Loadtime deduction efforts
5 years ago
Limburg, Netherlands
ModeratorExodust
He/Him, They/Them
5 years ago

Thought it'd be a good idea to put this out on the board instead of just on Discord, to have a more clear oversight on what's being done to get loadtimes out of the equation.

So, the main reason this is a thing at all, is because, as it turns out, actual PSPs tend to not be consistent with loadtimes, versus the PPSSPP emulator (and probably others, if they even exist, I don't know). Since an Arcade 42 run contains a minimum of 84 loading screens, significant loadtimes create a significant disadvantage, and are thus not very fair.

One idea so far has been to manually time loadtimes separate from the splittimer with something like a stopwatch app, either live or after a run, but this is not preferable due to inaccuracies. This might, however, be the only (feasible) way to deduct loadtimes from past runs.

The ideal solution would be some cross-platform and automatic script that can trigger a split timer to pause or its own separate stopwatch to count while it detects a loading screen. If the script interacts with a split timer, it would be important to look into doing this for multiple split timers, as not every split timer works on all platforms; if the script has its own stopwatch, it'd be useful to include an input box for final run time to automatically calculate loadtime-deducted run time. I am personally thinking of ways to achieve this with my very limited coding experience, but I've not gotten very far yet.

I'm personally keeping myself from doing any live-timed runs before there's a good solution to this, to prevent having to do more manual stopwatching of loadtimes (plus so I can actually see right after the run what my final time is).

DarkJarris likes this
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