It seems like the June 18th 2018 update, which introduced some localization fixes, also had an effect on our LiveSplit load remover, as it does not seem to work anymore.

Personally I have no experience with load removers so I cannot fix this issue (assumption is hardcoded pointers). If anyone does know how to handle this or knows someone who could look into it, help would be highly appreciated.

Since RTA w/o loads is our primary timing method, I guess this also means that no new runs can be submitted until the load remover is fixed. (?)

Is there anything being done for this? I'd like to get my first run in before the end of the month 🙂

Nope, the problem is not solved for the moment and after giving a look to the load remover, it seems to be beyond the scope of my ASL knowledge for the moment. I'm not sure it is hardcoded pointers, or I don't understand what is being done to them in the code.

I'm willing to give it a try if people who got involved can help so I don't need to retro-engineer everything written in the current load remover. Otherwise I'll probably ask the Speedrun Tool Development Discord to help me on that one.

The only thing I can do to help you for now, Cadarev, is to lend you my GoG version of the game if you want to run: btw, most of the time, GoG let's you rollback to previous versions from their Galaxy client.

A friend of mine is currently in the process of creating a new load remover, I will report back once results are available. ?

New update today...

Sadly my friend will not be able to continue on creating the new load remover because the person who helps him with it, or rather teaches him, is not available for the foreseeable future, so some other people can try again. :^)

As I just recently picked up the game, this is going to be interesting trying to place on the boards with a 2 minute handicap. Guess I'll just have to get good enough to overcome that disadvantage >.<

I uploaded a guide to roll back to the previous version of the game through steam console: it's more of a workaround than a proper fix, but it's quite easy and this way people interested in the speedrun can time their run accurately.

I think this might not be the end of the story as the load remover appears to behave differently from before. I suspected something was not right when I golded the "Goldwalk Revisited" split (start of backtracking part of the game, from Empty Set to the last bike cutscene) by 3 seconds which is very suspicious for a split this short and with no real RNG to speak of.

So I compared how the load remover behaves in runs now and how it behaved in my PB from 2.5 years ago, and indeed, the load remover stopped for a way shorter period of time back in the day.

Look at how the stopping of the timer is barely noticeable in my old run:

Compare that to a "PB" I got today:

Now it is possible that my PC has slowed down in the meantime, however, I timed the duration of the entire black screen in this level transition RTA (11.33s vs 11.5s), and especially considering there is one digit less of precision in the new run, for all intents and purposes, the black screen goes on for the same length.

So tl;dr: Level transition goes on for the same duration, but more load time is removed with the current load remover.

Now it's not as bad as you might expect. My PB today is 11s faster RTA, but 18s faster RTA w/o loads compared to my old PB, so I guess I got around 7s of "free" time save. Not a disaster, but definitely significant. As long as the load remover behaves the same now for everyone, I personally don't mind the "free" time save even though it does give you an edge over older runs. But nonetheless,I guess the cleanest approach would be to simply have a load remover for current patch.

that sucks a lot, but I think that even though the load remover works differently between patches, it works consistently across computers: Eskairie's run and mine are probably run on the same patch and seem to get the same stop you get (that would need some more rigorous timing that i can't really do tonight). If that ends up being the case, your old PB is the only one with the disadvantage among top 5 (as savepoints' and Onin's runs don't really have loadless times), so I guess that won't be a problem, because the guide i posted makes you download a very specific version of the game.

We only need to agree on which version we're going to run, that could as well be the version on which you did your WR.

Sure, just wanted to make you aware of it. Since I also used your guide for the downpatching, everything should be fine as long as that version is used. ?

I gave an attempt at fixing the load remover, here's the link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DLKZFukUa25jcYeV6kufc3l5MKP-Vr5r/view?usp=sharing

I tested it at the first few loading screens of the game, seemed to work fine on my PC. But I'm using a different variable for load removal, so loading durations might be different from what the currently used script times. So the moderators' approval would definitely be needed if the new script was to be used in actual runs.

To anyone who downloaded the script, I noticed a silly bug, which should be fixed now. Apologies.

The link has been updated with the new script.

Edit: another update, don't want to spam the topic too much. Bugs can still occur.