Some notes regarding the in-game timer.

Currently, we use both RTA timing and IGT timing. These are effectively two different categories of speedrun.

RTA timing starts on the frame in which the training zone appears, immediately after clicking "Play", and stops on the frame where the "level complete" splash overlay appears over the gameplay in Zone 4-3, just before the level complete screen.

IGT timing is read from the "Current Time" statistic given on the Zone 4-3 level complete screen.

If you have any opinions or questions regarding the timing system, please discuss in this forum thread.

Two notable points:

• The time-manipulation abilities in-game affect the IGT.

• I don't know what happens to IGT if the game lags. Does this give laggy players an advantage? Lag is clearly undesirable from both a spectator and player perspective.

I don't know if we're in a place to change the rules for timing at this point, but if so, I like the idea of using only IGT.

Using IGT would reward creative use of time-manipulation abilities (like in R60D's 01Aug run that is in 3rd place under the current leaderboard setup) and therefore would be a nice way to celebrate a mechanic that sets this game apart from other shoot-'em-ups.

I don't have the tools to test if lag affects IGT, but it almost definitely affects RTA.

The one disadvantage I see, aside from the work of re-verifying past runs, is that IGT does not tell fractions of a second and would complicate comparison of close runs.

All that said, time for me to actually learn how to use timebreak :)

I have changed the default timing method to IGT because it seems like the consensus amongst top runners.

I have retained RTA as a secondary timing method.