From the 23rd of February Rage Wars will have 2 different "modes" for each category. One mode requires the game to be played at 60 fps or less, the other can be played at whatever framerate you want.

The reason for this is a discovery made on the 21st of February. Rodkaiser messaged me saying that no matter what he did, he couldn't match my newest time of 42:56, which was also very flawed. Naturally I dismissed him as just being a shitter who's garbage at the game, but I still investigated.

I did a comparison of our runs using the red progress bar at the top. From the first frame of the level, to the last frame where the red progress bar is visible. This progress bar should be consistent for every player; it turns out it isn't. Over the first 9 levels my levels had (usually) been ending several tenths before Rodkaiser's, adding up to nearly 3 seconds. This does not account for RNG, load times or anything that's up to the player; this was purely a difference in game speed.

Earlier I had theorycrafted that a perfect run could be somewhere around 42:37 - well ahead of my 2018 43:12 run. I wondered why the difference would be so large in a fixed speed autoscroller, but didn't think more of it.

I thought about how PAL and NTSC N64/SNES games have time differences because of the different frame rates. PAL games run 10 frames slower per second than NTSC games. Because the game's framerate is tied to the computer monitor's refresh rate, I realized that my 2018 run was done on a 60hz monitor, but my 2021 one done on a 144zh monitor. I made 4 different recordings on the game's first level using 4 different refresh rates: 144, 100, 85 and 60. In all cases the game's frame rate matched the monitor's refresh rate. Comparing the 4 recordings, I found that the red progress bar disappeared at the same time on 100 and 144hz, a tenth of a second later on 60hz, and nearly THREE tenths slower on 85hz. Rodkaiser told me he played on 75hz, and when I added his run to the comparison it was two tenths slower on the first level. I will investigate this in further detail later.

Because of this I've decided to standardize the any% category to 60hz and 60fps maximum, as this is the most common monitor refresh rate. I realized after I did this that even 60fps might not be consistent for everyone, but I'll tackle that problem if it arises.

I've made a "free framerate" category as well, and this is where old runs have gone. The nature of speedrunning is to take the times as low as possible, and that is exactly the intention of the FF category. Here runs can be submitted without the competitive restraints of any%, in order to seek even lower times. I'm curious if the times will go even lower with 240 or 360hz monitors.