United StatesI think the way the IL boards are set up now work well because you can just filter each level by character to see who has the top times for said character. Your faster runs with the betters characters don’t overwrite your slower runs with less optimal characters, both times display on the boards. Sure it sucks that your leaderboard placement will potentially be really far down on the boards, but it’s a clean and elegant way to display times without the catagories getting super cluttered and spread apart.
At the time of approval I was hesitant about no audio, but upon checking their previous runs on their YT dating back over a year ago they had audio and the fact they had been apparently playing the game at a high level for over a year added some form of credibility (and also the thought of someone making Chase HQ II of all things their debut game to cheat in just seemed weirdly unlikely).
As I am no longer super active in this game I just assumed players had crazily optimized strats over time. I do not follow TAS websites so thank you for pointing out the fact that their run was posted on such a site, which is indeed very suspect.
I would like to imagine Dasha doesn’t understand the difference between RTA and TAS and just assumes SR.C is loaded eith TAS videos, but the fact that they have splits and everything in the video….I just have no idea other than it is an attempt to fool people into thinking it is real time.
I removed the run and told them if they want to resubmit they will need to join the conversation here and refute the claims or prove their runs are legit in some way. Maybe by streaming the game and showing their skills in a real time environment where they can show their inputs are not TAS. If they can consistently pull off say sub 9’s in a stream then maybe there is some credibility to this run. I suggest adding AlphaNerd as a mod to the game to have an extra set of eyes in the approval process in the future.
An actual Zeebo, there is currently no way to emulate Zeebo. Unfortunately my Zeebo randomly crashes, I lost a couple runs this way.
Dark Cloud has and always will be one of my favorite games and speedruns ever, but I’ve basically had to stop running it due to the detrimental health effects it has on my body since the game has little to no downtime to allow breaks mid-run. Back when I was running any% glitchless a few years ago I was still somewhat able to deal with what essentially amounted to a 8+ hr run without meaningful breaks, but no more.
These days I deal with chronic back pain and a bladder that definitely isnt what it used to be when I first started speedrunning longer games 4-5 years ago. What I’m proposing is a discussion to allow breaks during longer categories where you are allowed to pause the timer to take a stretch or restroom break. Not only is this better for all of our health but it will also make the longer categories more accessible and appealing to others.
An example would be that no excessive pausing would be allowed and any points in the run where you choose to take such a break should be clearly timestamped in the run description.
Maybe we allow 1 minute per hour of your run time (so 6 hrs and you get 6 minutes of “pausing” or maybe a set 5-10 minutes to use as you see fit. Maybe have a second timer in your livesplit that displays how much break time you have taken or only display it during an actual break.
Idk, maybe I’m just speaking for myself here but as we all get older I find it harder and harder to find the ability to do runs of this game, and maybe implementing something such as an allowed break rule will rejuvenate peoples ambitions to start or continue running this game. Thoughts?
When I was given control of the Rez board from the previous mod a few years ago it was pretty messy, but at the time I was pretty much the only active runner so I left it. Lately there’s a lot more runs being submitted so I cleaned up the board layout to make it easier to navigate and submit runs to categories.
Changes: -PC and Console are now sub categories, rather than entire categories. -Moved Direct Assault categories to misc. -Removed the requirement for milliseconds, now it is just hours, minutes, seconds.
To do list: -Clarify the rules for each category to make it a bit more clear on when to stop the timer. -Add a VR category IF a VR run is submitted (but I think it will only be for “normal” any% and 100% and not hard, to keep from cluttering the boards. I will add Hard VR if it is submitted though.
If you have any suggestions feel free to request them here and I will see what I can do. I tried adding a variable for PC runs to clarify if a mouse or controller was used but I don’t think this can be done unless it applies to ALL boards including console, so I didn’t add it.
The only problem is… outside of story mode… what happens when they add new tracks soon? This really complicates things when it comes to any kind of Time Trial RTA category or anything that attempts to do “all tracks.” For now I’m just going to stick to the in-game time trials I think.
Adding up the IGT for 48 tracks every run also does not sound fun. It’s painful enough as it is doing it for 16 tracks for Story. Thank you for your test run.
I think maybe it should be “Series Race” as the category and then 12 sub categories, 1 for each different series race (4 tracks) this way shorter runs would be possible, but this is just my opinion. There can also be one “All Series Race” category, but there would need to be quite a bit of interest to justify so many categories.
The thing I dislike about Story mode is it repeats tracks and doesn’t cover every track in the game, it is pretty silly.
I also think “Time Trial RTA” as a category might be good, completing every Time Trial level back-to-back in an RTA setting to have both real time and IGT.
What does everyone think about having series race boards? Nice short runs without the need of constant loading screens (and repeating courses) from story mode. Heck, an “All Series Races” board may end up being a better run than story mode anyway. I haven’t delved into them much yet but it seems like it’s 4 races each. How many in total?
Luckily Cloud and squall (currently) are terrible. They’ve also stated in their twitter update they will likely return in the future to account for people that missed them. In what manner though is unknown. They can’t be used in regular story mode anyway, just extra mode. Based on experience there’s no instance either of the current characters would ever be a good choice in any speed related race.
I think maybe by next season pass, depending on how they handle the release, we will have a better understanding of how to classify the rules. They may make them both obtainable with gil and not lock one behind mythril, or even make them permanently available with gil. For now, I guess it is best to not allow cloud specifically for any of the leaderboards, but squall should be fine since he is easily obtained with gil. If squall dissappears and never returns, and receives a buff that makes him really good, then the boards should be split as you described. Just my opinion though. (Cloud is honestly one of the worst in the game though, his ability is bottom tier… in need of a buff)
“Doug%” for Kids On Site (Sega CD). This is the only category for the game.
I think the rules changed a bit since there is now a second runner, but originally it was required to have a friend physically present with you during your run whose name is also Doug (this prevented me from running the game at the time). When a second runner got creative and submitted a run with various “Dougs” in the layout (Nickelodeon’s Doug, Doug Bradley aka Pinhead from Hellraiser) the rules were changed to “Must have a Doug with you” instead, for all of us lacking an actual friend named Doug.
This seems fine if there’s enough interest in it. This would essentially add 8 categories though since there are 8 levels. This may be best as a Misc category with sub categories as to not clutter the main boards (and it does sort of feel like a “category extension” anyway.)
Since several people have been submitting incorrect times lately due to this I just wanted to clarify how to correctly fill out your IL times.
Example: You get an 18.84 in-game IL time
CORRECT time on SRC form: 18s 840ms
WRONG time on SRC form: 18s 084ms
Also, be sure to leave the “Real time” field blank and only fill in the “In-game” time form (unless you’re doing the All Network Speedruns category).
I didn’t even think about hacking and how the game doesn’t provide replays of any kind, so yeah, definitely having IL’s archived here makes a lot of sense now that I think about it. Plus, in the end of the day there’s really no harm and it only helps the speedrun community for this game grow here.
Also, for the rules for All Network Speedruns, do we think timing should be allowed to start on any level as opposed to on Mountain Run and forced to end on Rolling run? If these rules are strictly enforced for everyone then I’m fine with it, but for me personally I would arrange my start and end splits based on how reset heavy the levels are (Rolling is very reset heavy for me, for example).
Not sure why considering the game has built in global leaderboards for those levels already. That would defeat the purpose of having IL’s for them here since the game itself already tracks the best times.
However, I was thinking that having an “All Network Speedruns RTA” category would be kinda neat, where all 8 runs must be done back-to-back in an RTA setting. This would actually provide a different experience than the built in global timer already in the game since the IGT “total time” is based on essentially your sum of best times, so being able to do all 8 in a row would be a cool test of skill since you need to perform these runs without any mistakes or retries in between.
So have we decided that pressing X on “Welcome to Astro’s playroom” is the start time? I was doing it on the X hold menu before it when creating a new game. I will need to subtract a second from my latest PB if we’re doing the second menu (which i think is fine)
Nice, glad to have more runs on the board. If ever needed, I am willing to help approve runs if I get added as a mod since I check SRC very often and I think this is going to be a pretty active speedrun with quite a few runs submitted. No problem if not, but the offer is there.
