Spelunky - May 6th, 2013

2013-05-06 04:19:39 pm

1-Up!

Game Page: http://speeddemosarchive.com/Spelunky.html

Spelunky (Any %) (Single Segment)

Verifier Responses

Quote:

A/V good, no cheating. Very nice run, gonna be hard to get any better. Sure it wasn't perfect, but as the runner states, you can't really get perfect in a random game like this. And it's faster than the current SDA run. Accept! Time is indeed 2:30.

Quote:

A/V is good, can't see any signs of cheating, although the whole bomb taking away the platform from the Olmec fight is very strange, I've never seen something like that happen before, but since it's seems like nothing more than a graphical glitch, I won't complain. Mein Gott, this one hell of a lucky run, I can't imagine how many restarts he must have done to get it, as apart from the the 'dead are restless' feelie, the runner has an immense amount of luck that beggars belief, specially in the temple area.

Less than a handful of mistakes throughout, including a bizarre hesitation right at the start, but apart from that, it's a solid run, well played throughout, and enjoyable to watch. It's also a huge improvement over the current run (23 seconds on a 2 and half minute run!), so I won't hesitate on Accept.

Quote:

This is why you should always reset a run over silly mistakes in the beginning. You'll always regret having something like that in what might turn out be the final run. Anyways the runner will know the feeling for the next time Smiley

Audio and video looks good indeed.
Pretty much all of the worlds had the best layouts you could ask for. Fast cave doors. Very quick jungle paths (apart from the event level). Pretty standard ice caverns (but then again, most of the non-event ice cavern layouts are standard). Sweet temple with 2 out of 3 fastest layout and the third being the second best kind. This run definitely made up in terms of luck.

I get the feeling the runner could have spammed jump instead of attack during level switches (or just learned exactly when to press to skip the cutscene) which would have let him start off just a tiny bit earlier in each stage.
Since the olmec mattock strategy is probably going to be way too unreliable for a run already so dependent on luck I guess the only big time saver would be to maybe get both a jetpack and a compass in the same shop, although right now I can't remember if that's a combo that can actually appear. The cost for also stealing a compass would be around 3-4 seconds but the time saved in the ice cavern could make up for that by a few more.

All in all this run is faster than the current run and we're unlikely to see this good luck in awhile so this is definitely an accept from me.
I might be attempting to beat this time at some point but I don't know if I'll have the patience for the neccessary luck yet Smiley

Quote:

A/V quality is good.

Run comments: RNGod. Accept. Congratulations!

My advice to the runner: speedrun games that aren't pure RNG and last longer than 5 minutes and you'll probably enjoy speed gaming a lot more.

Decision: Accept

Congratulations to Barry 'Zohma' Anders!

Thread title:

Game Page: http://speeddemosarchive.com/Spelunky.html

Spelunky (Any %) (Single Segment)

[b]Verifier Responses[/b]

[quote]A/V good, no cheating. Very nice run, gonna be hard to get any better. Sure it wasn't perfect, but as the runner states, you can't really get perfect in a random game like this. And it's faster than the current SDA run. Accept! Time is indeed 2:30.[/quote]

[quote]A/V is good, can't see any signs of cheating, although the whole bomb taking away the platform from the Olmec fight is very strange, I've never seen something like that happen before, but since it's seems like nothing more than a graphical glitch, I won't complain. Mein Gott, this one hell of a lucky run, I can't imagine how many restarts he must have done to get it, as apart from the the 'dead are restless' feelie, the runner has an immense amount of luck that beggars belief, specially in the temple area.

Less than a handful of mistakes throughout, including a bizarre hesitation right at the start, but apart from that, it's a solid run, well played throughout, and enjoyable to watch. It's also a huge improvement over the current run (23 seconds on a 2 and half minute run!), so I won't hesitate on Accept.[/quote]

[quote]This is why you should always reset a run over silly mistakes in the beginning. You'll always regret having something like that in what might turn out be the final run. Anyways the runner will know the feeling for the next time :)

Audio and video looks good indeed.
Pretty much all of the worlds had the best layouts you could ask for. Fast cave doors. Very quick jungle paths (apart from the event level). Pretty standard ice caverns (but then again, most of the non-event ice cavern layouts are standard). Sweet temple with 2 out of 3 fastest layout and the third being the second best kind. This run definitely made up in terms of luck.

I get the feeling the runner could have spammed jump instead of attack during level switches (or just learned exactly when to press to skip the cutscene) which would have let him start off just a tiny bit earlier in each stage.
Since the olmec mattock strategy is probably going to be way too unreliable for a run already so dependent on luck I guess the only big time saver would be to maybe get both a jetpack and a compass in the same shop, although right now I can't remember if that's a combo that can actually appear. The cost for also stealing a compass would be around 3-4 seconds but the time saved in the ice cavern could make up for that by a few more.

All in all this run is faster than the current run and we're unlikely to see this good luck in awhile so this is definitely an accept from me.
I might be attempting to beat this time at some point but I don't know if I'll have the patience for the neccessary luck yet :)[/quote]

[quote]A/V quality is good.

Run comments: RNGod. Accept. Congratulations!

My advice to the runner: speedrun games that aren't pure RNG and last longer than 5 minutes and you'll probably enjoy speed gaming a lot more.[/quote]

[b]Decision:[/b] Accept

Congratulations to Barry 'Zohma' Anders!

Zohma

2013-05-07 09:53:25 pm

This is great reading all of your comments! I'm excited that this has been such a smooth process and that you have accepted my first run. I'll definitely take into consideration your pointers and I think that if I ever do another speed run, it will certainly be something a little longer than 5 minutes.

Thank you all for verifying.

garebear

Edit history:

garebear: 2021-09-22 03:31:02 pm

garebear: 2021-09-22 03:00:55 pm

2021-09-22 02:59:29 pm

The community has discovered that this run was in fact cheated. It uses a mod called Saveable Spelunky that allows you to load and replay levels as many times as you'd like. The basis of this claim is that every level transition (besides the first one) has a tile missing in the top left corner. While this may not seem like a big thing there is no other video that has this issue. This is also not a visual artifact because the tile below it is decorated which wouldn't be the case unless the tile was deleted for some reason. The level transitions are 7 static files and there is no code that would ever delete this tile.

We've spent a lot of time reviewing the code from the game. One thing that is suspicious is there are two objects in the first two tiles that control level behavior. Because of this we suspected that someone added a new object in the 3rd place that changed game behavior and accidentally replaced the tile instead of placing it on top of the tile.

Today it was discovered that there is in fact a mod that behaves exactly this way called Saveable Spelunky. It adds a new object called `oSave` in that third position and it did replace the third tile rather than just being placed over the tile.

Given this evidence we think this run should be removed from http://speeddemosarchive.com/Spelunky.html

The community has discovered that this run was in fact cheated. It uses a mod called Saveable Spelunky that allows you to load and replay levels as many times as you'd like. The basis of this claim is that every level transition (besides the first one) has a tile missing in the top left corner. While this may not seem like a big thing there is no other video that has this issue. This is also not a visual artifact because the tile below it is decorated which wouldn't be the case unless the tile was deleted for some reason. The level transitions are 7 static files and there is no code that would ever delete this tile.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/Pbv7uvB.png[/img]

We've spent a lot of time reviewing the code from the game. One thing that is suspicious is there are two objects in the first two tiles that control level behavior. Because of this we suspected that someone added a new object in the 3rd place that changed game behavior and accidentally replaced the tile instead of placing it on top of the tile.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/6tCU2QX.png[/img]

Today it was discovered that there is in fact a mod that behaves exactly this way called Saveable Spelunky. It adds a new object called `oSave` in that third position and it did replace the third tile rather than just being placed over the tile.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/Cywft4i.png[/img]

Given this evidence we think this run should be removed from http://speeddemosarchive.com/Spelunky.html

ktwo

Edit history:

ktwo: 2021-09-23 08:19:34 am

ktwo: 2021-09-23 08:19:28 am

2021-09-23 08:08:29 am

Thanks for sharing the information. Zohma has been invited to comment on this issue. Since the run was submitted many years ago, it's maybe unlikely that they will show up, but now they've at least been given the chance. Let's also give them a few days to see the message and before any action is decided upon.

For the sake of reference, is there a more detailed discussion about this somewhere else that can be linked to?

garebear

2021-09-23 08:59:30 am

This was all discussed and discovered in our Discord server (discord.gg/spelunky-community) in the #classic-discussion channel, but I believe a more thorough write-up is happening. The key give-away of the run is the missing 3rd tile in the level transition. We've often been suspicious of the run for a number of reasons:

The time still hasn't been beat by world class runners and this is the only run every submit by Barry. It's impossibly good despite them making bad level reads that a Spelunky runner would never make. The third tile which isn't missing on any other run and the code shows no reason it would ever be missing.

The last 2 days we made a push to finally resolve this issue because a community running got a new legitimate world record of 2m40s, beating the previous legitimate world record of 2m53s and we felt they deserved to be rightfully recognized as the legitimate world record holder. It was only yesterday that we finally found the mod (http://web.archive.org/web/20201001121901/http://mossmouth.com/forums/index.php?topic=2308.0) in question via the Wayback Machine (the original forums for classic are now defunct) and we found that this mod did in fact remove the third tile from the transition.

This was all discussed and discovered in our Discord server (discord.gg/spelunky-community) in the #classic-discussion channel, but I believe a more thorough write-up is happening. The key give-away of the run is the missing 3rd tile in the level transition. We've often been suspicious of the run for a number of reasons:

The time still hasn't been beat by world class runners and this is the only run every submit by Barry. It's impossibly good despite them making bad level reads that a Spelunky runner would never make. The third tile which isn't missing on any other run and the code shows no reason it would ever be missing.

The last 2 days we made a push to finally resolve this issue because a community running got a new legitimate world record of 2m40s, beating the previous legitimate world record of 2m53s and we felt they deserved to be rightfully recognized as the legitimate world record holder. It was only yesterday that we finally found the mod (http://web.archive.org/web/20201001121901/http://mossmouth.com/forums/index.php?topic=2308.0) in question via the Wayback Machine (the original forums for classic are now defunct) and we found that this mod did in fact remove the third tile from the transition.

garebear

2021-09-23 09:21:27 am

To be absolutely explicit:

The code for spelunky classic 1.1 is available and the level transitions are 100% hardcoded. There is no way for that tile to be missing in a vanilla copy of the game. Because of this we've known the run to be illegitimate for some time but didn't have evidence by which mechanism they cheated. It was only when we discovered the mod yesterday that it became crystal clear. The mod added a new game object called `oSave` that was placed into the 3rd position. The author of the mod made a mistake, replacing the tile, when they placed the object. This object adds a key handler for loading/saving the game during the level transition.

The result is you can keep trying levels until you get a good one. So you run a level, if it's good you save, if it's bad you load back to the previous level transition. You can keep re-loading until you have a great segmented run. A couple people from the community tested the mod and were able to get times close to this cheated run within 15m of attempts.

To be absolutely explicit:

The code for spelunky classic 1.1 is available and the level transitions are 100% hardcoded. There is no way for that tile to be missing in a vanilla copy of the game. Because of this we've known the run to be illegitimate for some time but didn't have evidence by which mechanism they cheated. It was only when we discovered the mod yesterday that it became crystal clear. The mod added a new game object called `oSave` that was placed into the 3rd position. The author of the mod made a mistake, replacing the tile, when they placed the object. This object adds a key handler for loading/saving the game during the level transition.

The result is you can keep trying levels until you get a good one. So you run a level, if it's good you save, if it's bad you load back to the previous level transition. You can keep re-loading until you have a great segmented run. A couple people from the community tested the mod and were able to get times close to this cheated run within 15m of attempts.

ktwo

2021-09-23 11:59:28 am

Thanks again for the explanation. Yes, I don't see much room for misunderstandings here, but we'll still wait a few days before proceeding with removing the run in the event Zohma shows up.

ktwo

2021-09-27 01:24:42 pm

Zohma's run has been removed and the previous SDA-run (2:53 by ExplodingCabbage) has been re-instated on the game page. This was Zohma's only run on SDA, so no other runs are impacted.

garebear

2021-09-27 01:59:00 pm

Thanks ktwo! I appreciate updating the site to reflect the legitimate record.

garebear

2021-09-29 09:22:14 am

Final update here is BarryMode/Zohma has updated their video to in fact state it was a segmented run. Again I appreciate you spending the time to update such an old record so we can have a accurate history of accomplishments for Spelunky Classic.