Maryland, USABecause if not then apparently the main game I moderate (GTA Vice City) is just stuck with PS2 being the top (default) option even though the vast majority of runs are done on PC.
After some investigation regarding a runner who had a faster-running game than others, it appears that version 1.10 of the Android version runs at a faster rate than all of the other versions, and we now have an official fastest version of the game. Perhaps someone knew of this before, but I could not find any information about this anywhere during my investigation. I was able to test 1.07, 1.09, 1.10, 1.11, and 1.12; only 1.10 ran faster.
So going forward, you will be required to select your game version upon submitting runs. If you know your game version on older runs for a fact, feel free to edit your runs and we will re-verify them.
If you have difficulty finding a download for version 1.10, I got you covered. Message me if you have any issues.
Post any and all instapasses here because nobody wants to have to dig stuff up in Discord.
Taxi Driver (almost) You can break out of the cutscene by canceling taxi, but there's a "perma-instance" of taxi that crashes your game once you get it canceled somehow (e.g., via dying).
Distribution w/ Two Bit Hit (1.0/1.01 only)
Distribution w/ Test Track
SSA Race 1
Juju Scramble (1.0/1.01 only)
Cap the Collector (<1.04 ONLY)
Bombs Away w/ Test Track
Bombs Away w/ Vigilante Kill remaining instance either with a well-timed Vigilante start RIGHT before the end of the cutscene fade-out, or just go blow up the van. https://streamable.com/lmfrz4
Cabmaggedon Kill leftover instance with Distribution or om1 rampage death
One Bus Fare belongs among the ranks of seagull snipe, hooker%, and nice guy bonus IMO, and has a degree of strategy to it. I've done several runs, so you can see for yourself what it's like. 3:04 August 24, 2015 1:43 April 16, 2016 1:12 April 29, 2019 0:56 April 29, 2019 srcom sucks and isn't letting me create hyperlinks with custom text properly, but yeah
Also, I already submitted my GP hundo run under 69 HP as a request because I wasn't sure what to do without "non-existent category", but yeah. That one is also fully suited to memes IMO since it's just 100% but on a different official game version, yet the difference in content is currently determined to bar GP 100% runs from being on the main 100% leaderboard (no rampages, two missions cut). It's kind of like in-game 100% in that sense.
So MM2 runners discussed why there seemed to be some variations in some people's times for Ignorance is Blitz, and the conclusion was reached that having a high framerate does affect the physics in an advantageous way. This wasn't acceptable, so a baseline of 60 fps was agreed upon (with FPS display required) to keep things fair for everyone.
Now, because this may also affect MM1, I will be enforcing the new rule for this game as well (not that there have been any submissions for ages). You must display your framerate using something like Fraps or Dxtory from now on, with the framerate capped at 60. If you are using VSync with a higher refresh rate than 60, cap your framerate to 60 (Dxtory can do this too, among other programs).
For current runs that do not display the framerate, I have no way of telling what the framerate is, so I would appreciate existing runners checking their settings to see if either VSync is disabled for the game, or mentioning if the monitor used at the time of the runs was better than 60hz to retroactively apply the rule. @OsamaJT @Niloquì @bluluxabica @reaXn @talal @Swaggles
Since the IL boards been around, the side missions which come with timers have been timed using that timer, or whatever other in-game time could be used. I never thought it'd be problematic enough to affect rankings, but it's common knowledge that in-game time in GTA is pretty much trash.
This has come to its logical conclusion since we've realized that the in-game timer on the mobile version (and to a certain extent, console versions) of the game runs more slowly than the actual game itself (which is also extremely slow on mobile), so you can get a worse run on console or mobile with a faster in-game time. This is unacceptable, and as such we've made the decision to standardize timing. The start and end of timing for these ILs will remain as before, only using real time as the standard. This also finally solves the impossible PS2 WRs mystery. Unfortunately, this also digs the grave for the mobile version in terms of competitiveness in these ILs, but its disadvantage in speed is already reflected in RTA-timed ILs and the main board, so it should be consistent. Who knows if we'll see the day that version is faster at anything now.
A run was finally submitted for All Races and the city bus was used on checkpoint races to get the Panoz GTR-1. I think the timer glitch should be permitted since it doesn't affect the RTA time; actually, there isn't anything suggesting you can't in the rules, but having it clarified would be good.
A for allow. B for ban.
From what I understand, you technically skip missions since the different parts of EoTL are considered missions in the game code. However, from an outside perspective it's obviously one big mission, so this is why whether this should be allowed or not could be fuzzy.
You can explain why you voted a certain way if you'd like. Thread will be locked after a week, votes counted (filtering votes from those who shouldn't really be voting) and a decision will be made based on that.
Iwer Sonsch brought this up again recently in the discord, and one of Tei's recent runs for William Wallace seems to have somehow been set to Hard. Every respectably good runner runs on hard, most of the Standard column is empty, and what I did with keeping Standard for Wallace runs is quite pointless in retrospect. You can't select difficulty for Wallace but maybe that just means that there is no difficulty difference? and even if there was, it doesn't warrant its own column to hog up the rest of the space. I expect most people to agree but I've had a bad habit as a mod for several games to take action that seems reasonable only for people to disagree after the fact or be all confused, so here.
While discussing adding No Major Glitches, I figured that All Story Missions could be replaced by it. Clearly I was wrong in thinking it was so simple, and so will treat it as a separate matter. Now's the time to see if another leaderboard change can be made, anyway. So instead of wiping out any semblance of an all missions category (silly in retrospect), I propose upgrading it to All Missions (actually all of them).
The change would be relatively small; from my understanding, All Story Missions is every mission that changes the name of the save file, EXCEPT street races and BMX/NRG challenges (correct me if wrong), and also bans gang territory skip. All Missions would include everything, including the street races and BMX/NRG challenges, and the GT skip ban. It would unfortunately make all current ASM runs obsolete, but also make it a more complete All Missions category. This is probably how it should've been to begin with, but better late than never.
This is coming from someone who's never run ASM or 100%, so I'd like opinions. I'm open to keeping both categories available on the leaderboard for people to try out running All Missions before anything else is changed, or something else.
Post videos of you taking off in a VCN Helicopter (holding W) with closing the door, and a rough approximation of your framerate uncapped + your CPU and GPU. I used dxtory to see my framerate but it wasn't captured, but ideally framerate would be shown.
e.g.: Approximately 100-120 fps. Intel Core i7-2600, GTX 650.
I never really cared about the community consensus to ban turning off the frame limiter and just adhered to it. However, in the past year I've begun taking the opposite stance and today some conversation between some of us runners has arisen again on the topic, so may as well see what people think now, and how big of an advantage one's system specs would give if this rule were removed. This, as far as I know, was the single reason as to why the rule existed to begin with, but we may as well see the actual difference for ourselves.
edit: I'm wrong, 100 fps compared to 300 fps is a bigger difference in gameplay than I figured, but I stand with the rest of my points.
Removing this rule would bring new routing opportunities to the three major categories (aka faster), with all the pros and cons of having frame limiter on or off. Off, and your game will crash more often and behave more unpredictably (to us) with regards to physics, with faster heli takeoffs and slower boat movement and whatever else. On, and everything is normal, with slower heli takeoffs and whatever else. It's definitely worth more exploration. Besides, we allow using ramdisks and SSDs to improve load times, so complaining about pay to win is not a valid argument.
Post your videos/thoughts below.
As absurd as it might sound, I want the GTAVC section of the page with the URL "/gtamemes" to be purged of categories that are no more than gimmicks that have close to no value.
Let me list the ones I mean: 69 HP, Get to (0,0,0), Shakedown%, Ingame 100% NG+, Good Citizen Bonus, Low% Bad Ending, Trojan Voodoo No SSU No Censoring, One Bus Fare, and Pacifist Army Murder.
You may now be thinking to yourself, "wow this washed up kid really hates fun, doesn't he?" But I gotta say, plenty of these came into being with me joining in on the memes in the past. I fully believe they have no place on a board like this, and that the board should be reserved for categories that could possibly deserve a spot on this website, but aren't good enough to make it to their respective games' boards.
I'll go into detail.
69 HP, Good Citizen bonus, Low% Bad Ending, Get to (0,0,0), One Bus Fare, Pacifist Army Murder:
These runs last no longer than several minutes and require little to no planning or skill. There is no competition to be found doing these, and the only reason I ever did Low% Bad Ending, One Bus Fare, and 69 HP (albeit in GTA3) was because of either boredom or just coming up with random goals to get while having a timer going, and not for getting an actual free WR to be shown to the world on the site. These categories cannot be competitive and are basically just infected spots sitting on the boards.
Shakedown%: Literally just Any% up to Shakedown. What's the point? Nobody even races this anymore, and it shouldn't even be a thing on here anyway. See below.
Trojan Voodoo: This is a really cool race category, but I'll be damned if some nerd comes up and tries to grind it for WR because he can. (spoiler: I actually won't because this is exactly the kind of person that this gtamemes thing caters to.) Just leave it in peace, thanks. Also, when's voodoo?
In-Game 100% NG+: Hey, remember when nobody wanted this to be on the Vice City leaderboard? Well now I'm here to tell you that having this category here is just as pointless as it was over there! I've mentioned this before but the point of it is to show off that 100% can be achieved in under half an hour, so a link to the best run (only one that matters) can be placed in the 100% rules or somewhere else for people to see without it being a category.
Basically, leave it for memes worthy of people's time.
... because everyone who liked it didn't care, and everyone who didn't like it also didn't care enough to make a thread discussing what should change or why it's a bad change, but were still annoying enough to make me care enough to make the thread myself.
With that, I will clear up a few things about my motivation behind doing it in the first place. With any% 'long' being a dead category, and me having better preoccupations than to care about a video game, this went unchecked for a while. KZ_FREW recently started practicing this pre-August version of any% which he had been told could be referred to as "Any%, No ACE" (ACE standing for arbitrary code execution). As soon as I saw this name and realized what it meant, I 1) thought it was much much better than "Any% Warpless", to the point where I'd accept it personally, and 2) wondered if instapasses were actually ACE. Of course that's a technicality, albeit an obvious one, but once people were told that it basically just meant old any%, most of them just rolled with it.
Some time before I made the change (probably a day or two before), Odyssic threw the suggestion out and I realized that yes, this is a thing that should happen and it might get people interested in running VC again, with the "official" reintroduction of a relatively short, enjoyable speedrun. It didn't cross my mind at the time that there was the trend of people ceasing to run things that have no official leaderboard, but doing them if they're a main leaderboard category. In hindsight, that's actually further argument to keep the change, since I've seen numerous people playing the game, which is totally cool.
The way the change took place was that I added a variable called "ACE", set all runs default to the "No ACE" value, and manually edited each new run to "ACE". Variables on the site can be toggled to be subcategories, and I did that, so if you're complaining about this being so huge, then realize that if it ABSOLUTELY has to be undone, it's so damn simple.
Also, yes, I know the name isn't perfect. In its current form, it's alright. The main criterion for a good speedrun category name should be conciseness. It should be short, while also describing what it actually is quite well. If a name is too nondescript and short, you end up with shit like Classic%, but if it's too bulky and long, then Any% No ACE could be referred to as "Any% without doing tricks to start any mission at will". I've heard of "Any% no stack underflow", which is another acceptable name IMO, but it only really makes sense to those who know how the big KYFC warp works. It's still quite short and descriptive and I think it's better than "No ACE" by a bit.
One last point is that the variable might not end up having to be a subcategory division, but I think it makes sense. If there was no division, it'd simply be that every ACE run would be on top, and every No ACE run would be on the bottom, like it was before. The split makes the board a lot cleaner and understandable.
TL;DR, the change is welcome by many; yes, the name isn't perfect, but I think "Any% No Stack Underflow" is a viable name candidate, but discuss this here; and while I very strongly advocate for this not to be reversed, it can be done so easily if the world will end otherwise.
Discuss.
It was only used for green pepper PC runs and PAL console runs, but 1) nobody ever ran on green pepper and it's not gonna happen in the foreseeable future, and 2) console runs are super niche. Besides, the main differentiation that should be made on the leaderboard is between non-Japanese and Japanese versions anyway, so I'm in favour of removing the PAL region from VC.
Let me know if you think otherwise, but for the love of god don't come up with a counterargument that you personally don't vouch for.
I made a load removal script for LiveSplit. Look at my most recent GTAVC VoD to see it in action.
It pauses the timer during the island transition screens, starting replays, entering/exiting interiors, time taken to load mission [cutscenes], and the "Loading..." screens when you load a save (or at other times, I think). Let me know if there's anything missing I should add to it.
Once we agree that it's done, I will make it an option on the leaderboard. At that point, I highly suggest anyone who will run the game to use the loadless timer, but it's just in the works for now.
http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=32037241593194527756 This should be fully functional.
I saw Omega doing a deathwarp in his GTAM All Missions run, but it sucked, so I thought of this.
