Emulator runs, from this day, have and will be banned from submission. Refer to my other thread, I will not go into detail on why this is the best decision:
No, there will not be a seperate leaderboard for emulator runs, differences are still too major between them. The people whose run has been banned now and really feel unjustified, hit me up on Discord (Mentro#3169). If there's enough demand, we might work something out. But for now, the people who have emulator runs on the leaderboard are inactive and probably forgot that they even have a run for this game. This will do.
Also, runs will, from this day onward, be timed without the loading screens to guarantee a more competitive and just competition. I will retime all current runs, and all further submissions. Runs will be submitted WITH loads, I will edit the time WITHOUT loads. Leaderboard placement will, of course, be judged by your loadless time. I will time everything that the player still has control over, for example skipping cutscenes is timed, choosing stages also is timed, loading screens are not. I will start timing once the loading screen goes into the black screen with the stage's name on the screen, and when finishing stages or selecting them on the map I'll start timing once the entire screen is filled black.
About 100%: If there's enough demand for the category, I will create it. It's a legit run which will take longer, and show more of the actual game. Though, I have the feeling once creating it, it would stay empty for a long while, and I refrain from creating empty and dead leaderboards just for the sake of completion.
I'm find with the banning of emulators. Being an emulator runner myself, I feel this was probably for the best to have emulators banned. I never noticed the pattern differences compared to the actual hardware of the PS2. I mean, I sorta did. I remember running the game on my PS2 and was curious on why Canning Factory was behind in platform shifting.
Overall, I'm fine with these changes. Thank goodness I have my PS2 again. I'm just hoping my run didn't effect the community in a negative way. I apologize if I did.
You didn't effect the community in a negative way, if anything, you helped me discover this major difference!
Only curious, I don't want the return of emulators. However, was my past run (I believe it was 23:03) at all compared to SuperSponge on original PSX hardware? I'm not asking for any specific model comparisons, but was my obsolete SuperSponge run at all compared to playing the game on the original PlayStation? I question this as the platforms spawning differently on the emulator I used might've been caused by the emulator possibly replicating exacly as the PSX might would have done. I'm not entirely certain if that's what the emulator did, but that's why I'm here questioning.
Does the PS2 at all change the emulation of PSX? (For example: loading platforms earlier, causing them to begin their in/out cycle a bit early; the capability of loading in textures/polygons/collision sooner before the PSX?)
I didn't dive very deeply into it, but the decision of banning emulators was pretty straight forward given the huge inconsistencies within different emulators. Would have been fine if they didn't provide such a great advantage with the cycles now that it's loadless. It would be possible to allow just one specific emulator to be run on for submission, but it would still be a different leaderboard and I'm not very sure if that would hold up in terms of runs. I mean, I guess you'd submit, and that's about it.
Though if you're coming forward to demand that, I'll have no issue with that. If you actually run on PSX and discover that cycles actually load later (getting them earlier), then PSX is the way to go with loadless. Until then, this is a dead speedgame anyway : (
