Hi folks,

I was interested in running a few levels and noticed the current limitation of using the replay timer for IL runs only being accurate to the second. Beating times for things like All Together Now might be a little tricky that way!

After a little poking around in the replay file structure, I noticed that the replay measures the play time in milliseconds, so I put this together: DK2-Replay-View.

It's a pretty small application that just allows you to view the headers for DK2 replay files, and importantly, the actual in-game time for the replay, down the the millisecond. It can be run either from the executable in the Releases section, or from the source if you have a Python installation.

I'm not sure if any players/moderators would be interested in using it, but it might be handy for measuring your own / verifying other player's speedrun times (if the replay file were to be uploaded by the runner).

Anyway, let me know what y'all think!

Nice tool! The only method to check milliseconds I knew of was to look in the map save file, which only showed the millisecond times of PBs.

I've personally felt that competing against milliseconds would be more annoying than whole seconds (ties). The games feel too imprecise and unserious for that. But I'm not against a shift to millisecond times (replays or some other proof of ms would have to be required for every run, which may be too inconvenient for casual runners).

Now that replays are supposed to be compatible with future versions, I think requiring replays for WR runs will be good, if they can be used to detect mod usage and stat edits.

Im seeing this quite late, but yeah, excellent tool you've made, i'm a huge fan of it ! Having this much information within one little software might improve and make things easier to check for modification in the game.

It also means (if everyone is okay with it) that it would become a requirement to use this app on every submission (or maybe by sharing a replay file ? We could give it a try)

I suppose it also works on Operations right ? Its working the same way I guess ?

I'll be a bit far from my computer this weekend so I wont be modifying anything until next week. At least many other people can check this post out and tell there opinion on this :)

It should work with any replay file (current and going forward), though I don't know how much use it would be for the Operation runs category.

I don't know how much necessity there is for it in the vast majority of cases, but if a new run were to be submitted that was also same-second as a current record, it might be handy for a mod or the player to get a look at the exact time. Especially since the player will have saved the replay anyway for the submission video.

Re: detecting mod usage / stat edits, I haven't given it a try with any mods installed but I can give it a go. Theoretically it should detect any mods with the mod hash-- probably so the game knows if the replay is incompatible with the current mod list. Detecting stat edits might be harder, I don't know if that information is easily accessibly in the replay file without digging way deeper into the way DK2 stores the exact replay data.

To be fair also, I'm not sure if there's a way to enable file submission when submitting a run, I'm not familiar with what options are available to mods.

Alright i'm back ! And yeah i'm not sure as well that we can submit any file with the run, we can still put some link, but this might be dangerous for the mods so... For me the only solution is a link to an image hosting site with a screenshot of the software.

For the Operation category, idk how to use it since it means verifying each replay after each run, it would cost a lot of time for the speedrunner. I think we'll stay with how we'll do now for this category.

I'll start thinking about introducing this app in the next days, how we're gonna use it and who will need to use it. As you say, runner getting some new WR should be able to tell us the exact time to be sure that's a real WR.

The use of replays would be to download them and check in-game if things line up with vanilla behaviour. AFAIK replays with mods have to have those mods manually loaded beforehand for the replay to work. If they aren't present the game will give a warning that the replay was recorded with a different set of mods than currently active. A vanilla replay should load and play without issue on the vanilla game.

Don't think isolated screenshots of the tool are a solid proof without the replay file to go with it. I kind of forgot that downloads couldn't simply be dropped in descriptions. It's definitely overkill to require every runner to upload to file hosting sites or discord (when there's not much of a community). At the moment it's probably too much even for all WRs. Instead it could be saved as a measure against suspicious runs. Runners that fail to give the replay upon request will have their run rejected/removed.

Operation runs are live so, before/after the gameplay portion of the run in the video, the runner can click on the mods button in the bottom right corner of the main menu as a basic proof.

Another thing:

I'd like to see the Mods and XP annotations go. It's annoying to input the XP for every run and I don't think it matters as a comparison anymore. Tracking modded runs simply isn't reasonable. One set of mods can't be compared with another because they're different playing fields. A run with a modded unit/weapon isn't the same playing field as a run that kills the map in 0.001s with a custom modded ability.