[sonicandamy]

Sonicspeedruner you posted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfQAvHdtP9U this is obviously cropped gameplay as that is not how the game would appear on a TV the ring icon is cut off on your TV and you may actually have multiple fake times cuz on the same TV you have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3pMfbrSDUE boss fights were the ring and the "T" is less cropped out and also no audio randomly on this one lol GG cheater. (seriously look more into this guy)

Nicur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE3r4LDbghE Is correct me if im wrong also emulator and is against the rules (believe this was a genuine mistake uploading to the boards)

R3FR4G https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIeODuVI-Vo SUPER OBVIOUS emulator/modded the health bar starts blinking on chaos. this is also against the rules, would love to see that strat implemented in a gamecube run though. (genuine mistake upload... probably)

[SpanielWare]

I'm not an expert on this game, but are you sure Niczur and R3FR4G aren't playing the PC version (I don't recall a rule against purely cosmetic mods for this game)? If not, then yeah it would be interesting to see footage of these runs replicated on the PC version or on console (and at least key input files for the emulator runs to verify legitimacy).

I feel like you may be jumping the gun a bit on Sonicspeedruner however; simply having the TV muted or on a different picture setting between recordings isn't much grounds to call BS lol. But again, it would be good to see some clearer videos if possible, for comparison's sake.

[sonicandamy]

My bad, I ment to put this here https://youtu.be/IT7-8WLgdgc as reference on how shitty the game is suppose to look.

I believe I remember like 15 years ago when we was talking sonic generations we all agreed that even cosmetic mods were banned too; had to be a completely clean game, this is serious buisness in a professional setting not a beauty pageant for sonic. Niczur actually looks the closest to legit and how its suppose to look, but idk what going on with everyones jacked up aspect ratios??? these arent clean.

im going back through the charts to clean this stuff up since TSC gona be poppin again like 2008 with sonic origins and sonic frontiers.

*** EDIT *** as far as speedrunner is concerned go look at that video thats muted. whats going on? look at the room. first clip its just his box... maybe a dvr box? 2nd clip theres now a stick of deodorant on the dvr box like he just started gettin sweaty from makin fake runs,  3rd clip the direction of the deodorant has changed? 4th clip the camera is zoomed in and the deodorant is gone from the view 5th clip its zoomed back out and the deodorant is clearly gone... bro wth.

its 2020 by this point, why you gota make such sus videos?!? xD

[SpanielWare]

I stand corrected; I searched the forum and saw a post from Parax stating that cosmetic mods were banned for all games, falling under the umbrella rule "The original game and all its contents must be preserved and unmodified" (imo the general competition rules should be updated to more clearly reflect this). I don't think that the "professional look" of the game is important so much as the potentiality of a mod side affecting gameplay mechanics.

I agree that ideally players should not fuck with display settings and such that obscure the default look of the game, albeit in Sonicspeedruner's case it seems rather negligible to jump at calling BS (and as for the deodorant positioning, I think we can take off the detective cap and conclude the most likely explanation is that he uses his bedroom for things other than vidya).

[stellar]

idk anything about sonicspeedruner but niczur and refrag are both using the 2004 pc disk release of sadx, as the steam release is awful and borderline unusable. since the 2004 version is a legal, first-party port, it's legal for the boards. also it can support really high resolutions natively, which is unmodified.

[SpanielWare]

Thanks very much for chiming in, yeah I suspected they may just be playing the original PC version.

That just leaves Sonicspeedruner to investigate but I'm not convinced of any foul play here. He's got a lot of other Sonic runs on his channel (also of SA2B and Heroes) going back almost a decade, all awkwardly camera-recorded on the same TV, you can see the gradual improvement and they seem legit.

[sonicandamy]

Thanks very much for chiming in, yeah I suspected they may just be playing the original PC version.

That just leaves Sonicspeedruner to investigate but I'm not convinced of any foul play here. He's got a lot of other Sonic runs on his channel (also of SA2B and Heroes) going back almost a decade, all awkwardly camera-recorded on the same TV, you can see the gradual improvement and they seem legit.

Not quite, thats not how this works. If you are to believe both of them are using the 2004 PC release then check again here: niczur https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gE3r4LDbghE look at his HUD closer if the randoms statement is correct than he is using a closer accurate version perfect right? ok now check refrag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIeODuVI-Vo apparently using the same version of the game as the random user said but his HUD is MUCH smaller, thats not possible (plus the health bar is still blinkin man... lol).

"at least 1" has to be bullshit in this situation. let alone speedrunner at this piont

[SpanielWare]

Okay, well Stellar, do you know if the proportional HUD size changes depending on the native resolution setting? Seems like (as evidenced by the health bar) R3FR4G is using at least a cosmetic mod though which is sus; again it would be interesting to see if this strat can be replicated on the vanilla version (the others' and your time is very close at least).

Well, Niczur last logged in 3 days ago at the time of writing (so if you're reading this dude, we'd appreciate if you could shed some light on this too and explain what config you used). R3FR4G hasn't logged in in a year and a half however, so you'll have to try contact him via YouTube or Twitch (on which he's still actively doing SADX runs).

[Zurggriff]

The video in question for Sonicspeedrunner looks like the game was displayed on a TV. The camera noticably adjusts to the brightness of the display as seen by the area outside of the display changing brightness. When the display is showing gameplay, the luminosity is high so the camera reduces the amount of light it receives to prevent the display from showing as overexposed and the wall appears dark as a consequence of this. When the display is blank, luminosity is low so the camera increases the amount of light it receives which makes the wall appear brighter. There are stretches of video where screen tearing is visible and the tear is sloped. The display has color bands that appear to bend along a curved display. There is a reflection of a light on the display, which would need to be overlayed if the gameplay was cropped. These effects show up in their other videos with various camera angles and room lighting. Using cropped gameplay would require an unreasonable amount of editing to make all of this work.

I do not have the 2004 PC release and cannot find how higher resolutions affect the HUD, but the blinking health bar in R3FR4G's requires a modification to the game which is not allowed under the Competition Rules 'The original game and all its contents must be preserved and unmodified.' I did not find any exceptions.

Niczur's run appears to be fine.

[SpanielWare]

Thanks for the detailed analysis Zurggriff. I agree Sonicspeedruner's videos look too realistically filmed to be meticulously hoaxed.

Well Niczur was last active on the site yesterday, so he's still lurking but hasn't weighed in on this. I suppose he should replace his stats (and ideally videos for them) performed on a modded version of the game with ones performed on a vanilla version?

[drminus]

Weighing in on this being an 8-year speedrunner of SADX. You got a few things wrong in the OP.

Sonicspeedrunner plays on gamecube and records with a cell phone or camera as far as I know, the crop may have been done in editing. I do not think cropping or audio cut outs automatically constitute cheating.

Niczur and Refrag both play on PC Disk and not an emulator. Emulated play is extremely easy to tell as it looks like the Gamecube version. The PC Disk version has many notable visual differences to the Gamecube version.

As for Refrags blinking health bar, I have not encountered that on the PC Disk version. It is a pretty janky programmed game though and I wouldn't be surprised if that was a result of something in the vanilla game. It is designed for DirectX 7 (so early WinXP era?) and is highly likely being ran on Win10 for both competitors. The OS the game was designed for is fundamentally different than the one that users are currently on. However this is speculation and does not definitively explain this. With the PC Disk version you may have to take into account the graphics card, driver version, etc.

I feel that it is up to the runners to weigh in but I highly doubt they will turn their attention to this as they have little to no incentive to do so. I do not think the original allegation is enough grounds for further scrutiny, though.

[CoEmpathy]

I have taken a screenshot from my own copy of SADX in 1920x1080 to show the similarities to Refragg's run's HUD



The HUD of the game is noticeably affected in the same way as in Refragg's run, he just has the game resolution upscaled, as for the blinking health bar, this likely happens for the exact reason DrMinus mentioned. Though I can't prove that one way or another as I obviously do not run the same setup as Refragg.

As for Niczur, he's just clearly running SADX's PC disc version on the default resolution of 640x480, and nothing is strange about his run in the slightest. There are hundreds of ILs and single segment runs of SADX on the PC disc version on youtube, twitch, and speedrun.com you can compare it to and it's pretty clearly that version.

As for why neither of them have replied to this thread, it's honestly pretty simple. TSC's forums are not a relevant portion of the sonic speedrunning community and have not been such for many years, while the TSC stat pages themselves maintain some niche use from modern runners, these forums are easily ignorable and Refragg and Niczur could be wholly unaware of this thread ever existing.

On top of that, Refragg and Niczur have been well-trusted runners and even moderators of the SADX community on speedrun.com and discord for multiple years now. They have also been top level runners for over half a decade. They've been in position to be caught and scrutinized as cheaters for this whole time, and nothing has come to light about these runners playing their runs on emulator. These exact runs have even been submitted to speedrun.com, and clearly would've been caught by their moderators, who are highly knowledgeable in the game themselves and would be a good authority on whether or not someone is cheating, and neither were rejected when they were submitted.

[Sonicspeedruner]

Lol no I never cheated or forged any times I was in middle school/high school at the time and would record with the first Gen iPad tapped to a cardboard pole pointed at a box tv its was janky to say the least. I have zero knowledge of how to even use a pc to run the game never mind cheat at it  pretty sure I still have this file and would be happy to show screenshots of the times to prove ya wrong tho lol all love y’all!

[R3FR4G]

Hello gamers, i did not know this thread was a thing but here's what i have to say about my runs.
The blinking health bar is a result of pressing A X B Y at the same time, quite a funky bug and i literally just do it to the rythm of the music cuz it's funny.
As for résolution / aspect ratio, yep, it is not really standard although, this is just using the mod manager's graphics tab options, im gonna be honest i have absolutely no idea what the rules on tsc are for submitting nor do i care, if yall think this shouldn't be on tsc, so be it.
Anyway, there is 1 full amy story run that i have cheated on in the past and i have come clear about it multiple times previously, probably somewhere in the sonic adventure speedrunning discord / ssc discord / maybe somewhere else i can't remember.

Okay now as for niczur and sonicspeedrunner, i think i can very safely say that there is no cheating going on at all, they have been very respected runners spending hundred of hours in the game. Niczur is not playing on emu but rather 2004 PC with the mod manager and following mostly the speedrun.com rules and come on, sonicspeedrunners runs go pretty far back, he didn't have the best recording equipment sure but faking these runs would have been way too big of a task to even be a possibility

[SpanielWare]

Thank you for all of your contributions guys, think it's safe to say no one is cheating here and we can move on. sonicandamy, please don't call BS on people unless you actually have reasonable suspicion and evidence of foul play lol.

R3FR4G, I don't think there's any need to pedantically remove your stats from the charts that were obtained with only graphic/cosmetic game mods, as there is no evidence that said mods actually affect gameplay mechanics.

[sonicandamy]

Thank you for all of your contributions guys, think it's safe to say no one is cheating here and we can move on. sonicandamy, please don't call BS on people unless you actually have reasonable suspicion and evidence of foul play lol.

R3FR4G, I don't think there's any need to pedantically remove your stats from the charts that were obtained with only graphic/cosmetic game mods, as there is no evidence that said mods actually affect gameplay mechanics.

are you kidding me? R3FR4G admitted to mods and also admitted to not knowing the submission rules (it only takes one of them) and ((by the rules is not allowed)), we all agreed long ago that graphics/cosmetics can alter time because of how soniccenter tracks times  it in fact can be possible to alter in game even with a simple cosmetic mod ... even by milliseconds which in a sonic game is HUGE.

dont get me wrong im not trying to demonize anyone, I want R3FR4G to TRULEY GET THE TIME he submited to TSC, do the run AGAIN world record this time with no mods. lets see it.

for the record I believe I could easily get a 57:95 with the same mods though.

Edit: I believe Speedrunners "run" appeal, as my first IL's ever where filmed this way, but with a nokia phone instead of an ipad1

[drminus]

You know what? Screw it.

There is recent history on this forum of you going after runners who have a faster time of you, accusing them of cheating so maybe, just maybe, you can weasel your way into getting world record on something. There is no coincidence you specifically went after the three runners who were above you in the standings. There is another thread of you doing the exact same thing to RingRush.

Your accusations were completely baseless for every single person and cherry-picked so that you could get ahead. You even completely failed to realize that SADX had a PC release, in fact multiple PC releases. Perhaps you should learn a little bit more about the game before accusing people of cheating for no reason. As in, something as basic as knowing the existing versions of the game.

The only reason more came out about how these times were done is because people decided to be nice, but I'm tired of trying. Consider yourself lucky that you actually found out anything.

You don't even have video proof of your own time, in an age where cell phones are plentiful and can record video and any toaster of a PC made in the last 15 years can run SADX and record. So I have no idea whether you even got your time or not, and for your standards that's enough to constitute cheating.

Furthermore, you recently created an account to dodge a ban on your OPs account, asking for the regular account to be unbanned. This is generally against this site's rules. I am pointing this out because you are clearly privy to breaking rules yourself.

If you actually want a world record, get a better time and stop doing this bullshit.