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Making a Speedrun Timer in D

I semi-recently played through the original Deus Ex, and enjoyed my time with it so much that I felt like getting into speedrunning it, which ended up with me having to create a custom speedrun timer that “injects” itself into the game in order to implement features such as auto-splitting and load time removal. This article details the rough journey I went through.

This means if you speedrun on Linux you’ll have inferior tooling and a complete inability to perform auto-splitting and load removal, preventing you from getting an accurate measurement of how fast your runs and splits actually are. Deus Ex was made on a very early version of the Unreal Engine, and so you can actually extract all of the game’s scripts directly from its compiled data as they’re just sitting there in plain text. The first step was figuring out where LoadMap + its jump table entry were - I technically could’ve hard coded this, but decided it’d be fun to do things “properly” using my newly made toolkit:

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