hi, i have a couple feature requests I would like to see added. The context for these requests is the meatboy leaderboards https://www.speedrun.com/smb

first up: we would like to be able to reorder the submission platform list or change the default. The current default platform for meatboy, the wii u, happens to be one of the least popular consoles for submissions, and people forget to change it surprisingly often. it'd be nice to cut down that rate.

second up: adding custom platforms. We would like to be able to represent a patch version this way.

I suppose that requires explanation, since the typical way to show patch versions is to just make a patch variable (or ignore it & let ppl eat any timeloss). Well, the game is not being actively patched. For the vast majority of platforms the game is on, the latest version is effectively the only version.

pc version did get a substantial patch not too long ago. We now have v1.2.5, which is ~10-15 seconds slower in any%. Most people downpatch, but the old patch doesn't run properly on some computers (fixing this was a primary reason for new patch, actually). So a few ppl, mostly either new players or ppl with tech issues, run v1.2.5 anyways. Ideally we would like this represented on the leaderboards.

We would prefer not to create a 'patch' variable. For the vast majority of platforms, there is only one patch. In that sense, a patch variable would be visual clutter at best, and actively confusing to some new players at worst. Instead, since we are forced to show the platform variable anyways (? correct me if I'm wrong), it'd be easiest and cleanest from our perspective to just stick a "PC (v1.2.5)" in the platform list and be done with it.

so yeah, it'd be sweet if these could happen. thanks for listening.

Hi everyone, I'm removing the aftermath IL chapter page from the main IL boards. For context, aftermath forest is a set of custom levels. The problem is that a set of custom levels doesn't really belong on the main page, and especially not if no other custom chapters are being featured.

In the meantime, if you wish to view the runs that were submitted, I've catalogued them below for the time being. I'm not sure if the SRC run links will still work after their parent category has been deleted, but at least the youtube links should be fine. It's least I can do, since it's kinda unfortunate that their work is otherwise being orphaned like this.

Hopefully we can eventually restore these runs to a real custom levels leaderboard..

aftermath forest 1: 1.770 by CreepinAtMyDoor (aug 1, 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/y676nl1m

2: 2.730 by CreepinAtMyDoor (jun 18 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/zpq47rvy

3: 1.880 by stoic-rose94 (runman) (dec 1 2018) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/z03n88oz

6: 3.500 by CreepinAtMyDoor (mar 27 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/8yvwkw6m

7: 4.030 by CreepinAtMyDoor (jun 18, 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/m79qr59y

9: 5.150 by CreepinAtMyDoor (jun 4, 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/zpq4rvry

5.220 by litchi (jun 30 2016) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/0znvl8lm

11: 4.010 by Ikod (oct 28 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/ydqdvlxm

12: 1.570 by CreepinAtMyDoor (mar 25, 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/wzp7o8nz

1.800 by Ikod (mar 19, 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/nz1wlrry

19: 7.180 by CreepinAtMyDoor (may 3, 2017) https://www.speedrun.com/smb/run/ydqq2ovm

yo, so it's been brought up that the characters meat ninja and steve are currently not allowed on the IL leaderboards. The purpose of this thread is to solicit thoughts as to whether that should change.

I'm 99.9% certain that the original reason for them being disallowed is a holdover from the ingame LBs, where steve & meat ninja times are not counted (presumably because they get to go straight through walls or obstacles, respectively). But the only thing I can say for sure is that it was already collectively agreed upon before I joined the community, and I've been around longer than most.

If you don't know what Steve can do, you can check this sweet segmented vid from resident steve superfan watchurbaq:

Similarly, for meat ninja you can check this showcase by SupBro

Nah, that's it, really. I don't have much more to say in this post. Should the two characters be allowed on the IL boards? If you have opinions, let us know :)

(if you are curious as to what I think: they absolutely should have a place for ILs, and I'm guessing there was kind of a chicken-and-egg situation beforehand, where this discussion could have (should have) happened earlier, but nobody was interested in actually doing runs, because it wasn't allowed. I'm not necessarily convinced the best place is on the main IL boards. I don't want to write something long right now because I have no real strong opinions either way)

team meat recently did some server maintenance, and part of that involved shutting down the old Super Meat World server. When they patched the pc version of meatboy to version 1.2.5, they rewrote Super Meat World and set up a new server for it. However, the version most of us play on, ogversion, still used the old server. In the past few days, that server was taken down permanently.

This means that, because ogversion is hardcoded to connect to a specific IP on launch, we're gonna have some issues.

WHAT THIS IS

when you try to launch the game, the game will be stuck at the initial loading screen (before the intro cutscene) for a period of up to several minutes, before finally displaying an SQL server error and continuing as normal, with disabled online functionality (no super meat world or ingame leaderboards).

as of this writing, this applies to the original windows version ('ogversion') as well as the Mac and Linux versions. This does not apply to v1.2.5 on pc. The console versions use their platform's online functionality and are also not affected (& never had super meat world anyways).

HOW TO FIX

thanks to 6DPSMETA / DEFEAT for the fix. We just have to block the game in a firewall. For windows, follow this guide https://www.minitool.com/news/block-program-with-windows-firewall-009.html and create a rule that blocks supermeatboy.exe from accessing all networks.

I'm not familiar with Mac and Linux, but a similar approach should work for yall too. Feel free to post any successes you have and I'll edit the instructions in.

This fix will make the game throw the SQL server error immediately at launch, instead of you having to wait an indeterminate amount of time. From there, you'll be able to continue normally. All of the online functionality, however, will be permanently disabled.

Tommy's mentioned that a patch is planned for the Mac and Linux versions, to bring them to v1.2.5, but it's not being actively worked on (didnt say why, but its a safe bet they're busy with smbforever). Patches for ogversion itself (to make it compatible with the new meat world server) are not planned. If you want to play super meat world, v1.2.5 is going to be the only way to do it.

hi, i'm adding old runs to src so that the wr progression on the meatboy game stats page is accurate. see here http://www.speedrun.com/smb/gamestats

Problem is that many of the early runs for the 106% category in this game are from the same unregistered user, Takujiz. I want to update some links, but I can't figure out how to access his older runs. I can't click on the run on the game stats page, but if I attempt to check this runner's profile to see all his old runs, I can't, because he's unregistered and doesn't have one. I can only access his current pb.

What can I do?

can't submit it myself since i'm not mod but here you go

http://speeddemosarchive.com/SubTerrania.html

edit: also

also, the game's release date is march 1994 us, april 1994 uk (and possibly eu?). yes i know the game's title screen says 1993, i'm pretty sure that's wrong. i went through some old gaming mags and noted the release dates for different regions and when the game was reviewed.

hi, this thread is going to collect some basic info about how to get started playing the game.

a new version of the game, v1.2.5, was released on steam for windows PCs, to coincide with the race mode DLC and the 8th anniversary of the game's release. v1.2.5 is a tradeoff: a lot of glitches were patched out (including autojump and timer pause), but the game generally runs properly out of the box. In particular, v1.2.5 fixes most or all of the original version's framerate issues, and no longer requires a 3rd-party program to be used with a high-fps monitor.

If you want to play the old version, you can do so by opting into the "ogversion" branch on steam (rightclick game in your steam library -> properties -> betas -> select "ogversion" from the dropdown). you will also have to disable the race mode dlc, if you own it, and block the game in windows firewall (otherwise the game will hang for minutes on boot, as it tries to ping a server that no longer exists). See the other pinned thread in this forum for instructions. Note that ogversion can no longer access Super Meat World at all.

other pc platforms (linux & mac) have not had updates to v1.2.5. supposedly that's in the plans sometime, but it's been a couple years already, so don't hold your breath. consoles don't need it at all & won't receive it.

all of the below info was written for 'ogversion', the previous version of the game.

Generally, for fullgame runs, Windows > Mac/Linux >> modern consoles >>>> switch/360/xbone >>> vita/pstv

The Windows version is the de-facto standard. For the any% category, the differences between versions are primarily loading times & some minor speed tech. For other categories, character roster & major glitches also come into play.

The reason the Switch is separated from the other modern consoles is that it has a couple unique crashes that pop up in any%. 360 and XBOne just have extremely long loads. Vita/PSTV have some perceived lagginess when playing and are not recommended if you have a choice.

The best platform for individual levels (ILs) varies, and the above rankings do not apply. The different character rosters between games mean the PC versions can get the best overall time on some levels while consoles win out on others.

In any case, please don't worry too much about this -- we'd much rather see you run the game on a "worse" version than not run the game at all. :> Also note that, for whichever version you pick, you need to be able to record video & audio footage of it to get runs on the leaderboard.

Whatever you prefer, for the most part. Keyboard is slightly superior to controller at the highest levels of play for the 106% category or individual level runs.

A collection of tutorial links is available here**.

It's required to play the game at a stable 60 frames per second (fps) for all but one category. If you're playing on windows, you should highly consider installing and using rivatuner. See this thread for how & a more detailed why http://www.speedrun.com/smb/thread/tw32f (note: v1.2.5.

the "-lowdetail" and "-ultralowdetail" command line options can, if you play on a pc version, reduce the load on your system & save you some loading time, at the cost of graphics quality. If you use steam to launch the game, rightclick game in your steam library -> properties -> set launch options -> type in one of the two options (skip the quotes). If not using steam, google it.

Your save file is located at (game directory)/userdata/savegame.dat , at least for windows. Fullgame runs are required to use a new, fresh save each attempt. There are utilities available in the resources section that can delete the save & launch game for you in a couple clicks; if you'd rather do it manually, I recommend creating a shortcut to the userdata folder on your desktop.

Any% route reference: https://www.speedrun.com/smb/guide/zdtgv

How to autojump: hold jump, press pause. Let go of jump, unpause (without using your jump button)

How to sprint jump: see the brownie skip tutorial video linked just above (from thebmxbandit11).

How to dual jump: the game tracks controller jump and keyboard jump buttons separately. By alternating between both, you can cancel controller jump into keyboard jump and input a jump without having to let go of & repress a button (does not work vice-versa). Saves slight time in many places. Now, this is extremely hard to get used to & not really recommended for new players.

The game features button remapping via buttonmap.cfg in the game directory, but the functionality that file offers is extremely limited. For more useful remapping, look into alternate software. If you want to, say, remap pause to a shoulder button on a controller, look into joy2key. I'm also told autohotkey works well for keyboard. Note that, while remapping is fine, you may not automate actions. Macros and scripts are banned.

Slightly faster level transitions: when you touch bandage girl, press A (as in, the key for the letter A, on your keyboard) to advance to the next level without having to watch the replay first. The S key does the same, but for exiting to level select. Remapping these keys to your controller with joy2key or whatever program is allowed.

Yes, having a high-hz or high-fps gaming monitor can make the game run... off, with bosses moving at super speed and things like that. You can either drop your monitor's hz down to 60 in windows (& make sure vsync is on), or see above for how to install & use a program called Rivatuner to limit the game's fps to 60.

If you've encountered a situation where your game lagged & then you clipped into a wall, don't bother trying to reproduce it intentionally. There is an extremely easy way to make it happen anywhere, such that you can clip into pretty much any wall you want. This is known as the alt glitch, & it's extremely broken & banned in most categories. If it keeps happening unintentionally, try lowering your cpu load, by doing things like closing out of unnecessary programs running in the background or running in low or ultralowdetail (see above).

enjoy the game!

As part of running the game, I did some research. May as well put it down in writing here, since I don't think I'm ever going to run this game again.

First, I have some RAM addresses. Tompa helped me find these. Actually, I'll be honest: I didn't help much =p (I tried, but after an hour of trying to get x position and then realizing my final answer was wrong after all...).

x position: 057B, 2 bytes, unsigned y position: 057D, 2 bytes, unsigned x speed: 0573, 2 bytes, signed (will always display as positive in ram watch for some reason) y speed: 053F, 2 bytes, signed

I'm fairly certain these numbers are correct, but if it's important (if you're TASing or whatever), you should double-check. Speed does /not/ seem to correlate linearly to pixels per frame either.

tompa also had this to say: Sep 16 17:17:44 <Tompa> You won't start moving forward until your speed reaches 96, and the subpixel position doesn't get saved it seems Sep 16 17:18:05 <vorpal> i'm not sure what that means Sep 16 17:18:29 <vorpal> does that mean there's no subpixels at all? Sep 16 17:18:56 <Tompa> Well, first speed you get is 16, after holding a direction for two frames. Normally, that 16 is the amount of subpixels you have moved forward. But it doesn't move you at all until you have accelerated to 96 Sep 16 17:20:53 <Tompa> So yeah, doesn't seem to be a seperate x-sub counter that matters, hmm Sep 16 17:21:02 <Tompa> Or I just can't find it atm

Neither of us are really sure what that means.

Movement:

Just holding forward will get you to 304 speed. Jumping & holding both buttons will get you to 604, but you lose it when you land. If you bunnyhop and jump on the frame you touch the ground, however, you can preserve it. This is the fastest form of movement.

However, stringing together a bunch of frame-perfect jumps is not gonna be 100% successful. If, when you land from midair, you hold both face buttons and just press forward, Bart will walk forward at the same speed: 604. The catch is that the next time you go to jump, you will automatically get knocked down to 304 speed again, as if you had failed a bunnyhop.

The obvious solution, then, is to walk most distances and only bunnyhop when you absolutely need to. In this manner, you should save a bunch of time on average. I never bothered timing the loss from each instance of losing speed, but I figure it's somewhere between a tenth to a quarter of a second, just from eyeballing it.

When you're on the skateboard in the great wall stage, things are much more complicated.

When you're on flat ground (i.e. just starting the stage), both jumping and not holding straight forward cause you to lose horizontal speed. Incidentally, this is why you want to go through the top door right after you spawn: you get to accelerate to max much faster, since it's much closer to your horizontal plane than the bottom door. You actually lose horizontal speed when you're holding up-right or down-right, as opposed to straight right.

On the downslopes, that prohibition is removed. If you hold up-right or down-right, you lose no horizontal speed. Jumping still causes you to lose time: about 1 frame each time you jump, provided you accerlate back to max immediately after landing. Also, you want to avoid all the krusty head pickups you can (they get tallied up at the end of each chapter), & you want to land as soon as possible after the mandatory big jumps.

Lastly, Bartman (flying powerup) has the same horizontal speed as walking or bunnyhopping. Obviously his vertical speed is way different.

Some specific stage notes:

China 1 (the junk): far as I can tell, climbing the mast is frames faster than going for the bartman flying powerup if you do it absolutely perfectly. I don't trust myself to do that, so I just flew it.

China 2: I wrote a lot about the movement mechanics in this stage up above. I will say I didn't try too hard on making an optimized route here, since that's a lot of complexity that boils down to, damn, I lost exactly 1 frame here.

China boss (Fu Manchu Burns): Absolutely hate this guy. I swear his hitbox is fundamentally broken. As far as I can tell he's only supposed to take damage when his fan is closing or closed, but that distinction seems fuzzy at best. I saw a quickkill in one of the TAS wips but was never able to replicate it, and the guy is random anyways.

Ice Cave: It's possible to skip waiting for the bubbles with a frame-perfect bunnyhop, but if you miss it, you pretty much die instantly.

Ice River: the ice floes you stand on get gradually pushed back left by the current. Jumping on them moves them forward. How high the jump was when you land on them doesn't seem to matter, so I just spammed small jumps (but I also took it pretty safe when jumping from one floe to another, since this game's physics are trash).

Ice boss: double-hits are pretty easy if he spawns next to you.

Egypt 1: top route is a few seconds faster than bottom route (you don't have to time the assisted jump up into top route: just keep the face buttons held as you land on the launcher platform & it'll launch you up automatically). I cut several hard jumps out of my runs b/c they're hard. The really tiny platforms are pretty screwy: their hitbox seems a little to the right of where they visually appear. The bigger platforms are also screwy: sometimes you have to jump around on them to make them move, or sometimes you have to keep trying to make them spawn at all.

Egypt 2: because of the quicksand in this level, bunnyhopping is better than running for the beginning section. The invincibility is slower, but dodging the cyclones is harder than it appears, so I always ended up losing more time when I tried to skip it. At the bottom of the pit, the rightmost bartman flying powerup is faster despite being out of the way, b/c you're drawing the scorpion away from the door by getting it. If you get the powerup on the left, you have to wait.

Hollywood 2: The opening section seems a bit random in when the fireballs and flaming dudes will spawn. I was also never able to find a great route for fence + stomper section. I did, however, make a map of the coffin teleporter maze: it's simpler than it seems. See also: For the RIP room, it's possible to be much more aggressive than I was, but the room is honestly complete trash & harder than everything else in the game combined. The hard jumps are indeed frame perfect, & you also need to have a good setup for them to make sure you're actually at max speed and far enough right when you bunnyhop.

Hollywood boss: as far as I can tell, he has very few to no invulnerability frames, but the megaphones he throws often block your shots. Easiest way to fight him seems to be to stay in front of where he's moving (he always comes down, goes left, goes to the right, then back to the center and up), jump up, and mash shot a couple times backwards. If you play it right, the cherry bomb drop will fall either while he's up out of range, or beforehand (the bomb drop spawns when you reach 0 shots in your inventory). He takes 15 hits; you should be able to get him in 2 cycles (I lost several seconds here in my run).

other resources: there's a tasvids thread with a couple WIPs from like 2006. One of them desyncs partways into egypt, & while it isn't terribly well optimized (I think it was done on a bad rom & I couldn't find the right one, the checksums don't match), it does a bunch of stuff I don't do. If you could watch the full video, it may prove even more helpful. The other video looks like some guy did bad RTAs with a few savestates, it's pretty useless.

good luck.

It's been a well-known article of faith among the few people familiar with rocket knight a while ago that kega fusion is a really inaccurate emulator for the purposes of RKA speedrunning. This stems from a run done a few years ago. A player called chum posted an emulated time on the SDA forums w/ video. ShadowJacky's wr at the time was a high 28, and chum got, I believe, a low 29. The overwhelming consensus was that chum's run, which he did in something like 2-4 days of learning, was significantly worse than SJ's run, and should not be anywhere near SJ's time. Therefore, the conclusion went, kega fusion must be an inaccurate emulator. It was probably saving 30-45 seconds over the course of the run. /obviously/

and then nobody played rka for years.

recently a few more people have picked it up. some of that number have used kega fusion, so this issue has come up again. I was watching a stream of AND4H's and made an offhand remark that we should prob just ban kega fusion already. That turned into a discussion about how inaccurate it was, and I decided to do my homework.

homework's here.

What you should look at primarily are the two columns labelled 'diff' (columns E and I). Those values are the # in seconds of whatever section it was I was timing. Left diff column is console, right is emu. So for example, running the intro loop x2 took 114.38 seconds on console (E2) and 114 seconds on kega fusion (I2).

That's less than half a second's difference over 2 minutes. This doesn't add up to anywhere close to how much time we all were assuming kega fusion saved.

The sections I tried timing were sections of the game that required little/no player input & lagged some. Most of them were boss kills to the start of the score countdown. For a couple, I let the boss play out a bit without player interaction (letting the stage 4 boss loop once while standing in the safe spot, the opening autoscroll sequence before you can damage stage 6 boss, etc). And since kega fusion wasn't saving the seconds I assumed it would, at the end I tried timing the longest pure dps-to-an-enemy-with-no-complications section I could think of, the last phase of the gradius boss. I guess I wasn't close enough to it or something on the emu runthrough lmfao

As it stands, I'm limited by the situations I can test. Anything that really depends on player interaction is too variable to framecount like this, which cuts out most of the gameplay portions. (why don't I tas it? because neither kfusion nor console (obv) have tas tools) But as it stands, it looks like kfusion is saving very approximately half a second over two minutes of play. Over the course of a 28 minute run, that works out to 14 seconds. No idea what the margin of error is on this, but it's probably big.

still not sure why we came to the conclusions we did when viewing chum's run. this shit is obviously not saving 45 seconds. It was probably some combination of seeing "learned the game in 2 days" and sub-30 and the run being a lot less clean all come together in a way that psyched everyone out. I can fully accept that I was probably looking for confirmation bias when watching AND4H's stream the other day & saying there's no way that speed would be possible on console. I bet it fucking was possible after all. I'm gonna blame it on the lag feeling more real when you have a controller in your hand, because you're trying to input so you're interacting with it more ;_;

I would also be interested in seeing someone replicate a test like this with bizhawk. But I don't care enough to do that. Also interesting would be seeing someone who's familiar with playing against a set of splits to switch around between console and one or two emus & see if any of them feel off. But again, I'm not interested in doing that either, so... yeah.

A dozen seconds over the course of the game. Do we care to do anything about that? I think it's notable, certainly, but that's not a big enough difference for me to feel an urgent need to ban kega fusion anymore unless bizhawk is significantly closer to console. And as I don't currently know or care enough to find the answer to that question....

The links to 4 of my pb highlights across all of my speedgames has changed. This includes my current any% and dark ending pbs, whose links are now broken on speedrun.com.

I resubmitted my shit, in any case. Posting this so other ppl can check their own vods. I skimmed through my new links and as far as I can tell the highlights themselves are the same, they just have different hyperlinks for god knows what reason. obnoxious