NorwayI'd just like to see this game have some actual established rules is all.
Just a reminder that more than a month later nothing is changed.
I would like to know if something will happen or if we should be start aiming for sub 1:20 times for coop at 64 fps.
The refresh rate of a monitor only decides how many times per second the picture can update. On the lower end this basically means that on a 60Hz monitor you can run a game at 500 fps but you'll only ever technically see 60 of them. The monitor can't keep up with what your graphics card is chugging out, but the frames are still drawn.
On the higher end you can have your game running at 60 fps and the monitor will just keep drawing each frame twice on a 120Hz monitor like you said. The monitor is in this case limited by the harware, the game or other factors, not the other way around. If there are no such limitations a game will run at the highest fps it can, but again the monitor will only display 120 frames per second.
This game's lock is at 64 fps which means if the game will always attempt to run at and output 64 frames each second. V-sync works by limiting the fps of a game to the refresh rate of your monitor to eliminate screen tearing and with a refresh rate of 60Hz this means the game would be locked at 60 fps. If v-sync is disabled or the refresh rate is higher than 60 (v-sync will attempt to match the refresh rate of your monitor) the game WILL run at the highest fps it can - the hardcoded limit of 64.
I've explained 3 or 4 times now that v-sync will attempt to match the refresh rate of your monitor. Is your refresh rate higher than 60, then v-sync has nothing to limit to and essentially doesn't do shit, and the game will run at 64 fps. This is not complicated.
Can we stop talking about this now? I'm getting pretty sick of this being an issue.
Yes it does... That is the entire point of what I've talking about in the last few posts. If your refresh rate is higher than 60 Hz the game will run at 64 fps regardless of v-sync being on or off because the game will attempt to match the fps to the refresh rate of the monitor.
If you limit the framerate with software like Dxtory you obviously don't need to worry about it, but if you don't want to do that you will have to change the refresh rate to 60Hz and use v-sync to stay at 60 fps.
The one that immediately comes to mind is Dxtory (http://exkode.com/dxtory-downloads-en.html), even the trial version will allow you to limit fps and it doesn't require much effort. There are probably tons of other programs, but I'm not very familiar with anything other than Fraps and Dxtory.
If someone for whatever reason don't want to use software they would have to set their refresh rate to 60 Hz and use v-sync as usual. I assume anyone with a high refresh rate monitor knows how to do this as they usually default to 60 Hz, but just in case:
Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Display (or just right click your desktop) > Screen Resolution : Advanced settings and you'll find a drop-down menu with refresh rates under the Monitor tab
Oh I am well aware that higher framerate doesn't mean a game is running faster, but for this game we know this is the case, and like I said I totally forgot about the 64 fps lock in BattleBlock. My only point was simply that as v-sync will attempt to match the framerate of the game to the refresh rate of your monitor, using a monitor with a refresh rate higher than 64 might be the reason the game is running at 64 with v-sync activated. I was just trying to help figure out why Raiin's game is running at 64 with v-sync on.
I got my new monitors today and can confirm that this is in fact the case. With a refresh rate >60Hz you'll be running at 64 fps regardless of v-sync being enabled or disabled. 
I've seen plenty of cases where in-game timers (Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light), physics (L.A. Noire) and gamespeed (LCGoL, Need For Speed: Rivals) are related to the framerate of the game. It's a shame and I wish it didn't happen, but I guess let's just do the usual thing and blame consoles.
Just change the rules to include a 60 fps limit (which is easy to do with free software or simply by changing the refresh rate of your monitor and using v-sync as usual), fix the leaderboards and we can all move on with our lives never running into this problem again. :D
Ok, so I just thought of something. I don't know how the game and v-sync works with higher refresh rate monitors. I mean in theory v-sync will match the fps with the refresh rate of your monitor, so if Raiin has say a 120 or 144 Hz monitor, if v-sync works the way it should, he'll already be reaching more than twice the fps of people with the more common 60 Hz monitors even if v-sync is enabled.
Like I said I don't know how this stuff works yet, but I'm in the process of upgrading to 144 Hz monitors so I'll do testing when they get here. Basically if the v-sync option works properly for this game the rule needs to simply be "limit fps to 60" rather than "v-sync must be on".
I'll get back to you once I actually get some personal experience with the 144 Hzs. This was just something I wanted to mention as I never thought of it before today.
EDIT: Completely forgot about the fact that the game is innately locked at 64 fps so anything higher than that won't happen. Higher refresh rate might however still be the reason the game runs at 64 even with v-sync.
V-sync could be forced off in Nvidia control panel or whatever, I honestly don't care much.
I haven't had a look at the solo run, but I know for a fact that the coop run is considerably faster than it should be. The best time I've ever gotten for the first chapter together with Haos is an 8:45 and Raiin and Prime were in their run going like "is this sub 8" which is literally impossible. There is just absolutely no way, and compared to practically perfect segments they still save like 10-20 seconds.
Again I don't care why it's faster but it is. I'm not saying anyone's doing anything on purpose, but I'm not ok with it. It just really rubs me the wrong way to see a vastly inferior run put higher than the WR which is actually pretty solid. Sure it has mistakes, but it's a really good run. The thought of having someone wanting to learn the run watch a worse run and use that as a basis drives me insane.
People so far have just been using standard timing; starting time as they click the speedrun mode button (which you definitely should run as story mode adds nothing and makes resets a hassle) and stopping at the last meaningful input (meaning last sword hit on the devil). Ivyiss might have timed it differently, but I have not watched the run. Splits are nice but never required for any game.
Ivyiss is so far the only one who has done a remotely legit run of this game. No idea how optimized the run is but it should probably be a decent starting point.
The rest of us just fucked around and abused the dev tool that was left in, presumably by accident, that let you right click to teleport anywhere and left click to skip 2 phases of the second boss, J.C..
FirePrism, For the 7-9 thing the important thing seems to be where the player getting boosted lines up on the block. The one using the energy ball just gets as close as possible and gg. You just crouch and nothing more, facing doesn't matter or anything like that; it's all about the setup really
New file would look really good, especially for the level skip any% that nobody runs, but would make resets a hassle I will not deal with.
Shady already knows my views on this, but I'll put it here for anyone interested.
V-sync should be on, there's is no question about it. It shouldn't have a to be a rule, but apparently it does. Allowing v-sync to be off will make comparing PC and console even dumber and for PC runs hardware will easily outweigh execution, making the leaderboard a joke.
This was my first on-site event and I had an absolute blast. Already looking forward to next year's event.
I loved the fact that there was a monitor with chat during the runs. Being able to look over at chat every now and then both as runner and spectator was great. I was really impressed by tech and FFZ was also awesome, really really cool.
I have to agree with Joshimuz about the donations and stuff. ESA really felt like a speedrunning marathon, not a charity event where speedruns just happen as a distraction between donations, and I would love for it to stay that way. The event for me also walked the line between professional and silly fun beautifully.
I think having everything in the same area for the most part worked out pretty well and I liked that there were always a bunch of people around. However at times people showed way too little respect for the fact that there was a stream going on right next to them. When half of twitch chat during a run is "Anyone else hear Mario Party!?", that's a bad sign. It just comes down to lowering your volume a notch; both voice and game.
During my run I on several occasions had a lot of trouble hearing the host, and I ended up feeling like douche for ignoring or interrupting. For PC runs this naturally wasn't a problem because of the headsets. Speaking of which the camera angle during most PC runs was less than ideal.
The chairs were pretty rough, and after about 30 min my body was already killing me. I know this is not necessarily the easiest thing to fix, but it's worth mentioning, and definitely put me off sitting down to watch (especially the longer) runs.
One thing I was pretty disappointed by was the open blocks. Very early on we were a few guys talking about submitting something for the open block and it was apparently already full, and a lot of people were really surprised. Also the schedule for this was in my opinion awful. I think promoting variety and shorter runs would be cool for people watching. As a viewer I would much prefer to open the stream and stumble upon something short and a little quirky than yet another 8 hour run. I'm not at all opposed to these being in a marathon, but the open block really felt like it was all long, rather slow runs.
And guys, come on! So many times I went to throw away a can in the CLEARLY labeled bags and they would be filled 50/50 with cans and bottles and then all kinds of food containers. I guess this is to be expected, but we are all grown men and women, we can at the very least take care of our own shit.
@SerSanju - I'll bring my component cables
2:15 for Shenmue II is pretty safe even with the extra stuff I'm planning on showing off, but feel free to add time until you're comfortable with the estimate.
@Rueake my xbox is not modded.
Just realised the estimate for Shenmue II (misspelled in the schedule btw) was never adjusted. It's not a huge deal, but it's currently a bit excessive and could safely be knocked down to 2:15-2:20.
Sorry for pointing this out so late; I guess I just didn't pay much attention to the estimate and assumed it was already adjusted.
I will be bringing my PAL Xbox (and game, naturally) with the composite RCA cables, should also have one of those RCA to SCART blocks lying around if that's somehow helpful (I have no knowledge of this stuff)
I have a bunch of board games in the back of my car. Probably won't take them out before ESA anyway :P
No reset run of Shenmue II tonight resulted in a PB of 2:03:09. Estimate can safely be knocked down to 2:20, that still leaves room to show off some of the amazing characters in this game and a nice buffer in case something really crazy happens (which is highly unlikely; the run is pretty safe at this point). Good luck with the cuts everyone.
Improved my pb in Shenmue II Any% this week and it's now down to a 2:05:04. http://www.twitch.tv/seductivespatula/c/6593231
Tried out a new setup for the hardest trick in the run and it didn't end well so I lost a lot of time there. Also lost quite a bit of time in the final section due to my HDPVR crashing as well as two really silly mistakes.
Hoping to get close to the 2 hour mark soon.
