I've been reverse-engineering this game and I decided to look into exactly how the secret knock works to see what makes it so tricky. I thought folks here might find that interesting as well. I made a video with details and examples which I'll link at the bottom, but to summarize:

• All timing is based on the first knock, NOT the time between knocks.
• Each knock has a 7-frame window, up to 3 frames before or 3 frames after the ideal frame.
• Knock #2 should come 18 frames after knock #1, #3 should come 29 frames after #1, #4 should come 39 frames after, and #5 should come 55 frames after.
• Timing is based on when you press the button, not the animation or sound.

Here's the video with visuals and examples of different knock patterns:

I'm sure everyone here is familiar with the GL tool. After watching runners reset or lose runs over and over on other RNG parts of the game, I began to wonder if it would be possible to make something like GL tool for those segments. So, that's exactly what I did. I made a demo video showing what the tool can do: . You can see I'm playing the English version of the game in the video, but it has preliminary support for other versions of the game, including the Taiwan version.

I recorded that video around 6 months ago. I've been sitting on this project since then not sure what to do with it. I understand that GL tool was controversial when it was released, and this takes that concept to the extreme. I asked in a Twitch chat if the speedrun community for this game would be open to a tool like this and the results were mixed. Some people thought it would be nice to see fewer resets, but others (including the runner) said they would not want such a tool in runs.

As you might expect from the author, I'm not opposed to seeing this used in runs. The tool doesn't allow you to make anything happen in the game that couldn't already happen naturally. I see it as just eliminating a bunch of runs that never would have been submitted anyway because you reset on Aqua Cure or a 6-change music box or something else you had no control over. I understand a lot of people won't agree with that, however. Personally, I would like to release this regardless of whether it gets used in speedruns. I think it could be a fun thing to mess around with in a casual playthrough, or maybe it could be used in practice even if it's banned in submitted runs.

The potential issue if the community does decide that this isn't allowed in runs is that I don't think it would actually be possible to tell if someone was using it or not. I don't know how you would tell the difference between someone getting legitimately good RNG and someone locking the RNG outcomes ahead of time with this tool. What I want to avoid is a scenario where I release this tool, the community bans it in runs, but since no one can tell the difference it gets used in runs anyway, and now no one is sure which runs are legit and which aren't.

With all that in mind, I thought I'd post the video here and ask for people's feedback. Would you allow this in runs? If not, do you think it would be directly harmful to RE3 speedrunning if this was available? I'm not a speedrunner myself and I don't really participate in the community, so I'm interested to hear people's thoughts.