I've seen some people bring this up before. I can personally see the case that the run comes down to movement and mouse precision, but I'm honestly a little bit opposed to making dialogue skip easier. It feels to me like that's the major obstacle and the make-or-break tech for running this game.
I've submitted an 8:47 WR where dialogue skipping is done by binding mouse wheel scrolling to LMB. I would personally prefer that run be rejected, but that will depend on how our little community feels.
Separate categories are a total possibility, though, one allowing external rebinds so that people who don't want to break their hands by age 25 can run the game.
Either way, GG! What a time.
In every other instance that I'm aware of, AutoHotkey only works to fulfill preferences. Bind five different keys to one function to improve ease of access in a way that the developer never thought of. At the end of the day, rebinds of this kind do not result in any tangible timesaves.
Here, you've managed to cut off 10% of the game's runtime by using an external tool. This goes beyond fulfilling a preference, or expanding ease of use. This directly affects the run in a way that's actually impossible without said tool. By allowing this, we are by extension forcing every future runner to install and make use of this tool.
If this was possible within Unity's input options I'd find it a lot harder to argue against, but as it stands I think we have no solid reason to allow this.
I mean, I fully agree with you. I have seen people bring it up, though, and felt it needed to be addressed.
Personally, I'm for either banning external rebinds or allowing them as a separate category altogether. The second one is mostly because we have to accept that there isn't anybody who enjoys the normal run's dialogue skipping, and at least two people have already said they hesitate to do any attempts because of the dialogue skip tech. So in any case, it would be good to come up with SOMETHING for that.
I agree that it warrants its own category. Banning it outright just takes away another avenue of having fun with this game.
But then, what filosophy should we follow when it comes to the categories? Should the primary category be the fastest category, or is that category less legitimate than the original one? Which is 'Beat the Game', and which gets an added descriptor?
My suggestion would be adding a "w/ Script" category and putting an 'endorsed' AHK script in resources. Obviously it would be hard to monitor how people do it, but I think that goes through dialogue fast enough that you can't compensate for slower execution on menuing/pathing.
First of all, getting that quick of a time is pretty rad. However, I do think that we should put a ban on external scripts or keybindings. Having an extra category for such may be a decent idea.
Do we all agree that a separate category should be added, then?
I don't think anyone has spoken up against it yet. I'll ping PMC to post his opinion but I don't really have any contact with myserval or smoople.
If there's interest (and clearly runs have been done) an extra category makes sense. I would be absolutely fine with that.
I think it depends on what category people would rather run. I personally am not interested in doing runs with external scripts, but if people actually want to run the game but are deterred by the hand destruction, it would be a good alternative. I think either banning outright or making a new category are both good ideas depending on what everyone wants to run.
