As we all know, for the longest time there weren't any actual rules posted regarding running SGP, so I want to remedy it by finally filling the gap with something unambiguous and concise. I already revised some basic rules regarding the correct method of time measurement in Arcade and Championship modes.

There's much more to it though, and there's some nuances that Halamix drew my attention to, yet it is something i can't and don't want to decide about on my own, as there needs to be some community consensus.

First, the savestate problem. Halamix noticed that my Arcade runs lack the "Track xxx unlocked" screens between races, caused by the fact i had already unlocked them before and i'm replaying Arcade on the same savestate without resetting it prior to each run attempt.

This raised a question, whether or not it should be enforced that the players start each run with their savestates cleared beforehand so all of these screens would appear. It's probably negligible in terms of the amount of time saved, but i'd rather make this a rule.

Second issue, indirectly related, also involving savestates. In their Championship WR run, Pikoczek drives the Team Machine throughout the most part of the game, which only becomes available after obtaining the access to it in Time Trial mode. People who play on a fresh save wouldn't have such an opportunity, therefore this is subject to further discussion whether or not it should be allowed.

Third of my concerns, and last one for the time being, pertains to the 100% category. What does it mean to "complete Time Trial"? When is it considered completed? After doing a single lap on every track? After beating some specific time? Something else? I need a clarification on this.

Since this is too important to decide about on my own, i ask everyone interested to voice their opinons and discuss it.

Arcade: "Track unlocked" adds about 1-2 seconds of delay, I haven't timed it precisely, but given that some records are just 2 seconds apart (taking obsoleted runs into consideration), I'd say it would be good idea to require clean save, as in player can set audio volumes and camera settings beforehand but cannot have any progress in Arcade mode.

Championship: I think it's unfair advantage to use team machine, but maybe splitting championship into two categories would be a good idea? Clean save and unlocked.

100%: I also don't know what that means, however there is a car (Team Machine IIRC) that can be unlocked in Time Trial under some specific conditions (I forgot them :/). So maybe 100% mode could be referring to finishing all connections in Arcade mode, Championships and unlocking all cars and tracks? Proof in form of opened Catalogue with everything unlocked after the timer was stopped would be nice, but it might not be necessary.

Yeah, I'm gonna make the clean save for Arcade a requirement from now on, if anyone has any objections to it, please do say so. I really don't want to act retroactively though and won't invalidate existing runs if they don't have too much of advantage (i.e. could still be beaten on fresh save).

I'm all for the idea of Championship being divided into 2 subcategories, Clean Save and Any Progress Level. This way we won't have to invalidate anything that's already there on the leaderboard.

As for the TT, i need to watch what happens in the 100% runs, but if i were to decide, the requirement would be to achieve an "outstanding lap" on every TT track. And yes, presenting the catalogue menu after the timer had been stopped is very much encouraged!

PS. friendly reminder, than in case of objections, suggestions or comments, please chip in to the conversation @everyone

Arcade mode - current rules just say "Complete any path of Arcade mode. Clean savestate is required, backup your progress and reset the game beforehand." But the game expects player to finish 1st to complete arcade mode with "success" screen, so I'd say we could change that rule to "Complete any path of Arcade mode. Last race have to be finished on 1st place. Clean savestate is required, backup your progress and reset the game beforehand."

I was initially rather indifferent about that one, as long as the player makes it to the final finish line, but now I'm leaning to agree with it. Let's wait a bit, maybe others would want to say something on the matter too

Maybe for arcade mode we could use IGT? Then the track unlocks won't affect the overall time and the save file shouldn't matter anymore. Since it's only 4 races that might be easier to manage.

Of course for other categories RTA is more appropriate and practical.

Having different records for any save/clean save championship is most fair as they would use different cars.

Trust me, I thought about it because in-game timing would have been ideal (it's great in another game I run, Thief 2), except it introduces more mess than anything when it can't be easily applied to all categories.

Ideally both arcade and championship would sum up the entire time spent on racing track and display it after completing the game so you could just use that and deem it the official speedrun time measuring method. Although that's sadly not the case and manually summing up all championship times would be an impractical chore.

So even if that's way more viable for Arcade I'd rather avoid doing that just to keep one, consistent method of dealing with time.

There is a timer that counts time of the whole race, it starts after countdown and stops at the finish line

It seems that the game logic always runs at 60hz and that timer also beats 60 times per second.

I've made proof-of-concept IGT autosplitter and tested it on Arcade (clean save). During test, the time measured by autosplitter was 0.08s (80ms) longer than times stored in save file, so while it's close to the gametime it's not ideal (yet?)

Edit: Now autosplitter should have the same time as save files, I'll update it in resources in few days after some testing

Allright, let's get this straight: ALL runs should be performed on CLEAN (new) save.

Arcade: any path, any car etc.

Championship: From entering name to Last finishing line.

100%: ALL Arcade paths, "Incredible Lap" on all 8 tracks in time trial, Whole Championship. To complete game at 100% You have to unlock All cars and tracks.

To be honest, I dont know even how to record properly. Should I play on windowed or fullscreen? Which splitter is the best? I just clapped spacebar manually after every race. I really would like to do some more uploads, but whitout set rules of speedrunning (I'm still practising with old methods) it's pointless. This will work, but We should delete all "old" records, because they are outdated.

Cheers

Championship was split into clean and any savestate subcategories, we don't know yet what to do with Arcade

The existing autosplitter for Livesplit was only tested in Arcade mode, but it works there good enough (from name to last finish line)

If there's no explicit mention of something specific in the rules, it should be assumed that it doesn't matter. I don't think we should tell people whether to run the game in window or fullscreen as long as they don't do stupid things, like enabling extended DxWnd hooks that make it possible to alter in-game time by affecting the game loop timing.

Same with StuntKit modules, though as far as I'm concerned I'd prefer the game to be ran with as little support of external tools as possible (minimal setup that makes it comfortably playable, to minimise the possibility of the game being affected by external bugs/weirdness of 3rd party software)

Choice of speedrun time measuring tools is open to the preference of the runner. I don't think many game moderation teams on SRC enforce specific timers, am i wrong? Using the autosplitter is preferred but as long as there's no millisecond differences, it won't matter whether you start/stop manually or not.

As for old records, I'm not really in the favour of "rewriting history" and just deleting them. The save category split was made for a reason, and i fail to see how it's supposedly a bad idea, since people are free to run whatever category they prefer.

I think we need more people to say something on the subject matter first so it can be decided more democratically. As far as i'm concerned, for now i'm not really convinced so my vote is no. Hopefully others will have something to add.