I was watching Panini's stream and I noticed that his game was loading 7 seconds on Atomic - Pacifist, I thought something was off so I looked at one of my records, and noticed it loaded in 10.8 seconds or something.
At first we thought it was a plugin issue, then we discovered that it was a VI Refresh rate issue.
VI Refresh rate doesn't exist on PJ64 1.6, but it does appear on PJ64 2.3 and later. As a community we need to discuss what to actually do with it. As of writing we are discussing it in the discord.
Edit: Instead of banning PJ64 2.3 and later, along with whatever other emulators have the ability to change VI Refresh. Thinking of just straight up banning the alterations of VI Refresh Rate, since it heavily effects load times. and we should be able to know when its been altered, especially since we could just compare runs.
For the record, I personally am not a fan of this solution.
A Super Mario 64 Super-Mod had a similar thread, seen here: https://www.speedrun.com/sm64/thread/jyeet/1#w6hv0
With all of the different emulator/core/settings combinations that cause load time variance I think we are better off just doing what they did and standardizing the core + settings. Remember, VI refresh rate isn't even the only emulator setting known to change load times.
It is what it is, but I don't think this is a problem we should pretend is just solved by a VI refresh rate ban without doing some more thinking and/or science.
Other options include switching to using "time without loads" or IGT, both of which are complicated solutions.
Just my two cents. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I'll look into it more over the next week or so. I did this as a temporary thing, as we'll have to properly analyse and dissect it all. For what its worth at the time of my decision I had watched some of my old console runs and found that VI Refresh set at 4000 which is what Panini had his set to, would load faster than hardware would load.
Will update this post when I figure some things out in regards to potential standardization and the like.
