BelgiumToday I decided to do a pretty low-effort attempt at looking a bit into the code of Sonny as well by using a Flash decompiler to (among other useless things) look at the hex dump of the game and while I didn't find anything very conclusive I did find this one interesting extract somewhere 
the rare item variables aren't mentioned anywhere else in the entire rest of the hex dump as far as I'm aware so I wasn't able to find anything about it, and I also wasn't able to quickly find a way of looking into the code on a simpler level of complexity, but this leaves me to speculate that the game treats these "rare items" differently from regular items (which it certainly feels like to me, an example of this is that to me it feels like shaman of blades drops tribal weapons way more than 8% of the time specifically the first time you fight them in training, although that might just be me going absolutely insane, maybe it just has those extra things to handle the extra slot it needs to draw for the rare item) (the fact that they, for example MSH/shaman weapons/blade of light, also drop completely independently of other items further strengthens my belief that they might be treated differently than it seems). Did you find any indications of this in the code and could you send me a copy of or link to the source code of the game?
fuck everyone who said you couldn't do it, who said you weren't good enough, who said you would never get it. This was an insane Palace of Winds and almost was a 1:35.
Yeah this does sound fair to me, an easy solution to this problem would probably be to call the category "Any% No Major Glitches" or "Any% NMG" for short or something like that. Since the point of the category is pretty much just to exclude the item-eating glitch and wearing Veradux' armor I think its not a big deal to not strictly stick to "No Glitches". Thinking about this further an interesting idea could be to make it so that if you somehow perform the item eating glitch on accident during a run you're immediately forced to Re-spec in order to get those added stats deleted (before entering any more fights), which conveniently also punishes you for accidentally pulling off a glitch by making you reselect all of your abilities again.
I've recently gotten back into running this game since a friend told me I could use Flashpoint to play flash games. I learned the new Assassin Build and to my own surprise managed to beat my 2 4-year old PB's with it on my 5th attempt after getting 3 total MSH's in zone 2. https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/737030156115378306/963790065551704094/unknown.png?width=310&height=701 sadly I didn't record since I wasn't expecting to PB so I can't submit anything yet but that's ok. :) Afterwards I started thinking about more things to improve in the route since I found it weird that the two top times used different routes. For me it's hard to say which one is fastest atm (for 100% at least, for any% I'm fairly confident the assassin route is not beatable with the gunslinger route without any changes) as it'd be hard to judge how fast a really lucky run would be for both routes, but as I started looking more deeply into things I found a couple of interesting things which I don't know if they were known/tested before. The first thing I tested was whether or not there is a difference in speed between different types of attacks. I timed from the frame before selecting the attack to the first frame of the enemy attack (in both cases there was no enemy killed, no team mates, and no poison damage or anything else), and I found that there actually is a difference: (timings done at 30fps) Melee (Quick strike/Smash): 58 frames (~1.93 seconds) Ranged (Magic/Electro bolt): 50 frames (~1.67 seconds) meaning a 0.26 second timesave for every ranged "bolt" style move compared to any normal Melee attack (might also be worth it to time how long skipping a turn takes, there could be a very very small chance it could speed up the Omen fight a little bit by only attacking when he uses his ability). This would obviously give the Gunslinger route a hidden advantage since I'd estimate you do around 100 attacks in a 100% run which would mean a 26 second timesave just from faster attack speeds for the gunslinger route. I don't know exactly how much this affects the current routing scheme but I definitely think it's something that has to be taken into consideration for further timings. The second thing I couldn't quite wrap my head around is the way piercing works. From what I understand piercing increases both critical hit chance and the damage critical hits do but since I couldn't really find anything detailed on the wiki nor anything else it's a really hard stat to quantify for me and makes it hard to guess which purchases or calls are worth it or not in the moment. The last thing I quickly considered was shifting training fights to zone 2 after the 1 shadow assassin fight if you haven't gotten any MSH yet (since all 3 training fights have a 5% chance of dropping one), if you're going for an RNG-dependent playstyle. Haven't messed around with this idea though so it remains to be seen. Other than that the run will always be a MSH/Tribal Weapons-grindfest no matter what way you put it so that's always fun :D
The most likely outcome at the moment is that there would be a category extension for all runs with multiple players, with a subcategory for each of the 9 full game categories across both games
Since the timing rules can be vague sometimes here is a list of the exact frames timing starts and ends for Full Game and IL Runs respectively:
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Full Game Runs: -> Timing starts on the first frame where the file select button is visibly flashing. Example: *Last frame before timing starts:
*First frame of the run:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/883843846511947817/958374709173559297/unknown.png?width=1239&height=701
(note that the appearance of the flashing button may appear slightly different depending on if you record in 30 or 60 fps along with other things)
-> Timing ends on the first frame of the star grab cutscene after touching the final (grand) star.
Example:
*Last frame before timing ends:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/883843846511947817/958375460457283684/unknown.png?width=1239&height=701
*First frame after the run:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/883843846511947817/958375656612327444/unknown.png?width=1239&height=701
(appearance might vary slightly due to the same reasons as mentioned earlier) -
IL runs: -> Timing starts on the first frame where the selected power star noticeably flashes. Example: *Last frame before timing starts: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/883843846511947817/958376919852793926/unknown.png?width=1245&height=701 *First frame of the run: https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/883843846511947817/958377164280045609/unknown.png?width=1245&height=701 -> Timing ends the same way as it does for full game runs.
If you have any questions about these timing rules feel free to ask in this thread or contact a moderator in our discord server.
@NotTheJohn I rather think that speedrun.com disallowing moderators and communities to protest this way is unreasonable and a very simple yet unreasonable way to silence communities who are in disagreement with elo staff, since pretty much all other ways of protesting would be ignored or barely responded to
- It is very unnecessary to call someone an idiot when they take the time to respond to your forum post, I don't know how you can expect anyone to actually want to respond to your question when you address the people like that.
- An emulator is not an official release of the game, it is in the definition of an emulator, it EMULATES the official version, which automatically makes it an unofficial version on its own. Secondly the load times are inconsistent and even if they were slower than Switch or WiiUVC, emulators will always keep a layer of fishiness so we have decided to flatout ban all usage of any emulator for speedrunning. If you want to use an emulator so badly, then fine, we're not stopping you from doing so but you being stubborn should be beyond you caring about the leaderboard at that point.
There are quite a few things wrong with your statements:
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First of all I'd like to point out that you should never feel limited by what categories are available to you on speedrun.com, even if they're not in the specially designed category extentions. As a full grown mature man, you should be able to make your own decisions on how you want to approach and play the video games that you do speedruns of. Being tied down to a leaderboard shows a great sign of striving for fame and fame only, which is, as the majority amongst speedrunners would agree, not what the core of speedrunning should be. Simply put, if you want to do the run, fine, do it. Perhaps if you raise enough attention for it yourself the category might even get added to the leaderboard after all! And all of your problems will be solved and you will be able to live a happy life ever after.
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The analogy you make between galaxy 1 and 2 is wrong in at least three different ways. First of all is the statement that we collect 120 stars as both luigi and mario in galaxy 1 and 2 a pure spreading of misinformation and fake news, as any sane runner collects exactly 71 stars as mario, and 171 as luigi (not counting the duplicate last bowser star at the end of the 120 star run for luigi, of course). Aside from that even if you somehow managed to reach 242 stars by collecting 120 stars as both mario and luigi (120 + 120 = 242??????), it would still not apply to galaxy 1, as there you actually DO collect onehundredandtwentyONE stars as both mario and luigi, which are completely the same by the way so they're not unique power stars which is what the whole point of the category is in the first place.
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My most serious point, partially referring back to point 1). You aggressively asking why there isn't a 1982 is in my eyes actually very disrespectful to the people who have put in all their effort in actually running the category which is already an insane achievement on its own, you disregarding that and asking for an even longer category just perfectly goes to show the kind of backseat type of viewer that you really are, which as you might not know is not very often appreciated all that much in these kinds of people's streams, so I would change up that attitude aswell if I were you before it comes to affect you on a more personal level.
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Lastly I would just like to point out the hilarious mathematical mistake you made, and for me the true answer to your post of why there isn't a 1982. You might not have noticed yet, but 1862 - 120 + 242 does not actually add up to your proposed number of 1982, rather to the much less nice-looking number 1984. Which would of course not be a very nice category to have as it would show the direct relationship between any modern speedrunners' twitch chat, and the dystopian futuristic society that the residents of the UK in the book "1984" by George Orwell live in. Naming a category after this book would probably not give a very good image of what the 3D Mario speedrunning community stands behind, as we would like to not endorse such behaviour in our community as it is already full enough of 9-year olds.
^ also if you're using mario, hold A during the entire thing, if you're using luigi, don't hold A and spin with the wiimote. Also, after the walljump you want to hold up left and not up like you might be tempted to because holding up in a left gravity feeld is the equivalent of holding neutral.
Woah, nice find! Don't think any other categories need a rename probably since the rules of Any% and Any% Glitchless state you need to "trigger the final cutscene as quickly as possible" which isn't achieved anywhere here. Pretty cool nontheless though :)
