I noticed that there's an option to disable fog of war. I assume that you're not allowed to do that, but we don't seem to have any rules. Can we all agree to at least add one to prohibit that?
Another question is whether we want to allow save/resume mid-run for IL. I'd be inclined against it, but I know some RTS speedrunning communities allow it.
Potential rules:
- Fog of War must not be disabled.
- You must not save/reload during an IL run. (TO DO: What do we want to say for full-game runs?)
- We suggest you set the game speed to fastest, but it's not required.
- Runs are measured in real time from the first frame after the (first) level has loaded, to the first frame after the (last) victory message has appeared.
Any thoughts?
Fog of War and No Fog as separate categories?
For IL's maybe no saves, but for a full game I would say allow saves created during RTA, as some people may save during the later half of the game.
That would be reasonable.
Maybe we could also explicitly mention that using the "War2Combat" client (a version of BNE that's been slightly modified for portability, but plays the same) is allowed. (I think several of the currently-posted runs use it, including mine.)
@ZPR observed that the game only seems to check objectives every ~2.6s. This suggests that including milliseconds would be silly, since all times would be fall on one of these intervals if timed correctly. Although this assumes the game is consistently played at maximum speed, which is apparently not always true.
Some other links:
I've added "Fog of War" (Enabled/Disabled) as an optional field on all runs. It probably doesn't need to be a separate category at this point.
I'm going to add the following rules text for Tides of Darkness and Beyond the Dark Portal, based on these discussions and the set of runs we now have. Please let me know here or on Discord if you have any concerns and I'll be happy to discuss and make changes.
Runs are measured in real time from the last frame before the (first) level appears, to the first frame after the (last) victory message appears. For Individual Level runs, this defines an upper bound on the duration the player had control. For Full Game runs, this includes loading times between levels.
The "tigerlily" cheat code may be used to jump to a level to start an Individual Level run, but no cheat codes may be used during a run.
You are not allowed to save and reload during Individual Level runs, but you are allowed to save and reload during Full Game runs.
You may play at any speed, and you may change the game speed in the middle of a run.
Runs are measured in seconds, not milliseconds, because victory conditions seem to be checked less often than once per second, even on Fastest speed.
If Fog of War is disabled at any time during the run, the "Fog Disabled" option must be selected.
The repackaged PC Battle.net Edition client "War2Combat" is allowed.
@Watchman Sorry for the delayed response. Yes, it's allowed. I've updated the rules to be clearer about this:
All officially released version of the games are allowed (from the 1995 DOS release through the 2019 GOG release), and the unofficial repackaged PC Battle.net Edition client "War2Combat" is also allowed.
