Hello! Some person joined my Discord server to come ask this question. We answered with what we knew of "Good practices", but, seeing that no rules are actually specified besides the start and end points, we'd like to have moderators' confirmation over this.
Here's their message and the answer we left, waiting for your confirmation.
[quote="slava1989"] hello, like I wrote to you and wrote on YouTube to arrange a speedrun faster than you on the dune, but faced with the fact that you do not use overclocking and the game slows down very much ... can I fit you an emulator with overclocking? or what to be? I forgot about the lags in the game for 5 years ... and here they are. [/quote]
[quote="Vibrant Colors"] Hello! We follow the general speedrun.com guidelines regarding emulators, which specify 'an emulator should not provide an unfair advantage over console players'. This means that the use of save states, overclocking, macros, ..., should not be allowed. I believe.
It is true that nothing is specified in the Dune directory, so I'll still go ask about it.[/quote]
Hi! I could add you as moderator for this game so you can clarify emulator rules and check submissions. We could use a mod for the Genesis boards. You would need to go to Settings and enable "Require e-mail authentication".
Well, that was unexpected, but sure, gladly! We could use some quick briefing about what are good practices on SRC as moderator, though, then. In the absence of other players in this game, are we supposed to be the one deciding of the ruleset? It'd seem quickly unfair...
We'd just like to know if you agree with our stance above, to begin with. That should be basically everything needed for now.
I've added you as moderator. You are the most qualified person to determine what goes for Genesis runs. Feel free to update rules for Genesis boards. I'd recommend checking rules for other popular Genesis games (such as Sonic), to determine what emulators should be allowed and how strict you want the verification proof to be. Obviously emulated runs should be as close to original hardware as possible, to keep the runs on same board, if someone wants to run this game on real hardware at some point.
We currently have automatic verification enabled. This has been working fine so far, because there haven't been that many runs, but it's possible this setting needs to be changed at some point. It's still a good idea to give at least WR submissions a look when new runners come aboard to see that the runs are timed correctly and such. It's always possible some rules need updating in the future depending on major consensus, but these things can be discussed later if necessary.
If I understand how notifications work, I should be getting them whenever someone posts a run. It's not like it's very common, in this game, anyway... Although people from C&C Wiki have been working on adding Dune to their website, so maybe it'll attract more people.
We'll look at these other leaderboards about allowed emulators, hopefully we haven't been using bad ones... Thanks for these advices!
I believe you've been playing on Kega Fusion, which I believe should be the best option for Genesis emulation so it should be fine. And yes, you'll get a notification for each run and post for this game, even with auto verification enabled. Also worth mentioning, it's a good idea to familiarize current settings for this game before you start editing to avoid mistakes. Setting are a bit messy, because speedrun.com has gone through some changes. Some of the rules are in categories tab, while others can be found at variables.
and what particular region should there be iron? If, for example, Japanese, then it works at 60fps, if the euro, then it works at 50fps. in the end, iron is there and there. and the time of one and the same passage in the dune will be different due to the fact that with a large number of objects on the map, the game starts to slow down, which affects the passage.
- how are you going to check for non-overclocking? if the same console can be overclocked to 300%? sit with a stopwatch?
can think about 2x versions with and without overclocking?
Hi. Fastest version of the game should be played when possible. Variables or subcategories for region can be added later if necessary. Most games on this site allow emulated runs on same boards with consoles and there would currently be zero runs on this page if emulators were not allowed. Important thing is to allow everyone to participate, not just people capable recording from real consoles. We can revisit rules and modify if necessary, when there's actual competition in a specific category.
Intentional cheating is definitely not allowed and will result in removal of runs and possible ban. It's less likely that someone who has put tens of hours into polishing a run would consider cheating. Something like speeding up an emulator should be noticeable in the video for someone who's familiar with the game. If there's a real reason to suspect emulator user would have an unfair advantage to someone recording from a real console and loses a record because of that, then we need to consider banning such emulators or move the emulated runs to a separate board.
Genesis and MS-DOS runs used to be on the same board, even though they are two separate games. Boards for Genesis were added when more people started to run the Genesis version. Same thing applies to other changes. There's no need to overcomplicate both moderation and navigation on this page, before it becomes necessary.
Nice to see people still play this great game. Thirty years ago I practically live there (in Arrakis).
Regarding rules, as the Russian guy mentioned, there's no much sense banning better times just because you are using a stronger CPU with an emulator. As long as the speed of normal movement isn't increased, everything should be accepted. When you have troops all over the map going every each way and fighting with the enemy, the Sega crawled to a halt. I knew back then that if not for that, I could finish faster, and when I finally got my hands on an emulator (about 10 years ago) I quantified that being two full minutes for Ordos mission 9, which is the most difficult. Pity I can't get my hands on the PC I used, the OP records would last for all of a couple of hours ;-)
Difference between running a game on emulated consoles vs emulated PC OS is that consoles were usually standardized to identical hardware (except for PAL / NTSC difference). When running an MS-DOS game in emulator, runners often agree to certain speed settings to have a fair category to compete in. However, Dune 2 is cycle-limited, meaning you can't increase game speed beyond certain point, that's why it hasn't been necessary to specify cycle rules. As I already mentioned, changing settings to non-accurate emulation would give an unfair advantage over people running the game on original hardware. Same applies over people who have already done runs without changing settings.
The rule of thumb is simply 'Do not do anything that'd give you an advantage over original hardware runners'. With that rule in mind, you may emulate Dune II. This means emulator functions such as cycle override, fast forward, save states, ..., are not allowed. Emulating the game without using these functions is fine.
This also includes functions provided by a computer, such as binding a control to multiple keyboard keys, or using macros. This, not being an option on original hardware, is not allowed.
Be careful that a lot of emulators will automatically pause the game if they are unfocused. That's one of the only settings (besides display and keybinds) that you should want to change.
Thx for the input, I've already uploaded a couple of videos with the first two Atreides missions. In the second one, the time to beat was your own! I have to keep checking that full-game run to verify you didn't do better than the people posting level times.
Instead of using a full screen capture suite, I just log an .avi from inside the emulator, much more convenient.
I also noticed you use a discovered map to guide you trough the mission, I was thinking about doing that on more complex levels (where did you get them?)
You can find these maps in the Resources section ; the ones I use on my stream have slight edits done by me, showing Sandworm spawns and immediatly-triggered enemy units (for example, in Atreides 4, an enemy Trooper spawns and automatically starts walking towards your base, which is why the enemy attacks so early in that stage ; although its speed is not consistent for some reason).
wow, just looking at Atreides 4 and that's quite some work! Looks so neat.
Speaking of speed inconsistencies, I'm getting 16 minutes at the statistics page but in-video timed duration is 17:10. 16 minutes could be up to 16:59.99, but what about the other 10 seconds? lag? There was some, even after deactivating "filtered" video (which is on by default). I don't recall any lag with previous versions of the emulator, running on older versions of Windows, are we going backwards?
Dune is indeed a game that lags a lot, but like, it really lags a lot. I have tested while doing stuff on Atreides Stage 3, and estimated Kega Fusion and Retroarch's Genesis Plus GX core worked with similar levels of lag. These are both emulators allowed by the Sonic moderators, which seem accurate. What emulator are you using?
You may get down to 30, maybe 20FPS in stages 7-8-9, if your movements are poorly optimized or if the AI just decides to just spam actions.
For what may be relevant of computer lag, I believe Kega Fusion uses less CPU, therefore should lag less if your computer isn't too good. It however may have several graphical issues with some versions of Windows, from my experience.
If you have been using IGT (In-Game-Time), then you're gonna start to see differences here with stage 3. You should be using RTA (Real-Time-Attack), although I understand it's not been specified clearly in the rules. I could reword that part.
Real Time Attack should be counted from the first frame the cursor appears (in full-game runs, the same frame as the Yes button press), to the first frame the cursor disappears, on the recorded video. If we ever get down to frame counting, it's the video frames that should matter, not the in-game frames.
I've always used Kega, ever since I sold the Genesis HW. Ten years ago it was on a 1.2 GHz Core 2, now it's a i5 with a base frequency of 1.60 GHz. If I'm lagging now (not before) it must either be Windows 10 or the updated Kega version.
I'll have to take a closer look at recorded times with a video editor. Back to mission 4, it's proving difficult to beat the established record for this one.
How are times rounded? I checked RTA for Atreides 4 and I get 10 minutes 34 seconds 25 frames (30fps). I posted 35 seconds, being the closest.
Speedrun times are generally rounded down to last full second, not to closest second. Your time would be 10m 34s. I fixed this for you.
I'm also curious why your capture would be 30fps? It should be 60fps if you're playing NTSC version and 50fps for PAL. This is video frames, not actual in-game frames.
thx
30 fps is what VLC player reports in the codec properties of the Vimeo transcoded x264-mp4 file, it shows around 60 while playing and also in the original Kega logged AVI. I couldn't load the original in the video editor, to get an accurate RTA.
