to livesplit to see if they run at the same speed).

I have noticed that the rules don't mention anything about having weapons on or off for full-game categories. Furthermore, it just says that you need to complete the extreme contest, which to me means to qualify for all races and end the contest with more points than any other racer (in particular, it is not required to get first place in every race except in mirror). Because of this, I have found it faster in some races to run into my own proximity mines in order to kill myself and end the race early. I have found this can be done about once every 4 races without losing the point lead for the contest as a whole (so it can be done once in atomic, twice in critical mass, and three times in meltdown).

With the rules as they are stated, I don't see why this wouldn't be allowed, but I have noticed that the current runs on the leaderboard don't use this technique. I have submitted a run of every full-game category months ago, but it seems the only moderator for this game has disappeared off the face of the internet about a week before I submitted my first run for this game.

However, given this "deathwarping" tactic, I can imagine other runners may not like this, so it may be a good idea to have two different leaderboards for each category; one with weapons on and one with weapons off. In the weapons off case, killing yourself through any means would be banned (like running into walls until your health depletes, for instance, though I suspect that would be slower).

If ever moderation for this game becomes active again, this is probably something that should be decided.

If you are looking for downloads of patches, this is a good place: https://sites.google.com/view/supermario64romhacks/patch-downloads. In this particular instance, the link is https://mega.nz/#!beIkBSzR!hDS4zOQyJPEjlY3a2qBjqnmuoFrO1dqDliOn5Ua-MtU. I found this by using control+f on that list and searching for ocarina.

Since the particular link here says "unknown version", I compared it to versions I already have, and from what I can tell it is the oldest version of the game I have, which is what I call v1.0 (Kaze didn't put version numbers on his releases, which is why it is somewhat confusing and the reason why on the patch list it says "unknown version").

Any% runs are pretty accessible already, but all fields is just a super long grind. It might be a good idea to have something longer than any% but isn't as repetitive as all fields.

It might be alright to have a category be 'all vision fields', but I haven't looked at the map in detail to see how many fields that requires completing to do. If it is too many, there would be no reason to have that category since it would be too similar to all fields. In my experience from actually doing all fields, the vision fields are the only things that are even remotely interesting in that run after the big exp farm.

Alternatively, there could be a different interpretation of 'all vision fields', where you start the run with a completed file, then just play each vision field one by one until all of them have been completed. That would probably end up being shorter than any% and so might be pretty accessible for new runners, other than the fact that vision fields are generally harder than other fields, since you can't get an advantage by having a higher wizard level and so on.

Other than that, I could see 'unlock all skills' being somewhat interesting, or even a category where you have to get all of the journey notes, although it would be hard to verify that you have all of them.

If you want categories shorter than any%, one idea would be a run where you unlock a particular skill, like curse or barrage (freeze, bolt, and beam are way too early for it to be interesting at all I would think). Those could be good practice categories, since those are skills required to complete any% anyways, so it would be a good practice category as preparation for any%.

Reverse Hat Adventure, which is what we decided to call this glitch.

We treat 1.0.3 as 1.0, since it came out before anyone ever did runs of this game, so that is what everyone was playing on for the leaderboard that says 1.0. We basically pretend versions earlier than that don't exist, since they aren't that much different but are unquestionably worse.

JARP made a video of it at one point, but I think everything JARP had got deleted at one point so it is gone. From what I remember, you can easily get all the way to course 13 without any issues by using key 1 skip and then getting key 2. The main issue was then the 35 star door, and he probably used a handsfree bob-omb for that. you would have to take a bob-omb in course 13 and get it handsfree, then bring it to the 35 star door and use it to clip through.

For the "Beat the game" category, you do not need to complete all fields, only finish field X5, at the entrance to the spirit forge.

For the "complete all fields" category, you do need to complete all of the fields, which includes the vision fields, fields unlocked by completing certain fields on glaring difficulty, and compass fields. On the steam version, there are a total of 191 fields. This site contains a list of all fields: http://gemcraft.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Fields_in_Gemcraft_Chapter_2.

Oh right, I got it backwards. Yeah, NSR existing means that it would be banned in regular 100%. If the category doesn't exist, then RHA would be allowed in 100% and I don't know what the mods will decide to do.

for RHA, refer to this thread: https://www.speedrun.com/sm64oot/thread/ftgqn as well as this video: . At this point NSR means that you cannot use RHA. However, if some other means of modifying your inventory without actually collecting items the intended way is discovered, that would also be banned in NSR.

Currently the new version is allowed. It is possible that the old version is actually faster though due to RHA. It depends on whether they want to make a category split between 100% and 100% no source requirements. If so, then it will be functionally the same as splitting the leaderboard according to the versions.

So, since I will be doing a run using this glitch, we are gonna have to sort out what we are doing with the categories.

I have heard people talking as if there definitely will be a cateogry split: 100% and 100% no source requirements (NSR), where the regular 100% bans the use of RHA.

Well in that case this could be useful, since any item you lose through this process can be collected again. It seems that items spawn if and only if they are not in your inventory from what I have seen. So to make use of this it is a simple matter of finding a setup that is consistent that will result in a decent inventory. Even if you get a bad one, you can always just reset and try again.

It is pretty funny though since this is basically RBA. I think it has something to do with losing your hat, but not quite sure how exactly it effects the inventory. Maybe it has something to do with the object slot of the fire that hits you, which might explain the apparent randomness.