Hey guys!

I'm visiting my parents right now for easter and I wanted to play some happyland after Grosz's WR(Congratz!). I played a game for sometime, running single levels to learn routes one more time so I wasnt using OBS, didnt need to. I was only using livesplit and times were totally normal. Then I opened OBS and started recording and oooh boy game is faster. Like wtf faster, I got 16:58 with death which is absurdally fast. I never thought it can be caused by OBS lol

I have here windows7 64bit i5 2400k, geforce 650ti. A differnce between runes is like 10%. My obs settings: https://prnt.sc/TWuorNedcen6 https://prnt.sc/hOR8z3ZSORWl https://prnt.sc/sla4wQjWZ_g8

Im trying different settings right now but everything speeds the game to same high speed.

So maybe it's high time to move timing to my timer in full-game categories too?

I would love to incorporate your timer into full gameplay if we can't really resolve this. I think we dont need splits or anything like this(would be nice but whatever), but I would just love to have addition from previous lvls or just some history. I would be totally ok with adding some arbitrary time for every hourglass taken like +1sec because HappyTimer don't count remaining seconds after ending a level.

Holy, I just get smartest idea of my life. You record your gameplay of one level with HappyTimer and normal timer(like 3 minute gameplay of one level). Than you divide happy timer time by normal time and we get standarized time, then you can use normal livesplit f.e. It could also apply for previous records if they were made on same computer. I would make 2 columns for normal time and standarize time, just to not confuse people who are not competing for WR.

Hello! A new runner here. Can't replicate the speed boost from recording on OBS. However, my game sure as hell runs faster than it does in existing runs.

(Edit: I can get 231 in the countdown timer on Go To North, https://streamable.com/s95sw3 which would be borderline impossible with the speed shown in Magic Bong's run for example. There's no way you can save 3 whole seconds there)

Sometimes recording has an opposite effect, though, so the speed isn't exactly consistent even on my own device. (Edit: This applies to v1.3 at least)

In the original game the DOS version seems to be the most consistent, when it comes to running speed. Even though it's substantially faster than the PC version, you can count on it always running at the same speed. The DOS version that every download-site seems to offer has the Christmas Edition in it, so I wonder if allowing runs on DOS, like in the original game, would make any sense?

Hi @Ors

Great to see new runner with some new ideas. I was totally not aware of DOS version xmas edition. Ofcourse DOS categories should exist, I would even say it should be main category, and normal any% should be something like non-ladder in diablo2.

I downloaded a game from here https://dosgames.com/game/happyland-adventures-x-mas-edition/ I used DOSBOX without any special settings(I kinda dont know if its needed but we should play on the same cycles right?), and didnt saw any differences between versions for any% run.

About the speed difference, I don't see any difference between different DOS versions, but at least in the original game the difference between PC and DOS was usually a couple of seconds in the countdown timer, depending on the level.

Anyway, I think HappyTimer has some potential with making the comparison between different versions more fair, as you guys have discussed earlier

Yeah, happytimer is great to measure single levels, but its not that useful for full game speedruns because its impossible to measure time after ending lvl to start new.

Hello, I'm back to speedrunning (and I see the thread only now). As far as I see OBS don't change Happyland speed on DOS version (but if you have a bad CPU maybe you can experience some lags :/) and it seems to be the same game speed for all runs (as far as I know, for all my runs on my both PCs and Dezu's Any% WR I experienced this). I really experienced the game speed difference between PC and DOS versions too, the PC version was about 1.05x faster imo. For HappyTimer I agree with Dezu, it's a very great tool for single-level speedrunning, but when you're playing a full game run, the timer can't measure the time between two levels. (that's why I decided to speedrun only DOS categories by now).

Yeah, dos category is definitely the best one, and also for me obs doesn't give me any problems. So I guess we should just do DOS from the start.