Even though I slaved over this and redid several rounds many, many, many times, I think it can be more optimized, but at least I got the sub 7 I theorized was possible. I wanna try Akuma again and avoid getting Q however I can, but I also want to redo runs Dudley and Makoto.

Who would you rather see next?

After much optimization, I got a best TAS time of 7:52 with Akuma; I estimated sub 7:50 so it's getting there!

Notes:

1. Visual bug at the very start: it shows yellow text for the Asia version, then switches to EU blue, I actually don't know why this happened because I always keep it in EU version. It's never happened before even though I use custom color palettes, so I don't believe it's caused by that. The recordings should also work if I revert the ROM to default. Let me know if default colors are ideal or if it doesn't matter!
2. Timer starts when Super is selected now (previously started when I hit the Start button).
3. Q took a little over 38 seconds, which would've reduced the run to 7:14. Unfortunately, at the moment, I'm not sure what I can do to avoid him, other than taking extra damage along the way and possibly avoid finishing rounds with Super.
4. On almost every round, I was paying attention to the number of frames at the time the screen fades to black. Whenever reasonable, I reloaded and did some of the round again to reduce time.
5. There is a noticeable difference between defeating the opponent with a normal hit, a launcher, and a knockdown. A knockdown (e.g. a throw or Makoto's HP chop) seems to advance to the second round sooner, but with a launcher, the game tends to wait longer, even longer than after the opponent's sprites have gone neutral on the ground.
6. Ending with a Super, even though in certain circumstances got the KO sooner, the game still took longer to move on; on Q's first round, I could've ended the round with j.hk > c.mk > SA1 but this took longer than the combo I used. It's less about the SA freeze/screen fade/etc and more about how the game delays moving onto the second round.
7. Ultimately I decided to stick to KKZ for big damage, and for a future TAS, I will probably choose to do it in the middle of the second round instead of a finisher. I did this on Ryu more because I couldn't manipulate damage/CPU to end with KKZ (plus it was the most ideal moment to get hit by c.lk then punish the Hadouken), but this is probably more time-efficient in general.
8. Not every Taunt was done for the damage. Some of them served as CPU manipulation.
9. In a lot of cases I opted to use c.hp instead of c.s.hp. They deal the exact same damage and c.s.hp is faster by 1 frame, but c.hp deals a little bit less stun, which is actually ideal for TAS. This was done to avoid stunning the opponent too quickly as I reset them after every lk Tatsu. If the opponent is on the ground, you can't do anything, after all, and because the combo isn't finished yet, it will interfere with damage scaling. So I delay stunning the opponent for as long as possible in most cases. This is why I don't always reset with HP.

Kind of a continuation of this thread, I did a little bit of testing via TASing one match with Akuma vs Yun in arcade mode. I could've just tested with 2P but it makes more sense to me to test it against the CPU to see whether it's possible/worth it to optimize a run without a Perfect.

So is it worth it?

I ended the first round with a Perfect, and wrote down how many frames that took (when the screen fades to black. This takes into account the time the game takes to switch to the second BGM).

Then I reloaded a save state shortly before ending the round, baited/hoped Yun would hit me with a light punch or kick (it was S.LK in this case), and ended the round. It was faster by 61 frames.

In the second round, got a Perfect, reloaded, then found the time to get hit by 2 chained S.LPs, and it was faster by 69 frames (hayooo!).

So this is just a little over 2 seconds of time saved in one match. Projecting it to a full run (without Q), it could potentially save around 22 seconds, assuming I take 1-2 light punch/hits before ending the round. As long as it doesn't interfere with dealing damage to the CPU, it's absolutely worth it!

So it may be possible to end the game with Makoto, Alex, and maybe even Akuma, in under 7 minutes! It's all theoretical, of course, so we'll see.

EDIT: After doing a more optimized TAS I no longer believe it's possible to go sub 7 (with Akuma).

Five years ago I made a thread asking why nobody uses Dudley -- seems like my question took hold because the top two times are with him, that's great! I went back to check what I wrote in that old thread aaaaaand... I can't say that I entirely agree with that now, lol. Let's get into it.

Some time ago, I got back into doing tool-assisted videos and recently did some new speedruns. They're not all good but it certainly got me thinking about the RTA community again.

I should've checked here when RTA speedrunners start the timer (I forgot because I'm a dummy) because I included a timer in my recent videos and made the mistake of starting it when pressing the Start button instead of when selecting a Super Art; this roughly adds 2 seconds so please keep that in mind! I may update the videos so the timer is correct later -- but that is a bit of a hassle, so, to be honest, if I have to rerender and reupload these videos, I'd rather attempt to do more optimized runs instead.

I've included text on the right-hand side of the video so you know if Q was fought in the run, as well as Default Settings and Bonus Game (in case I ever change those). I might also start showing the in-game settings at the start if people insist on it, so please let me know.

I still strongly believe that knocking down the opponent and performing supers still wastes time -- though there are still times when using a super makes sense in a TAS -- but whether or not getting a Perfect does, kind of depends. When clearing Round 1, the game waits for the BGM to hit a certain point before moving on to the second, regardless of anything, so that the second BGM is synched. I've not yet tested whether clearing a round with no Perfect will delay the game less. I think the game also waits for the BGM again before fading out when the match ends, so I might test that too.

This is just to explain that, at the moment, all the matches in my runs are Perfect (I think one or two aren't), even if I previously believed that they waste time. But now, I'm not so sure it matters, and I'm not sure if anyone's ever tested that. I'll talk more about this in a second thread. Stay tuned!

Anyhoo! Here's a list of the new runs I've uploaded so far:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2hgIWyLo4cwMA1HkdeLxAfXZ9d_CIBsi

With Q:

• Dudley SA2 - 9:22
• Ken SA2 - 9:14
• Akuma SA1 (only Raging Demon was used) - 8:39
• Dudley SA3 - 8:47
• Makoto SA3 - 8:13

No Q:

• Alex - 7:34

(Continues)

I love this game, I've been playing it forever, but recently I got really into it and I've replayed it a bunch of times in the last few weeks. So I thought: why not get into speedrunning while I'm at it?

I already have a twitch account, I know how to use OBS, I suppose now I only need the... timer with the splits? Where do I get that and how do I set it up?

All of the screen transitions are gone? It looks like the game is skipping all screen transitions i.e. fade to black, fade-in, etc. is this a glitch in the emulator? The game's not supposed to look like that. With the transitions disabled, the game is naturally advancing much faster than it should between rounds.

With the help of a friend, we noticed a few more oddities with the run.

The CPU is quite lenient throughout the run and this can be noted in the first match, where Sean is effectively doing nothing, which makes me think the difficulty is set to 1. Throughout the run, there are other examples of the CPU doing nothing or being overly docile and this is incredibly lucky even for lvl3. You can run a short experiment yourself, load up Sean at level 1, do the whole match, then do the same at level 3, you'll see what I mean. Basically, you cannot get this lucky with a single character, let alone an entire run.

Even Dudley is frequently just walking forward and doing nothing for seconds, only a lvl1 CPU would do that, while lvl3 would do Uppercuts the second you're in range.

It's also far too convenient that his setupless jump-ins pretty much never got blocked.

At 2:32, Akuma's portrait/screen transition plays twice. It clearly looks like it was messed up during editing. Akuma's avatar also moves back (to the left) for a few frames. This weird "glitch" occurs later after the match against Dudley (3:46), so I'm unclear whether this is simply a glitch, but that doesn't explain why all screen transitions are seemingly disabled.

The INSERT COIN/JOIN IN text also vanishes for a few frames sometimes. Sometimes it lingers longer than it should. This simply should never happen. The text should keep blinking at the same interval regardless of anything and should only disappear during transitions (which, as clearly shown, were disabled anyway).

At least once, the characters vanished from the screen. https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/786375888692101066/9E3C14205C478561030F8B9A8979A974ADF1A524/

Basically, the run looks fake as hell, and we're also talking about a player who fails Shoryuken inputs frequently and even started the SUV bonus game by high jumping when attempting to do KKZ.

There may be more oddities, but the fact that the run is as glitched as it is (and that the person playing is fairly inept) makes it hard to tell which "glitches" shown come from the screen transitions being disabled, and whether anything in the video was edited.

Regardless, the inacurately and overly docile CPU is the biggest hint (seriously, you have to be lucky in every round, the whole time for this to happen even at lvl1) but the simple fact the game doesn't look the way it should makes me and my friend believe it should be taken down from the leaderboards.

I had a quick look at the speedruns on here and seems like everyone's using shotos, but has nobody seriously considered using Dudley?

In true speed TAS runs, I set up a few rules for getting to the end as quickly as possible, some of which being no knocking the enemy down/back, no supers (they waste too much time), and getting hit at least once in the match, because the Perfect announcement also takes up time. Because it's TAS I can somewhat manipulate the AI into comboing into them while they're crouched as often as possible (while crouched you take suffer 30% more damage) but of course it's not guaranteed. I've done TASs with Akuma, Ken and Dudley, with an attempted run as Makoto that I never finished, because I quickly realized Dudley easily outspeeds them. He has the best jumping arc and can do more ground combos without knocking back or down, namely duck in uppercut over machinegun blow. I see the community is rather small at the moment, but still I invite you all to watch my TAS to get a better idea of how, I feel, is the most optimized way to speedrun 3S. I added a counter to it as well.

Hello to all, I just noticed the current "world record" of this game from New Game involves enemies despawning. This is wrong because this bug only exists in the game when you have the Style Switcher mod installed in the stand-alone PC version. Therefore, any run where this occurs should be instantly disqualified. It cannot be a legitimate speedrun as the bug is not present in the game otherwise.