I've had a play around with Cheat Engine but I'm a bit out of my depth with the autosplitter scripting sadly. The best I can get is a somewhat promising pointer towards IGT, but I've had no luck beyond that. The pointer isn't perfect, because the 'IGT' counts up during menus and briefings too and tends to keep ticking for a little bit after mission resets. However! It has proved useful for reviewing when the game initialises after 'Start'.

The IGT memory value begins counting at the exact moment LEGACY UI first appears. This varies for some outlier missions like BotB (2.60s) and Kings (2.35s), but otherwise, from what I can tell, loading is finished at 1.30s after 'start', and then gameplay begins, even if we can't see it. Note that these values include my reaction time, so the real value is probably closer to 1.00s (-0.3s). This works even for missions where UI is hidden for a title crawl. IGT pops off at 1.30s after 'start' on Base Game and FL59, regardless of UI type. If this is something that other people are able to use and test, the pointer address I found is (on version 2.1.1.A.24.1208.9439):

"ProjectWingman-Win64-Shipping.exe"+095C0120

And the offsets needed on top (in order of application) are:

70
438
0
1BC

Make sure to set it to a float to see the time value!

My interpretation of the above is that the game should be loaded, logic should be progressing, and acceleration should be possible, all from at least 1.30s after 'Start' (on the vast majority of levels).

It's encouraging that you didn't notice a load time difference between your new and old rig StarPilot. That makes it more hopeful that we don't have anything to worry about by beginning time from 'Start' on missions as FalconLuma suggested. It would ensure fair timing across both UI preferences.

Very nice research! Thank you for investigating :)

I've done some more research by timing from the start screen to first visual, results below.

My findings were:

The majority of missions hide the UI at the start to facilitate the title crawl, in these instances, there is no difference between NEW and LEGACY styles. I didn't test every vanilla mission, but for FL59, start to visual is 4.3s on these missions, and in Vanilla is 4.7s-4.8s. Given my reaction time is between 0.2s and 0.30s, this backs up your finding of a 0.4s-0.5s difference between FL59 and Base Game.

For quirky missions where the title crawl appears at some other time, the difference between LEGACY and NEW is able to manifest, but it isn't consistent across missions or DLC/Vanilla. In FL59, missions 4 and 6 are identical, but mission 1 is an outlier. On LEGACY, if the start text isn't allowed to finish before you start, it can add +0.75s, but only on the first couple of loads bizarrely.

The only quirky missions I had time to find in vanilla were Wayback and Kings. There might be more. Wayback shows similar times to FL59 4 & 6, whereas Kings is a unique case because of the fade in from white.

Timing from 'Start' will work I think, there seems to be very little if no variance due to hardware between us. This would also solve the problem of the difference between LEGACY and NEW, because the player should be loaded in and able to accelerate no matter what, the question of when they get visual confirmation of control doesn't matter.

Hi there!

I’ve been running the Frontline 59 tunnel run category and I think I’ve discovered an issue with UI styles that is affecting times (possibly for runs across all mission based categories too!). Longstory short: Those using legacy UI are suffering a 3.0s time loss at the start of missions because the UI becomes visible 3.0s earlier than those using New UI style. This causes those using legacy UI style to start their timers earlier. I don't believe this would affect campaign runs because the point at which the UI spawns in is irrelevant.

Here’s a video which demonstrates it:

I only noticed this because the tunnel run category is very close and I couldn’t for the life of me work out how I could get a sub 2:31 time, let alone sub 2:29 like FalconLuma. I've been adding 1.60s at the start of my runs to account for untimed acceleration and I figured this might be an issue for other runners too.

Before I discovered this I did some analysis of each run here to try and work out what was going on: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vQ2DvfbAXI-4Y0BC7Gup30rf-VrxCg9kK3DslBcu_d-PUkm9Uf3sdLIH5PHfQisZTZzsKJX2_OWph1G/pubhtml

My conclusion is that those using New UI style should have +3.0s added to any mission-based runs (such as the tunnel run). There is also a chance that hardware factors in, and we should test this via other runners. Details of which runners in this category need time additions is at the bottom of the sheet link above.

Info: Legacy UI style runs can be identified by their UI spawning in before the world and/or cockpit/plane. New UI style runs can be identified by their UI spawning simultaneously with the world and/or cockpit/plane.