I've been looking into doing One Must Fall 2097, which works now that the DOS extender crap has been figured out. If you're not familiar with it, it's a highly customizable fighting game with giant robots. The problem with the amount of customizability is that it's tough to nail down a good standard for how to set it up. I'm looking for feedback on a few things. The only reference I have is the
speedrun.com page, in which they've recently taken interest in the game and set up some standards (some I agree with, some I don't)
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Game speed: I think I have this one about figured out, but feedback is welcome anyway. OMF2097 is highly influenced by CPU speed - just go into DOSBox and play around with cycles to see how extreme it is. I did a test run at the default CPU divider and found it to be a little too fast for my liking. The speedrun community has a standard of 14500 cycles in DOSBox, which seems to be a good watching speed. I used a DOS benchmarking utility in DOSBox with their configuration and then fiddled with the CPU divider in JPC-rr until I matched the DOSBox benchmark. The game now runs at about the same speed as the other speedruns, but if you have a different opinion on this let me know.
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Difficulty: The community uses Champion difficulty, which is the highest you can set it without codes. However, there are button combinations that can unlock higher difficulties. The submission rules say that this is allowed so I'm leaning towards doing the highest unlockable difficulty.
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Number of rounds: The community uses the "best of 3" format. I think that's kind of arbitrary, other than being the default setting. Since this is a speedrun I think it makes sense to just do one round per fight.
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Nova: Nova is an uber-robot that would obviously be the fastest robot to use, but it's only unlockable via a code in the selection screen. I'm leaning towards not using this, at least not in a standard any% run.
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Advanced options: There is a special options screen that you can access either through a command line parameter or via a code in the main menu. I don't know if this is permissible or not, it would be nice to have a judge weigh in on this. If it's allowed, there are a few settings in here that would shorten fights, such as lowering everyone's vitality and allowing for some damage to pass through blocks. These settings are designed to not cheapen the game too much (for example, vitality can only be set as low as 80%, not 1% or something stupid), but I still don't know if tinkering with the game parameters like this would be allowed.
So you can see there's a lot to think about. Any feedback would be appreciated, even from people who have never played this game before.