AND, should clarify that the webcam rule is applicable to console as well as PC.

Oh, and forgot to mention that all runs submitted before the rule change are grandfathered in, no one is losing their verified records over this rule update.

It was recently discovered that differences in frame rate can cause the games physics to behave differently, in order to prevent differences in gameplay between console and PC, PC runs must now cap their frame rate at 60 FPS (Options in the Main Menu > Graphics > Frame Rate Limit > 60).

PC runs must also now display the frame rate in High Contrast Mode (Shift+Tab to open Steam in Game Menu > Settings > In Game > In-Game FPS Counter (Change setting), and also enable In-Game FPS Counter High Contrast Color.

Additionally, If using a webcam, do not cover the In Game Timer, FPS Counter or Ammo areas.

Thanks,

-AC7 Moderation Team-

Yes to what Pie said but also, if you stick with practicing holding 90 when you play it gets easier with time. It becomes automatic muscle memory eventually. If the controller modification made it so you couldnt hold full throttle anymore you’d actually lose time because holding 90 doesn’t start being advantageous until around 2700-2800 speed in most planes, before that you want full throttle.

Pop into the AC7 discord to participate in community polls for the next three days. Thank you.

Hey everyone.

This post is to announce that we have two additional moderators in the form of CptPie and myself (Denim_AK). There’s been an increase in submitted runs lately and we want to make sure everyone’s runs get to be acknowledged in a timely manner.

Other actions we will be taking this week are providing a clarified version of the rules. As of yet no actual changes to the rules are being made, there are just a couple points that we felt deserved clarification.

We will also be reverifying a handful of runs from a particular category that we discovered an oversight in how that category has been timed.

We would encourage anyone who wants to play a role in shaping how we move forward to join the Ace Combat 7 Speedrunning Discord, as we occasionally have discussions and polls there to make sure that any changes that get made reflect the desires of the community at large.

We are excited to have an increased number of active runners and encourage community members to check the leaderboards every few days as we aim to make future run verification time decrease to only a day or two so we can watch the competitions play out in real time. Since we now have enough moderators to do so, we will also be enacting a “no self verification policy” just to increase future transparency and integrity. Good luck everyone, feel free to message us on Discord if you have any questions, comments or concerns.

Thank you.

Hello. I casually fired up RR64 this morning and made another discovery relevant to the strategies laid out in this thread. It’s pretty simple. JoeDamillio, you made a break through with these shortcut strategies when you started using the clouds in the game as reference points while traversing the difficult grass sections of shortcuts. It blew my mind when i first read your post in this thread about the clouds cuz i had never noticed the clouds before and that seems like such an obvious reference point. Turns out i never noticed them because on my game they weren’t there. By the time you had posted the information about the clouds i had stopped making runs as my life got busy and i haven’t really been back since. I did try to utilize your cloud strategy once and was bewildered by the missing clouds in my game, i even wondered for a moment if you were using an emulator or something but this morning i figured out the discrepancy.

The clouds in RR64 only show up when playing the game with the 4MB Ram extension pak installed to your N64. I didn’t instal the expansion pak or even know about it until a few months ago when i needed to get it to use the USAMUNE practice rom for super Mario 64 Speedrun practice. It kind of blew my mind, none of my speedruns for SM64, RR64 or Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater utilized the expanded RAM and all of those games perform much better with it. And in addition to the increased frame rate performance, occasionally certain features are added to the game with the expansion pak installed; in this case the clouds.

So if anyone reads through this thread and wants to utilize JoeDamillion’s cloud reference shortcut strats, know that you need to buy and instal the N64 4MB RAM expansion pak, you’ll be happy you did though as it makes all of your n64 games more enjoyable. I will have to start brushing off my RR64 skills and try runs again soon now that i have access to the clouds. If this game had a bigger Speedrun community id argue we need separate catagories for with and without expansion paks as its definitely a different playing field but im not sure that’s necessary yet. Should probably look into whether the increased frame rate alone provides enough advantage to warrant the separate category; with a Speedrun of multiple hours the difference could be several minutes just because of your hardware.

That is all. ✌️

I usually use a timer on an ipad next to the tv when i film it, would that count or do i have to have live splits? The ipad timer method has so far been fine in SM64.

Ah, cool. I kinda figured but had to know for sure. Hadn’t considered using it on the front of bowsers sub, makes sense and explains why i could never get that to work in the past. Thanks guys.

I was messing around in HMC today curious if i could find a way to climb the hill in the middle of the water area with the star since i still havent gotten the hang of the box triple jump trick. I ended up figuring out how to jump up the slope. Im not a scholar by any means so others may have figured this out and it doesn’t save anytime over the triple box jump but im still curious if this is a new discovery cuz i didnt think you were supposed to be able to get up that slope. There may be other uses of the logic behind this even though this trick itself doesn’t save any time.

Awesome. Another couple days and I can finally start running this again.

Nice.

It’s nice to meet someone who gets it, figuring this shit out is one of the coolest things I’ve ever done but so niche nobody gets it.

It didn’t occur to me to use clouds as reference points, I usually used the high spots of little hills just when they load in, the make a sort of gun sight before the terrain behind them loads in.

I’ve never really tried insanity tracks, have you tested these techniques there?

For real, life’s in the way for me too. I’m like 20 seconds from bronze and I think my route would be 1h36m if I can grind it out long enough to get a no lose run.

Can respect that, to me there is just something satisfying about beating the whole game in one sitting even though its way more frustrating to do competitively. Is there any reason we cant do both? I know goldeneye levels are split up individually like that but id way rather watch a full game run through that shows mastery over the whole game. On the flip side, individual levels would make more difficult shortcuts or other exploits justifiable in runs. I dont see why we shouldn’t be able to have individual and full game runs, they are both fun and interesting in their own way.

Hi everyone. I just finished up a week and a half grind discovering shortcuts and other mechanics in the game. This Speedrun community is pretty small and ive found it hard to stay motivated when it feels like im just racing myself (im not even in the top 3, i just mean i dont think anyone else is actively trying to apply shortcuts to push what’s possible with this game. I love this game and i know other people do too so im trying to understand why so few people actively Speedrun it. I imagine the main reason being the amount of luck it seems to take to put up a great run with no loses (at least for me), but if so i think the addition of shortcuts really help with that. They allow you to get away from the other players and have more control. I hate getting an hour into a run and losing a race at the last second because of the tiniest mistake or freak accident. It makes the game feel RNG based even though its not technically RNG i think. So basically i want to see if i can muster up some competition and collaboration in the community to make speedrunning this game a bit funner. Im sure part of the reason for the lack of active runners is they are just focused on other games but with the addition of shortcuts we have a frontier of possibilities most games dont have as much of. I love Mario 64 for example, but with hundreds of runners trying to break that game open they’ve done a really good job and now the opertunity for new discovery is slim. RR64 however is just scratching the surface. I broke the shortcut mechanics down in about two days of trial and error, i think there is plenty more left to be discovered and i find that exciting. So i dont know if my words make anyone feel like firing up this game again but i id feel a lot more motivated if there was a sense of competition and collaboration and activity in the community. To that end, i started a Discord Page for RR64 Speedrunning. Im actually kind of a noob when it comes to discord so im happy to let someone who knows what they’re doing run it but i wanted to get the ball rolling. Its attached to my “Denim_ak” discord account and thats linked to my profile here on Speedrun.com so if the link below expires then you should be able to find it off my profile i think.

https://discord.gg/pggk4GDR

Im going to try to get some of my gamer friends who’ve never tried speed running this game to give it a go. I think some more competition around here would be fun.

Over the last week I’ve found out how to use major shortcuts on almost all the races between level 3-5. So I think you are right, it’s time for a new category.

There are so many shortcuts in this game now. Wanted to share a new piece of info about forced respawns. Actually crashing your bike has been surprisingly the least consistent part of these shortcut techniques. I use the crotch rockets in levels 3 through 5 to make it easier to dodge other players and weave through traffic, unfortunately though they have so much handling it can be hard to try to get them to crash when doing a respawn. A wall usually works but even then sometimes you can just do a big flip and end back on your tires unscathed. Here is a pretty consistent solution when the terrain allows for it. If there is any decent incline near by, you can hold a wheelie at slow speed when entering the incline and continue holding that wheelie. Speed up once on the incline and time it so you’re about 3-4 seconds into the wheelie when on the incline with a little bit of speed and it will buck you off the bike backwards. I know everybody already knows about this Mechanic, but on the street bikes in the later levels it’s often not enough to cause you to crash, the bike will find a way to correct itself, but doing it on an incline makes it consistently buck you off. This is mostly handy when you’re performing a reset away from the city since there aren’t any walls to crash into, trees work but you can glance off to the side or not be fast enough or even hit too fast and potentially end up too close to the road at the wrong angle and trigger the cheat fail, using the wheelie reset you can pretty consistently get the same results. I’ve only had one time where it’s failed so far, and I think that’s because I was too close to the top of the slope when The bike trued to buck me off. So if I had timed it better it likely would’ve worked. Good luck guys, I’ve been streaming every day and I’m trying to make YouTube videos with isolated tutorials on these concepts, just last night I found five new shortcuts in levels that were previously hard for me to beat consistently. I’ve only got a few more levels to find consistent ways of winning in Before I feel like a first place contender, I’m getting pretty close and I’m excited. I’m happy to share anything about what I’ve learned in this game, check me out on Twitch if you want to see some more real time discoveries. Thanks everyone.

Hi everyone, the plot continues to thicken. It’s now become apparent that Getting the game to update your position into first place and thus moving your respawn point to your current location has more to do with The angle of your bike than it does with your distance from the road. So I described how I had a breakthrough yesterday, how I got the game to update your location to first place when I would creep up to the road, but eventually I would start turning and end up more parallel to the road so that I didn’t get too close and trigger the cheat fail. It finally occurred to me that the game would update my location when I was changing angles to be more parallel with the road. So you don’t have to get as close to the road as I thought, you have to travel in the progressive direction sort of parallel to the road for a second or two within it seems like around 80 feet from the road, and then it will update you. This has made it much easier, because you don’t have to get that close to the danger zone meaning you can go much faster, in fact in certain situations, you can even get the game to update your position to first while on a trajectory into a wall or some thing else to perform a forced respawn. This makes it possible to perform forced respawns at high speed under the right conditions. ✌️

In the future I think I’ll refer to the act of getting the game to update your position to first place while also updating your respawn point as just “Performing an Update”. So I’d just say, “follow that road left until you see the flashy sign, perform an update, then a respawn.”

Hi guys, I go into more detail on these exploits on the thread “Open Season for Time Saves”