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dunnius: we can't really afford to use the word "boring". Pointing out, as you did, that it's too similar is valid though.

BTW... why don't we just sticky this thread?
If you're going to allow three difficulty settings per game, then I vote for allowing mixed difficulties in IL tables. Only show the fastest time. Because currently if you've done an IL table on easy and want to show a few levels which are faster on hard then you have to submit a whole table on hard. The fastest total time should be the fastest time regardless of difficulty, because ILs are separate entities, there's no continuation.
How about not having mixed tables, because in that case, if someone actually wanted to do hard mode/whatever ILs later, we'd have some ILs counting for both categories - instead we could simply allow incomplete tables after one whole table has been filled in. But only if the extra runs are on a higher difficulty setting and faster than those in the existing table.
Sounds good to me.
Freezard, has that kind of IL table even been discussed before or how do you know it wouldn't be accepted? Mixed difficulty is mentioned in the text as valid. Whoever wrote that might or might not have had ILs in mind, but I don't immediately see why it wouldn't apply, as long as you go for the fastest time in each level. I've also notified the other admins about your question. If they have anything else to add, I'm sure they will post here.

LotBlind, I think this particular thread so far mostly contains things covered on the rule page. I thought that once activity dropped down here, a new sticky thread could be created. It would contain a link to the rules page and then links to discussions about specific cases would be added to the thread as they appear. That could also include links to specific posts in this thread.
Hmm... yeah Duke 3D at least has mixed ILs. But still - does the next person, doing the next difficulty over, have to submit a complete table if one of the existing mixed ILs is on that difficulty? Ofc not right? I suppose otherwise every new difficulty gets treated normally, and in effect it's just that in the end the tables will have a couple of blanks where the easy difficulty runs that weren't the fastest would have been. It's kinda weird because the rest of the table is per difficulty but one column is per fastest. Maybe we could allow for slower entries on easier difficulties just to make it look neater, but then you'd have to emphasize the fastest...

well that's pretty academic I'm sure. Not a lot of games even have more than one ILs table.
I survived MIKE-Fest 1
Good job with the rule update it looks great.

I'm wondering if it would be sensible to put something in there regarding the Language that is used (or should be used) in a game as they are  difference in speed (English is most of the time shorter than German).

one option would be the fastest of curse but I would be more in favor of the most common one for that game (making it more likely more people can compete without buying the game in some other language format like french or Japanese first)
Quote from ktwo:
Freezard, has that kind of IL table even been discussed before or how do you know it wouldn't be accepted?


Yeah I've discussed it before and moooh said it wasn't allowed: https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/allow_mixed_difficulties_in_il_tables.html
Tigger, I believe the policy has more been about focusing on gameplay than text/version differences. So in a sense, there is no rule on what is and what isn't acceptable for SDA. Play on whatever version you prefer (even though I think most viewers prefer if it's played with English text, all other things equal). If that version is incomparable with other versions, it will be in its own category. If it's comparable (for example a fix time difference because of the text), the gameplay will be the determining factor for obsoletion. I guess you could in theory obsolete a run if the gameplay was improved by 10 seconds, while 20 seconds were lost because of more text in the new version. It's obviously not an ideal situation though and in practice also rare. For games with competition, people naturally tend to pick the same version as the players before them.

Freezard, thanks. I hadn't seen that thread before. I chatted with moooh about it. It was very brief though since he was just about to go on a trip for one week. I'll talk to him again when he's back. I admit that it looks a bit contradictory with that thread on one hand and the wording in the rule text that could be interpreted in a different way.
I'm somewhat late, but I still wanted to clarify the topic about mixed difficulty tables. Long story short, they're allowed for submissions, as long as they are based on "fastest time for each level". This has no impact on the rule text, as this is what's already stated in there.
Edit history:
LotBlind: 2016-06-17 07:52:22 am
LotBlind: 2016-06-17 07:38:39 am
LotBlind: 2016-06-17 07:35:27 am
So decipher this for me plz:

I want to do a trick in a run where something happens to the game state by itself after I've entered the save menu. I don't save it immediately but though I'm technically only in the menu to save, waiting a bit makes the next segment faster. Does that wait time get timed or not? If it doesn't, it kinda feels like I'm abusing the "save menu peace" runners are given so they don't have to scramble. However, seeing as segmenting there saves time, can anyone really tell me I can't do that?
Borderlands 2 Glitch Hunter/ router.
Quote from LotBlind:
So decipher this for me plz:

I want to do a trick in a run where something happens to the game state by itself after I've entered the save menu. I don't save it immediately but though I'm technically only in the menu to save, waiting a bit makes the next segment faster. Does that wait time get timed or not? If it doesn't, it kinda feels like I'm abusing the "save menu peace" runners are given so they don't have to scramble. However, seeing as segmenting there saves time, can anyone really tell me I can't do that?


Sounds like that is dependent upon how long you need to wait in the save menu for if it's like half a second or less up to maybe 5 seconds I'd waiver it off as 'Could be accounted for in the time taken to save the game anyway' if it's a larger amount of time then I would say it needs to be accounted for. Getting away with a few seconds isn't that big of a deal but if it's like 1 minute of waiting to do a 'Trick' that whole Trick process needs to be recorded whether it's in a menu or not.

(My opinion at least)
To me it's not really different from waiting during a cutscene in order to manipulate where you get placed after skipping it (this happens in Metroid Prime 1, which is measured using gametime which doesn't count cutscenes). That's pretty much indisputably OK.

OTOH, it's also a bit like pausing during load times to stop the timer running (which, IIRC, is done in some Smash Bros. games). I think that's also generally considered OK, but a lot more debatable.
Judgy: Well it's not so simple is it... what if I could split it into parts so I do multiple saves right there, waiting a few seconds each time? I realize this won't have occured too many times but I'm wondering if there's a precedent. It's like I'm cheating without really cheating... is it my fault the game doesn't pause properly?

I should mention I've since found the trick doesn't work the way I imagined, so it may not be relevant (or it might seeing how the game is). Still one day someone's gonna ask the same question.

ais523: it's not in-game time so...

BTW: I understand only Quake runs can be sent in as demos. There's no mention of demos in the rules, maybe mention it with "recording".
It's save-menu-less time, which is similar to in-game time in several ways.

Something similar happens speedrunning Neverwinter Nights. There's a single key to do a quicksave, and the entire time spent doing the quicksave is spent in a loading screen. As such, by SDA timing, making a safety save doesn't cost any time at all (it's a PC game, so loading times are removed; a good thing too, because they vary a lot between the various runners and are fairly common). I tend to safety save quite a bit as a result.
I thought safety saves would be timed in any RTA, but I see the critical point is the variance in loading (or indeed saving) times.

One argument for allowing me to do tricks like I mentioned is that I'm doing something that's similar to abusing save/loading where the result makes it look impossible or non-contiguous despite the video having been edited to look like one long thing. It's easier to just accept it categorically instead of trying to draw a line like Judgy attempted to do. I see where he's coming from of course. I mean in that case I feel you'd have to consider saving w/ such extra benefits as a separate action from saving w/o them, and time the whole thing. It's at least fairly easy to recognize when it's which case. It implies you leave the saving in the video because it's timed, but again the biggest problem might be it limits where you can segment. Seeing as this really doesn't crop up that might be acceptable?

Blimey, I think we have another dilemma at our hands with the same game - it's DosBox and the rules state you're okay to record runs on DosBox. When you do that any lag frames get ignored (I think the game-internal lag is still present or is it? I really don't quite know.) Which means if you recorded your run on an external recorder like FRAPS, doesn't that mean you're risking losing tons of time to lag that's present in the video compared to someone who did their recording on DB? Does everyone who does Dos runs use DB itself? Should we add a word of warning in the rules?
Quote from LotBlind:
BTW: I understand only Quake runs can be sent in as demos. There's no mention of demos in the rules, maybe mention it with "recording".

I think this is to go too much into detail. It's not a big deal if someone tries to submit demos. It should most of the time be possible to find a solution when that happens. I've only seen it once since I've been looking at submissions and then it got solved.

While I'm writing here, I can also say that I don't have much of an opinion on how to time the save warping. On one hand, it feels natural to me that you time actions that impact the gameplay, which in this case would mean the save menu. But I also realize it opens up a whole range of gray areas like ais mentioned. So maybe it's easiest to not make a special rule after all. Either way, if the question is directly pointed towards how it will be timed here, IsraeliRD would have to comment on it since he times all runs.
ktwo: You're right that it's not entirely relevant, but I just wanted to confirm that to myself, because I was actually entertaining the notion of recording something using demos... it's a segmented run of a PC game so loading times aren't timed right? If I could always guarantee the demo starts on the first frame after the level has loaded (and ends after I've saved) is that acceptable then or not? There's no way to tell for sure the demos aren't played with slow-down (well I mean it tends to look pretty obvious). As for the loading screens etc. we could just hack them in after.

Israeli answered the timing question by saying if such tricks are used, he'll time everything, just in case someone was curious.
Edit history:
Freezard: 2016-07-07 07:55:18 pm
If a game has an option to run in higher than 100% game speed (from menu options), then that should be preferred right? It doesn't count as another category does it?
I have a question that should be maybe put into the rules for segmentation: Are you allowed to change any in-game settings before each segment? e.g: In Driver 1, the game automatically raises traffic density by one bar in 5th mission (no idea why), but you can change it to any setting before doing a segment, which of course gives you an advantage over single-segment runs as it takes couple seconds to change it.
Freezard, I know a bunch of accepted runs have changed the game speed to get the lowest possible time, if that has been an available option in the game menu (I don't remember any names on top of my head though). I'd even be tempted to say that that would be the default category. If, for whatever reason, there would be a particular interest in not using the speed(s) that allow for the fastest time, then I guess an additional category could be created.

Ewil, it sounds like this should covered by the following (from the rule text):
Quote:
In the second case (you start a new segment from the start menu), timing will begin as soon as you activate the menu option that starts the new segment. This is generally the option that leads to a new menu with gameplay-related, and not only cosmetic, options.

I don't know how well this fits with Driver 1, but it sounds like timing should be done from the moment you activate one of the menus prior to the "traffic density menu". In any case, it would be weird not to time it in one way or the other.
Fastest speed: for my opinion (always a valuable one!) I think only games that have the fastest speed be completely unplayable or if it's "unbound" should have it be disallowed, and otherwise... yeah it only makes sense if you're allowed to use those settings as much as you like in the spirit of true speedrunning. Some early Police Quest games have it "unbound" but maybe DosBox bounds it in some cases? AIR the runner in the end ended up not using that speed. I'd imagine only a very select few games are interesting enough to run both sped up and slowed down (e.g. to optimize for in-game time), but I can see them existing, because there may be strats that "wear down" the mission in a trivial way that win faster because of being safe to keep the speed to the max, and other - more interesting and skill-based - strats for doing it normal-speed.

Jetpack is an example of a game where the speed controls are accessible at all times. The very fastest speed in unbound so the TAS went with the second fastest one. In real-time running, I'd like to say you just use all of them (if it's fair) or any but the fastest throughout your run.
Quote:
In the second case (you start a new segment from the start menu), timing will begin as soon as you activate the menu option that starts the new segment. This is generally the option that leads to a new menu with gameplay-related, and not only cosmetic, options.

Quote:
I don't know how well this fits with Driver 1, but it sounds like timing should be done from the moment you activate one of the menus prior to the "traffic density menu". In any case, it would be weird not to time it in one way or the other.


The idea is to do segment no. 1, where the game changes the traffic density to 1 bar. Then go to options, change it back to 0 bar, then do segment no. 2

As I undertand it, timing will begin as soon as you activate the menu option that starts the new segment should be load menu, not options menu. I'm not trying to argue which one is correct, I'd just like to know if I can change the setting back, or not.

Btw, my Tomb Raider 4 run (http://speeddemosarchive.com/TombRaider4.html) here on SDA changes aiming mode in options just for one segment and it is neither recorded nor timed. There's probably a few more games around that "abuse" this as well.
Edit history:
Freezard: 2016-07-09 02:07:18 pm
The game I'm thinking of is Duke Nukem Forever where you can run the game in 200% speed after beating the game on normal. But I also noticed you can speed up the new Ratchet & Clank once you've collected enough gold bolts. I guess in the R&C case it would be slower to collect the required bolts in a normal run though so it would only be useful in new game+.

Also, how are the rules for reloading checkpoints to save time (as seen in many games probably, but for example the segmented Borderlands run abuses it a lot)? Is it also allowed in single-segmented and ILs?
Quote from Freezard:
Also, how are the rules for reloading checkpoints to save time (as seen in many games probably, but for example the segmented Borderlands run abuses it a lot)? Is it also allowed in single-segmented and ILs?

This rule should apply here:
Quote from Knowledge Base:
Single segment with resets: You are allowed to save and resume in a single segment run as long as it is part of the same game session. This will add the with resets tag to your run.

If loading checkpoints is saving time, then it's obviously improving the speedrun quality and should be encouraged in a SS (if it's one session).

About game speed:
In my opinion there should be different categories. I might be mixing apples with oranges here, because this is not directly about game speed but different difficulty, but when I think of some Mario Kart games, there are runs in the lower 150cc categories although 200cc/250cc are available and faster.