I wanted to make a proposal to the mods and add the rule of not counting load times, I'm not forcing it or anything its just an idea to think about and I wanted to get the mods opinion on it. Thanks
I would love for this to be a thing, because everyone has different computers thus equals different load times. If the load times are removed the times would be more accurate for competition.
Unfortunately, certain screens show no indication of loading, even when they obviously are. The best example of this is after turning off the mind control facility: the lights turn off, it loads another map, and the narration comes in, but there isn't an actual loading screen as it loads in the darkness. There are other points this happens, though that one is the main one that comes to mind.
If we had a no-loads timer, that would be pretty awesome.
"Use cheat engine to find an address that is consistently a single value on load screens, then make an ASL that says the game is loading when that address is the loading value. You'll probably need to find the offset for the value as well. There's plenty of in depth tutorials out there for finding offsets in CE." this is what they told me, now i have no idea what half these words so if anyone wants to step up and make this or help make this that would be great
Ok, I'll start looking into it. I knew there were tutorials out there, but they're pretty lengthy and complicated. My internet is being kinda slow today, so can't get distracted by videos; might as well read some tuts :P
Ok. So information I've found out so far:
1 - SourceSplit does not work despite TSP being a Source Engine game. I suspect this is cause it does a bunch of weird things in weird ways (like with cheats and stuff) so it doesn't load maps the same way or something.
2 - Cheat Engine is a specific program used for debugging other programs, specifically single-player video games.
After figuring that out, it's pretty simple to go through the tutorial for that, find the addresses to feed to livesplit for auto splitting, and then we got an auto splitter. I mean, that will still take some time and might still be way over my head, but I'm pretty confident right now. I'll give another update when I have more progress.
Ok, I've messed around with Cheat Engine for like 3 hours and thought I found a value that could work for the autosplitter. The only problem is that idk if it works or not cause I don't know how the auto splitter language works (also no explanations anywhere). I tried to make a script that would cut out the loading times at the very least, but it didn't work so I'm done for the night. Here are my findings if anyone else wants to sort through thousands of lines of assembly to figure it out:
A double variable I found [inputsystem.dll+1F534] is set to 0 while the mouse controls Stanley, or more specifically, when the game hides the mouse. So, it would change to more than 0 when loading, on menus, or tabbed out of the window. This is the best I could find, with the table narrowed down to about 900 values.
I also found [65301796] would be called when the game was paused or loaded, and [653018B7] would be constantly called while the game was running. If there was a way to tell when those values are called (not changed), then we could use them.
Idk, it was a lot of work for very little to go on. I'll try more some other day though.
as for the auto splitter: I tried, idk what was wrong. Link to code: http://pastebin.com/Pgq8msz6
I've recently become a mod, I think I might be able to add a non-mandatory No Load time section for times. I'd probably have to talk to the other mods since I'm new though.