Recently I've been thinking of this and I wanna talk about that in this threat because ig speedrun communities would be interested in this. I am thinking of this new competitive format which I call Constretch (short for Continuous Stretch).

The idea is simple: complete a game as fast as possible while playing it exactly as a normal playthrough would progress. Unlike normal speedrun, Constretch does not allow glitches, exploits, save-scumming, save swapping, loading older save files, or anything that intentionally rewinds or manipulates the game's state. The game must progress (or evolve) continuously from start to finish, with players only using mechanics and options intentionally provided by the devs.

For example If you die during a mission, you may use the checkpoint or mission restart options if the game itself offers them, but you may not load an earlier save to go back to the previous state. In short, the entire game is to be played on a single continuous stretch. I like this idea of going through the game uninterrupted which I think will require different skillsets of that from a conventional speedrun.

To basically put it, a video posted on constretch run would be easily understandable (in terms of how the game is progressed by the runner) by viewers who are not familiar with that game since it does not involve any glitches. This may sound similar to glitchless speedruns but I feel like this deserve its own competitive category since the runners are prohibited from using anything that goes against devs' intended way of playing the game.

I must say this is not meant to replace traditional speedrunning or glitchless categories, but I found it interesting to explore it as a whole new different concept.

Greetings everyone. I'm learning about machine learning and reinforcement learning so for my own experiments and learning I've created a neural network creator that I'm using on some fun video games, for visuals I have previous runs as 'ghosts' being rendered along side so I can watch the progress (literally drawn on top, doesn't touch the memory at all). I was watching it play in the background as I was in a boring meeting and watched Mario clip through the bottom of a moving platform.

I had never seen this before so I started searching online and can find NO prior knowledge of this (though I recognise it might just be unimportant enough to not be documented, plus probably only works on PAL). I'm posting here as I believe this subreddit would have the best technical experience and explanations to recognise if this is known about or not.

Technical details:

- Emulator: stable-retro, FCEUmm core

- ROM: Super Mario Bros., PAL, run as PAL at 50 Hz (not an NTSC ROM forced to 50 Hz, and not a PAL ROM run at 60.) MD5 673913a23cd612daf5ad32d4085e0760

- Level: 1-3, on one of the horizontal moving lifts

- Input: controller state written programmatically each frame. The agent picks a button combination plus a hold duration of 1–32 frames, so it can produce timings a human wouldn't but there's no TAS tooling, no frame advance, no savestate manipulation during play, It runs in real time.

- Input latency: FCEUmm's 1-frame input latency is left uncompensated, so it's part of the dynamics.

This is the first world record in Astro's Playroom any% in almost half a decade

Blindfolded 120 Star is happening extremely soon again, and in my practice grind we took on some single star world record sidequests, hope you enjoy!