I decided to mess around with making a load remover and managed to make a working one. If anyone is interested in testing it, it's uploaded in Resources.
Works with both the Steam and GoG versions, will test it on a physical copy once I have one.
Edit: it does not work on physical copies, at least not on the 1.0 version. I also see no differences in UI or loading times between physical and digital copies of the game. No idea why it loads so slow for me compared to other runners.
Final update, I've put way too much time into this for how little it's going to get used, but made some big improvements.
It will now:
- Auto start Livesplit upon starting a new game from the main menu
- Pause livesplit on all loading screens and cutscenes
- Auto split on every map change
Unfortunately I couldn't get it to auto split the end split because I couldn't find a workable memory address for when the ending cutscene starts to play, however, it will pause the timer while the ending cutscene is playing, so you can just manually split then and it will be just as accurate as an auto split would be.
Hopefully this is useful to someone other than just me at this point.
I'm thinking it's probably going to be necessary to switch the leaderboard from Real Time to Time Without Loads.
I recently re-watched the record run to see where I can be saving time and noticed that there is a huge difference in our loading times (see direct comparison in the video below)
In short: my loading times are consistently 3 times longer than in the record (roughly 1 second vs 1/3 of a second)
There are at minimum 92 loading zones in the run, not counting any quicksave/quickloads, of which the run also has many. This means there is somewhere between 60 and 90 seconds of difference from loading time alone over the length of a run.
I suspect the difference might be because Radge ran on a physical copy of the game, which would also explain the graphical differences in the UI, and the 3dfx splash screen when he restarts the game, which the steam version doesn't have. I'll be getting a physical copy soon to test this idea, but still think the change should be made to level the playing field for any future runners.
Video examples:
