EnglandMy boy Pac created the website at the end of 2013, and over the course of 2014 a lot of series communities migrated off of whatever spreadsheets they were using to track leaderboards and set up shop here, I was in that cohort.
The above link seems to be a temporary invite, so if that one is expired by the time you see this thread again, you can use this one which is a permanent invite: https://discord.gg/b4ajrQx
I eagerly await seeing you have a top time in glitchless after a few attempts since it apparently requires little skill.
Thanks for the headsup. I don't see anything that would suggest the run itself is invalidated, but certainly shouldn't be verified as an original hardware run. Timing is also wrong, so I'll retime.
Additionally, gonna remove this user as a game moderator. Not having that, a self-verified, mistimed, mislabeled run from a user who hasn't been online in 2 years.
^ Yes, the punch combo speed matches the international release, and the JP release doesn't feature HP bars for the bosses.
Yeah I'm sure this will help for the guy who asked 6 years ago.
"Me and some friends who play the game are waiting until we can get the category to do speedruns"
I hate that this has become a predominant attitude to speedrunning with so many people.
If the category is RTA, or Real Time Attack, the timer cannot be paused. If the category is Time Attack, it may have its own specific rules on pausing and breaks. The vast majority of speedrun categories are treated as RTA, though.
Unfortunately for you, you need to be at least 13 years old to use this website.
Fun fact you can speedrun on an "illegal" emulator without submitting to the leaderboard if you just want to run the game.
Late reply oops
Hard is something that may be added in the near future as I'll be doing it for GDQ submissions, but as it stands right now there aren't really any Normal/Hard runs. Hard is an appropriately named category which nobody has wanted to attempt, and Normal basically plays like Easy but less fun, so people have generally opted to play Easy.
Not much point having leaderboards for categories with no existing runs, if runs turn up in the future we can re-evaluate which categories should exist.
For the purpose of text-mashing in long RPGs such as this one I think it's a no-brainer, the presence of the Armwrestling minigame does complicate matters slightly, but more a more nuanced rule can be made if there's a need for it. In the context of text-mashing alone, I don't think any value is added to the run by requiring runners to mash for most of their day.
I made a short video by TASing Mission 1 with both Music Off and Music On to show the frame data involved
Music Off: Andy Turn 1 End: 1817 Flak Turn 1 End: 1979 Andy Turn 2 End: 2142 Flak Turn 2 End: 2283 Andy Turn 3 End: 2494 Flak Turn 3 End: 2638 Mission Complete: 2787
Music On: Andy Turn 1 End: 1817 Flak Turn 1 End: 2013 Andy Turn 2 End: 2208 Flak Turn 2 End: 2383 Andy Turn 3 End: 2626 Flak Turn 3 End: 2803 Mission Complete: 2984
The Enemy Unit timesave is obviously negligible on Mission 1, but the Turn Start timesave is pretty clear. With Music On, Flak's turns took 34/34/33 additional frames respectively, that 1 fewer frame on Turn 3 is supposedly accounted for by him only having 1 unit on that turn. I'd love to see if this Turn Start timesave ever deviates from this value, 30~ does seem like an accurate ballpark figure.
As the consensus among people who have logged runs of the game appears to be that Music Off being the standard would discourage them from continuing to play, I think we can move forward with tracking which runs are playing with Music On/Off, and decide what to do regarding a timing offset. I'm unsure about how exactly this should be handled as it's not a simple case of "Music Off saves X amount of time across a run", as everyone's runs are likely to take a different # of turns to complete. If we can get some objective data regarding how many frames per turn are saved by having music disabled and whether these frame values ever change (Frames saved on turn start + frames saved on unit moved), that would be a good place to begin. Assuming this frame data doesn't change, it wouldn't be very difficult to track in a spreadsheet, just time-consuming during verification, if we decided to go that route.
For now I've added Music On/Off as a variable with each run on the board tracked appropriately. If the above suggestions turn out to be impractical, worst case scenario is that Music Off can be banned for future submissions, it's not an elegant solution but I don't see a good alternative.
This is a really cool discovery, I'm surprised I didn't notice this sooner. My initial reaction is to say that there shouldn't be a category/variant split for this because as you say, this doesn't change anything about how the game actually plays in terms of strats/tech used or route followed. It's the exact same run, just using a toggle that happens to save a substantial amount of time across a full run. The music does add a lot of character to this game so I get why runners would want to still be able to play with it, but my own personal opinion is that in speedrunning we're already ostensibly going for an objective that is seen by a lot of people as "Not fun". Which isn't to say that speedrunning itself isn't fun, but we're running games to see how fast they can be completed. If anyone feels particularly strongly about this I'd like to hear, my own position on the matter is that this is just a meta advancement and we don't need a new category for runs that just weren't aware that this was faster.
