Shortcuts

Shortcuts is a system which allows for a short-form command invocation to be automatically expanded into a longer-form command invocation.

The concept of shortcuts is to allow for those game boards in which the top-level category represents games, rather than standard Any%/100% categories, like you see on most game boards on the speedrun.com website. You are most likely to see this implementation (top-level categories being games) on game boards which cover trilogies or remasters, such as the Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy.

Usage + Example

Shortcuts work in the same way as if you were calling a normal game board. The difference is that, instead of the "game" argument being the top-level game name defined in the config, you instead refer to an alias of that game.

This is best described with an example. Suppose you want to look at the Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back Any% category under the N. Sane Trilogy game board. There are two ways to refer to it.

The standard method -- which always works -- would be to do this:

!run cnst pc crash2 any%

In this instance, cnst is the alias/short-form text referring to the Crash Bandicoot: N. Sane Trilogy game board, in much the same way as if you were looking up Hogwarts Legacy. The "category" keyword -- the third argument in this command -- is instead a reference to the game name of CB2: Cortex Strikes Back, because technically that is the top-level category. The actual "category" -- any% -- is bundled into the flags system that we already use and handled by our existing system.

However, in most cases, the N. Sane Trilogy is just a placeholder for 3 games and so we don't really need to know about it specifically, but we want to avoid confusion with the existing "Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back" game board that references the original release.

As a result of the shortcuts system, we get the below:

!run c2nst pc any%

In the background, the program automatically knows that c2nst is a shortcut to the "cnst" game board and the top-level category "crash2", so it sets all the game metadata to be that of "cnst", as if that had been provided by the user. The existing category "value" is pushed out into the flags system and the category variable is internally overwritten to be set to "crash2".

Notes

Not all games use the shortcuts system. This is provided solely for convenience on a selected number of trilogy game boards where the "game" is defined in the top-level category: often for remasters or re-releases where there's still an older version of the game that exist.

Please check the relevant game-specific article for more details on whether a game series supports shortcuts. If it does, there will be a section devoted to the shortcut formats that can be used.