I've gotten in touch with this person again and they agreed to look into making an autosplitter. So far I have asked them for an autosplit for each chapter, and when the final boss dies. I also mentioned that the leaderboard is currently going by in-game-time, but they say that depending on what livesplit is able to read from the game it may or may not be able to tie to the in-game-timer. If it can't then it would have regular load removal.

If anyone has other requests for functions please post them here so that I can pass them along.

While retiming the last 2 chapters isn't too bad for me just now, if at any point someone starts trying to get an optimized full game run, then having to retime the end of every run to find out if it was a PB is going to get extremely tedious.

I've hired someone before to make a load remover / autosplitter for another game. Would there be interest in having me reach out to them again and see if they would make one for this game as well? It could save a lot of time and trouble, for runners and moderators.

I have a full game run I'd like to submit to the leaderboard, but I'm not sure how to go about getting the IGT of the FINAL BOSS and HIT THE ROAD chapters.

Neither the FINAL BOSS or LET'S HIT THE ROAD chapters have results screens, and they don't show an in-game-time.

I haven't encountered anything like this, so I'm not sure what might be the issue or how to fix it.

I heard somewhere that the game won't run, or had some other issues with Windows 11 though, if maybe that has something to do with it.

Sorry for the late response here, SRC didn't actually notify me of a new forum post until 5 days after the fact. I would also recommend joining the discord since the resources there are more likely to be kept up to date.

There are some known issues with the load remover and a few people are trying to work on it when they have the time.

Another minor Quicksave/Quickload exploit: if you quicksave right as an enemy dies (during their death animation), you can then manipulate what they drop by quickloading, even if they dropped nothing to begin with.

I haven't managed to do it with a melee kill, so I'm guessing the timing must be pretty precise. I can do it reliably with inferno scrolls though. As soon as you cast the last inferno scroll, quicksave as soon as the game will let you (ideally, you will see the enemy's health bar be empty, but their death animation hasn't played yet), then after they're dead, you can just quickload over and over until the drop you want spawns.

Not really useful for any%, by maybe useful for All Quests where you need to farm X amount of an item from enemies.

Demonstration:

I recently put in a request to be added as a leaderboard mod for Summoner, and it was accepted because FrameDump had not logged in for quite some time, and I have no way of knowing if/when he'll be coming back.

Since being added, I have made a few changes that I will try to quickly list off:

1. Added a "Time Without Loads" field for runs/submissions.

2. Re-timed FrameDump's and Radge's runs for a Time Without Loads so that the leaderboard is fair and accurate.

3. Wrote up a set of Game Rules for clarity.

4. Changed the "100%" category to "All Quests" because 100% was never clearly defined (and there were no runs on that board anyway).

5. Added an "Any% - Teleport Cheat" category. I saw FrameDump mention that runs with this cheat can be done in about 30 minutes, so that could be interesting.

6. Split PC and PS2 into separate sub-categories for fairness, because it's unlikely that runs on these two platforms would be comparable.

If anyone has any other suggestions, or feedback about the changes that have already been made, please let me know.

I'm thinking it's probably going to be necessary to switch the leaderboard from Real Time to Time Without Loads.

I recently re-watched the record run to see where I can be saving time and noticed that there is a huge difference in our loading times (see direct comparison in the video below)

In short: my loading times are consistently 3 times longer than in the record (roughly 1 second vs 1/3 of a second)

There are at minimum 92 loading zones in the run, not counting any quicksave/quickloads, of which the run also has many. This means there is somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds of difference from loading time alone over the length of a run.

I suspect the difference might be because Radge ran on a physical copy of the game, which would also explain the graphical differences in the UI, and the 3dfx splash screen when he restarts the game, which the steam version doesn't have. I'll be getting a physical copy soon to test this idea, but still think the change should be made to level the playing field for any future runners.

Video examples:

Final update, I've put way too much time into this for how little it's going to get used, but made some big improvements.

It will now:

1. Auto start Livesplit upon starting a new game from the main menu
2. Pause livesplit on all loading screens and cutscenes
3. Auto split on every map change

Unfortunately I couldn't get it to auto split the end split because I couldn't find a workable memory address for when the ending cutscene starts to play, however, it will pause the timer while the ending cutscene is playing, so you can just manually split then and it will be just as accurate as an auto split would be.

Hopefully this is useful to someone other than just me at this point.

Works with both the Steam and GoG versions, will test it on a physical copy once I have one.

Edit: it does not work on physical copies, at least not on the 1.0 version. I also see no differences in UI or loading times between physical and digital copies of the game. No idea why it loads so slow for me compared to other runners.

I decided to mess around with making a load remover and managed to make a working one. If anyone is interested in testing it, it's uploaded in Resources.

It's been a long time, but I'm starting to look into running this game again. Has anything new been found in the last few years that isn't in the current record?

I don't see much point in adding a category for just the tutorial. Might as well just run Any% at that point since the tutorial is already the entire first half of that run.

A sub category for emulator runs was added 3 years ago

It's available on steam https://store.steampowered.com/app/6510/Lost_Planet_Extreme_Condition/

To reiterate the part where I directly answered your concerns: This is still early in this game's life in terms of speedrunning, so early that PC runs don't even have a working load remover. Once one of those exists, console runners will be able to manually calculate the loading times in their runs and subtract it from the final time, at which point there will be no advantage whatsoever to running on PC versus console in terms of loading time. This is very common among many speedrunning communities. Also worth mentioning, modern consoles can have SSDs installed in them which already largely negates loading time advantages from PCs.

Additionally, you mention keyboard and mouse being an advantage, but there is no evidence to support that with this game as the majority of top runs have been performed with a controller, regardless of platform.

And to add a third point, separate leaderboards for Console/PC are not "basic", many games do not separate them. Examples: https://www.speedrun.com/d2016 https://www.speedrun.com/prey2017 https://www.speedrun.com/ds1 The main reason that Console/PC get separated is when there are tricks/glitches that only work on one of those platforms, which is currently not the case for this game.

New categories are created based on need, not expectation, and the available evidence about this game does not currently suggest that there is a need.

Your stance that the moderators are mishandling the leaderboard because we haven't automatically given you new categories, and the thought that we don't consider whether or not those categories are warranted is also a kinda poor attitude to take and a pretty unfair assumption.

And I would like you to consider the tone of your own comments thus far. Both "Most games on here have consoles separated from PC, I dont know why the mods havent for this one but they should." and "Interesting how nobody responds to this, even though its obvious" come across like you are attacking the mods as though we are incompetent and mishandling the leaderboard, which I do not appreciate.

1: This is still early in this game's life in terms of speedrunning, so early that PC runs don't even have a working load remover. Once one of those exists, console runners will be able to manually calculate the loading times in their runs and subtract it from the final time, at which point there will be no advantage whatsoever to running on PC versus console in terms of loading time. This is very common among many speedrunning communities. Also worth mentioning, modern consoles can have SSDs installed in them which already largely negates loading time advantages from PCs.

2: There is no point in adding a new category for hardest difficulty unless the strategies for it are significantly different, but currently they are not; you still run past pretty much every enemy, and the boss fights are all the same but with slightly more HP. If you had joined the speedrunning community discord (https://discord.gg/7hZ2KyS), you would have seen that this topic has already been brought up, as has glitchless - multiple times.

I see none of you have been around speedrunning for very long, you can trust that the moderators for this game have all been in various speedrunning communities for a very long time, and we know what we're doing.

2 things I'd like to add:

1: You could have joined the community discord server and seen that conversations about glitchless have already been brought up multiple times (with the same response that Imperg has just given you) rather than just making passive-aggressive posts in the srcom forums.

2: If you don't understand how people are getting the times that they are, the best way to find out is to watch one of their runs rather than write a post implying that their runs are illegitimate, and then expecting someone to show up and explain the intricacies of a 3.5 hour run to you via text. If you have more specific questions after watching a run, the best place to ask them is in the community discord I mentioned earlier (https://discord.gg/7hZ2KyS), where many people, including the runners themselves, would be able to answer you.

I see that you are new to speedrunning, you can trust that the moderators for this game have been around many speedrunning communities for a very long time, and we know what we're doing.

There doesn't need to be a separate category if an official patch adds the ability to skip cutscenes because everyone will have access to it. The only reason to possibly add a new category is if not all platforms can skip them.