I'm not sure what the rules for this game should be. I'm the only runner (right now) but I still want some thoughts on what's legal and what isn't. This also extends to Yuri's Revenge

¤ Version Every official version should be legal. I am using the "The First Decade Unofficial Patch v1.03 (Revision 4)" -- While I don't think it directly affects the game, for the series as a whole I believe widely accepted/used unofficial patches can be legal to use. I use the 64-bit version of gamemd.exe provided by the unofficial patch. I can't imagine it changes anything in the game.

¤ INI editing Skyrim and Dishonored are selective on what can be edited and Deus Ex has their own category for editing. There's only one option that needs mentioning: Width/Height - In-game there's only 3 options, 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. With INI editing you can have any resolution, and the larger the resolution the more is visible on screen. The developers included in multiplayer the abilitiy to limit resolution, which adds support to not allowing this to be tampered with. I'm undecided on this.

¤ Game Time vs Real Time I checked my best segments against their Game Time and noticed odd discrepancies. Half of RT is actually shorter than GT, which shouldn't happen because of load times. Liberty is -17 and Mirage is -10. Fallout is +46 (though that can be explained by the cutscenes pausing the game). The difference is Real Time is +14 against Game Time. Then there's Save & Load. While this doesn't affect Real Time at all, it can dramatically lower the Game Time. Someone could endlessly save and load as if they were TASing to get a good time, which isn't in the spirit of speedrunning. The only argument against Real Time that I see is the loading times. However, computers these days have take almost no time to load a mission and the difference is likely neglectable. I was going to make an auto-splitter but it's not compatible with VMware. I support Real Time to be the main time the leaderboards use (at least for RA2 and YR). I do, however, support having a second column for Sum of Game Time, but it must remain empty if you use Save & Load (which optimal runs won't use anyway) or if you skipped too fast to see the time of a mission. Individual levels (if we bother with that) will always use Game Time, but don't allow Save & Load (unless it's loading the start of the mission).

-You should use whichever version is the fastest, unless it's broken (more fps = more speed etc.)

-In this case, the INI editing shouldn't be allowed.

-If you're going to run the whole game, then I suggest to use real time. You could probably use in-game time for IL runs, though, if you can fix the discrepancies.

On a minor note I have a timer offset of -0.600, since that's about how long it takes to get to the first cutscene (which you have to skip). It'd be good if that was standardize.

The most widely accepted/used unofficial patches are probably the ones for TD and RA. It's hard to say how accepted the unofficial patches for RA2 are since it's not that ancient.

Full campaign runs:

• Any time you have battle control is counted.
• Time in a cutscene where you don't have battle control in the middle of the level is counted, but time at the beginning of a level during a cutscene when you haven't had battle control at all during that level yet is not counted.
• Time spent saving and loading is also counted.
• If you restart a mission, time spent pressing restart would be counted, but not time spent on the loading screen or before battle control was regained.
• Video proof should be contiguous. In other words, there should not be any splices, splits, cuts, or stutters in the video. All missions of the campaign must be played in a row in order.
• We round the frames down for Individual Level runs. For full campaign runs, we round the frames down after all of the Individual Level times have been added together. So for example, I have a combined total of 671 frames from all my individual mission times during a full campaign run. I would round that up to 700, or down to 600 if it was below 650. Rounding up I would add 7 seconds to the full seconds from the rest of the run. Rounding down I would add only 6 seconds to the full seconds from the rest of the run.
• If Game Speed is available as an option during gameplay, it should be left at the default setting (Fast)

So I am guessing that the second column ROMaster2 is referring to in the OP in practice is "Time with loads".