I maintain a webpage with Jazz Jackrabbit 1 version differences:

http://www.lixgame.com/jazz/versions.html

-- Simon

I've watched WanderingMind's GoE All Stages in 16:27. Really solid play and bullet dodging, congrats! I can't assess the efficiency in the later stages yet, but I've dabbled in GoE stages 1 and 2 and understand some ideas here.

In stage 2, the TAS faces the wallhugger miniboss whereas RTA faces the car miniboss. What's the reasoning behind this? Both routes have a room with many elves, but the car route must wait for a extra conga line. Are the car elves easier to kill than the TAS route's elves?

Room before stage 2 main boss: I found the same strat that gets the triple early, then moves to top edge and face straight down. The room is still scary. Ideally, you don't get cornered, but the fight takes very long and seems to rely on random powerups spawning during this fight.

Stage 2 main boss: Your strat looks both safe and fast: Piledrive turret 1, kill turret 2 on the same side of the room, then hug the wall (to dodge yellow bullets) and find reference points to shoot turrets 3 and 4 with ricocheting rainbow (the boss blocks the big green bullets from turrets 3 and 4). Nice!

After seeing WanderingMind's HPP on hardest difficulty at Shots Fired, I've downloaded HPP again.

Are there any requirements or suggestions whether to use the HPP GM5 or GM7 executable?

The options menu offers a choice between v1.4 and v1.5. According to the readme, that's purely cosmetic. Does it have any effect on the speedrun?

I've only been interested since a day or two yet. Therefore, I can't promise to learn the run or even stream the game regularly, but the itch is there. :-)

Manual splitting can be inaccurate. Re-timing a run from the proof video allows better comaprison. Here's how I do it, will update this according to feedback.

1. Read all of this enumeration. Agree silently with me, otherwise please debate. I'd like to know a well-defined and reproducible method. :-)
2. Ignore the speedrun timer shown in the video, instead open the run in a tool that shows frame numbers or milliseconds. At 60 fps, there will be 16 or 17 millisecond values that all refer to the same frame. Let's always choose the earliest millisecond value per frame.
3. Find the value A = the milliseconds of the last fully-lit screen of the main menu (multi-episode run) or the last fully-lit screen of the episode selection (single-episode run). To do that, let A' be the earliest millisecond value of the first fading-out screen, then compute A = (A' − 33 ms) for a 30 fps video or A = (A' − 17 ms) for a 60 fps video.
4. Find the value of frame B = the first completely-black frame after the final boss fight. Let B be the earliest millisecond value of this frame.
5. Compute the run's duration as B − A.
6. As a moderator, edit the run and set its time to B − A. I find it good style to add your computations to the run's description: The ignored speedrun timer's value, A, B, and B − A.

It's possible that two players have different loading times. This exact computation from video frames will not solve that problem; it will preserve the difference. You'll need another method or more reasearch to strip loading times.

In 2017, I've re-timed the episode 4 runs tonight according to this. Vortale, CapnClever, and I were nearly tied at 3:45.xx, so I wanted a good, reproducible re-timing method.

From experience, the re-timed times are 0.1 to 0.2 seconds better than the manually-split times because all runners like to split at the end on a guaranteed-black frame, not necessarily on the first black frame.

-- Simon

Everybody is welcome to join the Titus the Fox Discord group -- not merely the speedrunners and TASers, but also casual players and those struck by pure nostalgy. :-)

https://discord.gg/GV9rpSp

-- Simon

Update 2017-05-29: Time ends on first non-black frame of the kissing cutscene.

Below is the old post from 2017-03.

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Covert_Madness wrote in https://www.speedrun.com/titus/thread/152l1 : Start: I would say start button pressed. Finish: I would say exit of level 20 (when black screen is seen).

I'm good with starting time on pressing START in the main menu. Main menu fade-out and level 1's title count towards the time.

To clarify the exact end of time time: You probably mean "exit of level 14" instead of "exit of level 20". Black screen after level fade-out means that we should cancel the music before stopping time, okay. But what happens if you get extra lifes after level 14, should they count towards the time? Can you get extra lifes here in the version without the kissing cutscene?

In 2017-04, Neither Covert_Madness nor I wanted to step forward and agree on an end time. We figured it should probably be one of these:

A. The SDA-conforming control loss of main character. This is when the end-of-level jingle starts after level 14, or, if you disable music, screen after level 14 begins to fade out.

B. On first frame of the kissing cutscene. This would measure the extra lifes.

We defer this decision to when more people begin running Fox.

-- Simon

Edit 2017-03: We're running at 40,000 fixed cycles now, and I've added it to the run's rules.

Here's my original post for the discussion's completeness:

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I've recorded my 31:31 run at 20,000 fixed cycles. Vortale's 30:32 run seems to use a faster setting, he reaches the fade-in of Diamondus 1 about 0.7 seconds faster than I do. His main menu navigation seems slightly faster, and the level load times are noticeably faster. I estimate a difference of 5 to 10 seconds over the 6-episode RTA.

I've played around with DOSBox cycles. Using core=auto, cputype=auto, cycles=50000, I get comparable times like Vortale's 30:32. With cycles=80000, it seems slightly faster even, comparable to CapnClever's 31:46.

Is there an agreed-on setting for cycles? Should there be one? On slow physical machines, emulating more cycles might harm performance. Should everybody use what happens to be fastest for them instead?

The best resource I found was TASVideos, even though they disallow DOSBox: "Use the largest possible value that you think makes the game run more fluently, but not larger. If uncertain, use 40000. This corresponds to an average 486." Source: http://tasvideos.org/DOSBox.html

-- Simon