Greetings everybody! As we hinted at in the previous News post from last year, today we are officially releasing our brand new version of the Load Remover Timer (LRT) we use in LiveSplit, which has been developed by Yuushi with help from Sawken. This has been in the works since 2022 so it's a big relief for us to have finally reached this point.

This timer was tested extensively from the beginning of January until just a few days ago, with more than a hundred test runs being done, which were compiled here. During this process, many small bugs in it were fixed. Despite this and because of how complex this game is and the vast amount of categories and variables it has, it's possible there could be some more bugs we haven't caught. If any more are found, they will be fixed as soon as possible. We think that with over a month of testing coupled with how long the boards have been locked, it's time we finally release it.

We won't be explaining the list of features this LRT has on this post, since you can see that here.

You can already find the new LRT on Edit Splits, by searching Resident Evil 4. Simply press Activate, and configure the settings however you like. If you have been using Scriptable Autosplitter through the Layout, remember to disable it.

Getting a proper understanding of why we've had to change LRTs once again is difficult, as there is so much to explain. Last year we published a 19 page document on our Discord's runners channel (available only for runners of the game) attempting to explain in detail all of this, so if you're confused, that may be a good place to start.

In short, the previous LRT had a multitude of issues that we've wanted to solve for several years and we've finally been able to.

Since the new LRT is slower than the previous one (mainly due to not pausing at all during inventory blackscreens, which was a huge problem with the last two LRTs), noone can PB with the boards as they stand right now. Because of that, it was agreed upon in the discord, among the runners of the game, to retime the whole board, making all runs "slower" (including all obsolete runs) using an automated script. The currently chosen methodology for this is to take the RTA or IGT of each run, substract a set value that varies depending on the category, and place the resulting time on the LRT attribute of the run. These values were obtained through observing the average LRT-IGT (LRT-RTA for Assignment Ada) difference on each category.

We will follow through with this plan in a few days, so if you want to suggest a different solution you should do it now.

After all runs have been retimed, the boards will be OPEN and submissions will begin getting accepted.

Another important thing we would highly encourage you to do is to take a look at the rules, since they've been completely reformatted, as well as many new rules added and others changed. All of this was properly discussed/voted on between runners on the Discord just like the LRT.

Somewhat related to the rules, it's crucial to note that any new submissions using the previous LRT (the one that released in 2021) will be rejected from now on, since this timer is faster and has many bugs that make it unusable.

Lastly, some more reminders:

• The route for most categories in the game, as well as where/when to equip certain weapons and where/when to ditman have changed drastically with the new timer. We suggest you take a look at some runs using it to get a sense of these things, so you don't lose a ton of time by using an obsolete route.

• Like we've said many times before, we would highly appreciate it if you join our Discord server and if you have at least one verified run in any of our three boards (Steam, Console, Category Extensions), you can request the Runner role to get access to all community-wide discussions.

• You can always contact any of the moderators for any issues you encounter. Again, the best place to do so is in our Discord.