Earlier today, I had a cup of coffee for the first time in a few days and then shortly after was asked by my friend Laurel Weaver on Twitter what I thought about a topic that recently came up in the Undertale speedrunning community (which were comparable to an earlier issue that came up during my tenure as a Minecraft speedrun moderator).
I replied with a loosely organized thread of my thoughts on the topic, which I thought was at least an interesting enough collection of thoughts to not leave buried in Twitter replies forever.11 wow this sentence uses the word “thought” way too many times So, some thoughts on external tools in speedrunning and related topics:
i think undertale's is a simpler issue, though i am somewhat less familiar with the range of related topics in undertale than in minecraft. for initial context, my understanding is that a program has been made which takes a screenshot of some wiggling letters before the start of the run and monster dust particles later in the run, and uses this to deduce the RNG seed. i've also seen some mentions of another older, similar strategy involving a reload that i'm not so familiar with but which i infer you can probably see in modern neutral and pacifist records?22 it’s ten minutes into either category
the "the runner clicks the white pixels" thing seems to me to be a weird consequence of the current formal rules, moreso than an essential consequence of the facts the universe has handed us. it's possible there are some people who see the clicking white pixels thing and think "yes, this specific step being required is actually pretty much in line with my intuition about what sorts of external programs are legitimate", but to me it seems more like a consequence of an attempt to drop a line in the sand between competing intuitions about what sorts of external programs are legitimate.
with that out of the way: there's a sort of spectrum you can draw between people who have strong a priori intuitions about what sorts of things are permissible in speedrunning, and people who just kinda want to make whatever rules would result in the speedrun having the properties they want. sometimes i say things like "the super mario bros. 1 any% record is 2:30", which is slightly a joke but also because philosophically i feel that minus world ending (or if you really want to get into the weeds, the category which permits but does not require using the minus world ending) has a more legitimate claim to the "any%" title than the category which is more conventionally known as "any%". similarly, the undertale any% record is 5:48. and niche but close to my heart, i am not especially fond of the practice of referring to super mario 63's "no level designer preserve" category as any%, though i do see what's unsatisfying in referring to the most popular category which had been rightfully called "any%" for so long as "no LDP". and i legitimately would not go so far as to say people ought interpret an unspecified reference to "100%" as meaning "100% LDP", the category no one has even fully routed yet—but that is perhaps somewhat unprincipled of me to a degree, i do think there is a sense in which 100% LDP is the true 100% category, in that No LDP has an additional restriction beyond requiring you to 100% the game. that is to say, i do have sympathies to the "a priori reasoning about how speedruns ought to work" side.
before the calculator argument and before dream minecraft,33 arguably during, now that i’ve actually checked there was the gamma 5 debacle. throughout the history of minecraft speedrunning—well, the japanese runners were always very purist, they thought runs didn't count unless they were on hardcore and i think they often banned F3 and such. but in the west, it's been the practice of many runners to modify their game settings file outside the game to set their gamma value (called "brightness" in the in-game graphics settings) to a value larger than the maximum of 1.0, allowing greater visibility in dark areas. the first instance of this i can recall is sethbling, who spurned the regulations laid down by the now little-known SMA mcsr elders and ran a category he named "any% fixed seed glitchless (+gamma)", or something along those lines. that incident was quite a long time ago, and i don't quite remember if the moderators just gave into sethbling's preferences or what. but at some point increased gamma settings were legalized, and we tried to walk that back. which was controversial, and has informed my opinion on how speedrun rulesets ought to be made. i still think banning gamma above 1.0 is basically correct on the merits. but it's fundamentally not that big a deal, and even slight inconveniences can be kinda annoying to runners. i learned some pragmatism from this. it can on occasion be okay to just like make an arbitrary exception if that's what the community wants, especially if it can be defined very explicitly as something like "gamma up to 5.0 is fine"44 “Explicit” was maybe insufficient explanation here. I meant something like “unambiguous” or “lacking room for much question as to how it should be interpreted.”
(Here's a video I made around that time, trying to help address concerns from runners that their Twitch streams might look worse on Gamma 1.0.)
to bring it back to the present discussion—my attitude is basically "if there's a clear consensus among undertale runners that they don't want to deal with this weird tool, eh, fine." my general attitude is that external tools are all basically okay. i think this has been my attitude ever since i saw the old (now obsolete due to a new skip) furnace fun solver in banjo kazooie and it didn't even occur to me that someone might find it objectionable. "actually just cracking the seed" in minecraft RSG makes sense to ban, it is a category specifically about the random seed. but if minecraft had no set seed function, i would want to allow seed cracking in any% (though of course a category split would make sense). i think some people run a category called "scout and route" which is sort of close to what that might be like, except that i think they use /seed and the routing is given a time limit but does not contribute to the runtime (iirc). (there are concerns here about "what does it even mean to crack a seed?" that are relevant, here. does it count if i only figure out the first 48 bits of the seed or something? how close is divination to the line, exactly, when that basically runs off of summary statistics about the set of seeds compatible with a particular observation? i do think i have to admit that this is more a theoretical rules inelegance that weighs on me than a real practical concern, but... i legitimately have no idea how i'd adjudicate it if enough people other than the brilliant matthew bolan were investigating these sorts of things that i had to start actually worrying about horrible edge cases) so i look at undertale and im kinda like "well i fundamentally feel like this ought to be legal and to me personally it seems like it just makes the run better, having the option to waste some time in order to try for a 1/30 chance of getting dogi skip is kinda silly" but if people don't like it and are sure they aren't just generally bothered by changes to the speedrun, then... seems basically fine
the issue with the minecraft calculator is this: what even is a calculator. is people ctrl+fing through gigantic unwieldy spreadsheets the sort of thing it seems permissible to ban? my attitude at the time was like, "well, it's entirely unconscionable to ban physical notes on paper. a simple spreadsheet, too, is fine. and we can't just put a limit on the size of the spreadsheet, that's silly." but this results in people using spreadsheets that are practically calculators unto themselves, just operated ever so slightly more manually than a calculator calculator. and that just seems really silly? like, what, is minecraft speedrunning supposed to be all about spreadsheet juggling? that's absurd.
nowadays i look at my original stance with a little more skepticism. like, i do basically agree with it still? but, i don't know, maybe you can suck it up a little. spreadsheets are kinda just fancy notes, but... you CAN actually just Ban Big Notes, even if you think Big Notes are just a type of notes and notes generally are clearly fine. even if you'd need to arbitrarily define "Big". it's ugly, inelegant, gross, but... i have seen how slippery the slope can get, and come to better appreciate the views of people who don't like the "external programs are totally fine (except when they crack minecraft's seed, whatever that means)" viewpoint, and i would be a little more willing to drop down an unsightly little fence on that slope. i'd still personally rather not, but i now find it an acceptable option depending on the overall attitude of the community towards the slope
i sort of don't expect the fate of the minecraft calculator to come to undertale, if they go the route of banning certain sorts of programs. the slope in minecraft is especially slippery. the fundamental thing they wanted to ban, in its simplest form, did nothing but run a couple trig functions. you legitimately could replace it with a literal TI-86 or whatever, the minimal viable product can be reasonably made in literally like two lines of code. so my guess is undertale does not suffer the same fate, and it needn't be worried overmuch about. part of me feels uncomfortable, relying on these relatively circumstantial factors that wouldn't hold up to a concerted effort to optimize runs within the grey areas of the rules, but i do have to admit it's more of a theoretical robustness concerns than a concrete pragmatic fear
wow this sentence uses the word “thought” way too many times
“Explicit” was maybe insufficient explanation here. I meant something like “unambiguous” or “lacking room for much question as to how it should be interpreted.”
