You make valid points regarding cheating. A lot of the rules are indeed not possible to enforce unless it's very obvious.
As PlanetXtreme said, minor changes like +2% grip or slightly more nitrous when it would normally blow up the engine could be just enough to gain the advantage and would be almost impossible to tell. Even a Lua script for g2g to get better vehicles can be done and easily passed off as just having amazing RNG.
The issue with displaying the mods menu at the end of the run is that it would be pretty annoying to void your run because you forgot to open the menu. And yes, you can just modify the vehicle files instead which would not be visible from the menu. It is super tedious to scroll through all the parts and tuning tab after a run.
Using a replay can tank fps and the file size is huge. They also tend to break after updates, so I do not think it's a reasonable choice, even though it would give you full information of the run.
Ultimately, I agree that a solution could be some kind of speedrun launcher or a mod that vets the run automatically against the criteria that ensures it is "legit", but this is a much more complex task than it initially seems. Simply adding more and more rules that the player has to follow manually is going to get overwhelming and lead to a lot of false positives because something minor was missed from the rules.
Sorry for the game audio being a bit quiet since I was still setting up the audio in OBS for the stream.
Should probably archive the old runs as AI has had some changes
I don't think it's bs. The point of speedrunning is just to complete it as fast as possible. I understand the incentive if you want to race "legit" or focus on realism, but that's not speedrunning.
Also, the last thing we need is even more categories as there are already over 200 apparently plus all the new missions in 0.25 that are not added here. Further dividing the time trials into TrackLimits% and NoTrackLimits% is too much as we already have way too many categories, most of which already have little interest.
Also, like generalh said, there will be too much ambiguity and subjectivity to verify it. Sure, a circuit track with clearly defined limits will be okay, but what about a street course or dirt sections where there are no clear borders. Someone would have to make a mod of the time trials that adds that translucent white border thing from the new 0.25 crawl missions to have any level of measurable consistency, which is unfeasible.
