Hello friends,

long time lover of Silent Hill runs, and had thought about doing a run but the leaderboards have me quite confused.

So, emulators are hidden, that in itself is not that big a deal; but it is the hiding of only certain emulators that has me confused.

Why is it that both PSTV and PS3 are not hidden? Excluding the original model PS3 released in NTSC-U/JP all editions of PS3 use software emulation. Similarly, PSTV, PSP, PS3 that use the PSN version are all emulators. Whether or not they are "official releases" they are emulators. Edit: Forgot Vita

If it is that emulators are hidden because they are unfair, then these should be transferred to a different category, including the consoles I have listed.

Anyway, it appears that most of this is moot, as the in-game timer is supposedly very good. This would mean that the emulators, if they are faster versions, then the runners would be at a penalty, not a gain as they would have less time to respond to things.

Lastly, if emulators are to be permitted, a solid clarification of what settings are valid should be made. If it is that they are jank, detail the jank settings and forbid them. (Edit: I should note that there is some clarification for ePSXe, but not for others)

Thanks, crazyjesse

PSTV is seriously not marked as emulator? o_O

Anyway, completely agree. Either make emulators a separate category, or at least show them on the leaderboards. If an emulator or emulator version is banned, detail why, maybe.

Also, suggestion on emulators as a whole: standardize what emulator/settings are permitted. Don't just umbrella all emulators and ban certain ones. Have one version of ePSXE (or whatever) with certain settings that play the game as close to the original console as possible and make that "the emulator" to use (besides hardware emulators, like the PS3 or.... PSTV......)

More food for thought: Why is emulator shown for SH Origins, when the emulator for that is worse than ePSXe when it comes to emulation? Wut? But yet, over here, TWO THIRDS of the runs are hidden by default. Huh.

gets popcorn

ban everything.

lol Aaron, it's the most egalitarian approach for sure.

[quote]Whether or not they are "official releases" they are emulators.[/quote]

yeah but they're official emulations which is the only distinction that particularly matters

The problem isn't emulation so much as the fact that emulation varies wildly across hardware and unofficial PS1 emulators are all janky crap that emulate SH1 badly. Most official efforts fare somewhat better in the visual department and also will always perform consistently across different people.

[quote]then these should be transferred to a different category,[/quote]

this is a terrible solution for a number of reasons already outlined in all of the previous discussions about this

if something is broken you don't move it, you get rid of it

unofficial emulations of SH1 have a number of issues emulating the game that make this solution really bad

[quote]This would mean that the emulators, if they are faster versions, then the runners would be at a penalty, not a gain as they would have less time to respond to things.[/quote]

That doesn't make ANY sense at a base level. That's not the reason they're hidden

[quote]if emulators are to be permitted, a solid clarification of what settings are valid should be made[/quote]

They have been. ePSXE is the only emulator where settings really need to be clarified because it's the only one where plugins are a huge mess. The rest basically just work out of the box. Course, ePSXE is the only one anyone actually uses despite it being the worst PS1 emulator but oh well.

Not gonna lie, this thread kind of annoys me because we've discussed and been over all of these points before and it's really annoying watching people repeat it every so often.

I don't understand how it's not kind of vaguely accepted in speedrunning at this point that unofficial PS1 emulation is really weird and janky and probably shouldn't be used. It's so all over the map with how accurate it is from game to game. SH1 gets a shit end of it because most emulators don't emulate the fog and transparency effects properly which causes all kinds of weird junk.

[quote]More food for thought: Why is emulator shown for SH Origins, when the emulator for that is worse than ePSXe when it comes to emulation?[/quote]

simply put because PSP capture is annoying and nobody who's actually ran that game seriously cares about it enough to get mad about emulator.

I agree, PSP emu is fucking terrible but Origins is Origins and I can't be arsed to argue about it.

This problem would be instantly solved if JP was faster since there is no PSN release for that version.

Funny thing is, the JP version actually emulates better (door transitions, better framerate).

PSTV/PSP/PS3 are different from PC emulators in that whilst they technically do emulate the game, there are not going to be new releases constantly of said emulators on those consoles that can drastically affect the performance of the game. This pretty much leaves everyone on a level playing field.

The problem with tracking unofficial emulators is that slowdown, load times... these things are constantly changing, to the point where comparing an old 3rd party emulator run based on how the game runs from 2016 and from 2018, for example, is basically impossible. Not the case for the aforementioned official emulators.

Standardizing a current version/release of a 3rd party emulator is a bad idea, because even if you standarize the current version of Bizhawk... performance a year down the line is still gonna drastically improve in terms of accuracy to PS1, and then you're gonna be running an obsolete release regardless.

TLDR: If I play SH1 on PSP, anyone else playing on PSP is having the same experience as me. Same with PS3. Same with PSTV. If I play on the current Bizhawk release, someone 2 months from now, who has naturally gone to download the latest newer release, could have a differing experience from me performance wise.

Also worth noting some PS2s, particularly the latest slim releases, also use software emulation.

I agree that Origins shouldn't be treated differently emulation wise from the rest of the series. I do not agree that PC emulation is equivalent to officially sanctioned emulation. Ignoring the legal aspects of PC emulation, it's unofficial nature makes comparisons in a game like this difficult. The reality is that the allowance of unofficial emulation is a privilege, not a right with leaderboards.

I would advocate and support a message to the site development team to make filters more obvious, so people aren't unaware of the existence of emulated runs.

As someone who started running this game on emulator, I find it unfortunate that it came to be this way.

[quote]Why is it that both PSTV and PS3 are not hidden?[/quote]

because they're sold by sony

[quote]If it is that emulators are hidden because they are unfair, then these should be transferred to a different category, including the consoles I have listed.[/quote]

HELL no.

[quote]if emulators are to be permitted, a solid clarification of what settings are valid should be made. If it is that they are jank, detail the jank settings and forbid them.[/quote]

we did actually offer multiple times to the dozens of people up in arms about it to go out and find the perfect emulator settings to mimic the game correctly; surprisingly everyone went silent about that, but you're free to go ahead and try, report back here with your findings :)

[quote]Why is emulator shown for SH Origins, when the emulator for that is worse than ePSXe when it comes to emulation?[/quote]

feel free to elaborate further on this too, can't throw out that kinda claim without specifics

[quote]find the perfect emulator settings to mimic the game correctly[/quote]

the funny thing is that I actually did go and do that myself and people still kept repeatedly not doing it right and I don't even totally blame them because it's a strange complex bullshit labyrinth of menus that depends on hardware where all logic is suspended

As a side note regarding Origins:

If you want to make points about Origins and its emulation, please feel free to go do that in the Origins forums. Using that game's emulator policy when it emulates a totally different system with totally different specifications under totally different contexts makes the comparison to Silent Hill 1 completely without merit. We should discuss Origins in the context of Origins, not as a false equivalency to this game given the completely different circumstances of that game.

yes, games in a series that encompasses like 9 games are sometimes treated differently because surprisingly not all video games are exactly the same. But Origins could perhaps do with some revising and tightening, it's a bit of a neglected board. It's largely just that the interest is never present until someone wants to bring it up to argue about a totally different game. If you want to talk about seriously improving Origins leaderboard state, I'm game, but I'm not really down as using it as a lame "gotcha" for this game.

Regarding an emulator split:

there's numerous issues with current unofficial emulations of SH1 that make comparing runs of SH1 with console difficult and as a result there would always be a large question mark hanging over the authenticity of any emulated runs regardless of intent of the runner.

There's no real option here that pleases everyone, cordoning emulator off into its own category doesn't make a whole lot of sense since the "emulator WR" would have just as large a question mark riding over it compared to other emulators as well as it being kind of strange to just make "weird janky versions" its own category when that inherently lacks legitimacy.

Banning it outright is lame and prevents people from even having that option at all to learn/run the game and I don't like that either.

Hiding is the only thing that really satisfies the middle ground of communicating "As a community, we're not going to deny you from playing it this way but we would strongly prefer some form of console."

and this still doesn't satisfy everyone because people care more about visible WRs without having to click on a filter button than they do about trying to find the middle ground between competitively-rigorous and casually accessible leaderboard rules.

There isn't a good answer. This is honestly the best solution we've come up with given the tools we have to work with on speedrun.com. Most PS1 games don't have to deal with this problem seriously because emulator tends to be RTA slower than actual PS1 hardware, so WRs can never square up. Silent Hill, due to its IGT, has a wholly unique scuffle with emulators.

Forgive me if my tone comes across as terse but I find myself re-explaining this constantly and it's hard to not feel like this argument isn't started in bad faith a lot.