1: I have both pieces of DLC for this game, do runs need to be done with the base game only or is it fine to use parts from Creepy & Cute and so on?
2: Currently I'm using a tweak to make the game run at 60fps rather than the default 30 (it plays awfully without in comparison). Is that allowed? I don't see any mention of it in the rules.
3: Not a question but you guys should probably separate ILs into an IL leaderboard. For example like this: http://www.speedrun.com/The_Simpsons_Hit_and_Run
This was more of an issue when you had a bunch of misc categories but as the board becomes more populated it'll be harder to fix this kind of thing in the future.
4: Just due to how the nature of the game works, what about my own creations popping up in a world? I believe that they're supposed to be scaled to appear properly but what would be stopping me making a bunch of creatures which are incredibly easy to kill in the hopes that the game throws them in there with me?
1: Any version of the game is acceptable for all categories.
2: This counts as a mod and mods are banned in the rules of every IL and the fullgame.
3: We had one like that and decided to remove it after we started removing all the frivolous categories, and once they were gone having an IL leaderboard pointless. And secondarily, travel time from IL to fullgame took quite some time due to the site itself being slower so we decided centralizing it to one page would be the most efficient and visually pleasing.
4: This is perfectly acceptable.
Yes, any version of the game, including DLC or patch history is acceptable. There is no need to run a particular version of the game. I actually recommend playing with Galactic Adventures because this version has many patches to keep the game from crashing.
I have seen some YouTube videos played in 60fps, but I never knew how it is done. Can you show a video or guide of this tweak. I do not think it will affect game play time, but for now can you run 30fps until the tweak is a little more transparent?
We use to separate Full Game and ILs into two leader boards and I think it makes sense for The Simpsons. I have been modeling all my decisions on Halo speed running. http://www.speedrun.com/halo_coop#Halo_4 After speedrun.com's big UI update it really ruined Halo's board. However, Halo has 8 games, with 8-10 levels each, with 2 difficulties for each level and they were all on the same leader board and it looked beautiful. Adding more categories into Spore's leader board in this format should be easy. Yesterday I actually removed two full game categories and some categories within ILs because I thought they were too miscellaneous. But personally I do not like the IL board because it only shows #1 and not the listing without going deeper into the site.
Spore is a very NG+ kind of game, and yes because of its nature creatures will be showing up in games. This is perfectly acceptable, it would be unreasonable to require that everyone's Sporepedia be completely clean. This does allow for someone to purposely creature thousands of basically level one creatures to make Creature Stage easier. Similar to Space Stage, other saves are allowed to exist in the galaxy and I used these other saves to help out my Space runs.
Thank you for your questions! We think of specifics of rules on the fly but try to conform to two rules: Any optimization through NG+ is acceptable and fair game. Whereas starting an IL with creature history so it can have reward abilities is considered "carry over" in Halo and is not allowed.
Details on the tweak I was using for 60fps can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Spore/comments/30qip5/how_to_play_spore_at_60_fps_remove_the_30_fps/
I don't really think it affects game physics in a way which would end up speeding things up at all but I've been using it for so long that I don't really remember the difference. But yeah. I'll revert it back to how it was vanilla and do a quick run through of creature stage to really see if it affected anything negatively.