Category timing compiler for MK8D speedruns.

Intro

I’ve still been speedrunning Mario Kart 8 Deluxe on the 200cc, no items category; and decided to extend my set of tools for practice and youtube uploads. If you haven’t done so, please have a look at the first part of this project.

CodeDev

The first thing I wanted to do this time was to be able to atomatically calculate the timings of the differerent categories on the leaderboards (they have differernt starting/ending points). This was fairly straightforward, given that we already had all the timings from the tracks, so it was only a matter of taking the difference between the track splits:

48 Tracks: 	1:31:44.44
32 Tracks: 	1:01:48.37
Nitro: 	    0:31:30.56
Retro: 	    0:30:17.81
Bonus: 	    0:29:56.07

After doing so, a natural extension was to do a table with the history of the splits and to highlight the best splits for each category independently:

Finally, I wanted to add the timestamps for my youtube videos so I coded the routine to add an offset (that, unfortunately, has to be calculated manually):

Mario Kart Stadium: 0:00:30
Water Park: 0:02:06
Sweet Sweet Canyon: 0:03:49
Thwomp Ruins: 0:05:45
Mario Circuit: 0:07:36
Toad Harbor: 0:09:25
...
Animal Crossing: 1:22:48
3DS Neo Bowser City: 1:24:35
GBA Ribbon Road: 1:26:39
Super Bell Subway: 1:28:40
Big Blue: 1:30:30

With all of these routines in place, I know what I need and the improvements I want to make to the code, so I’ll be doing so for part 3 of this series.

Further thoughts

To the code up, I should definitely start using a pandas dataframe so that I don’t lose track of the stats and the timings and not to have to re-calculate it several times over.

Code Repo

• Repository: Github repo
• Dependencies: xmltodict, matplotlib