Touhou Splits - A tool for tracking scores while streaming

[marus]

Hi everyone. I made a neat little tool for Touhou streaming called Touhou Splits. It lets you keep track what your scores are during different parts of the game while playing! If you're familiar with speedrunning then you can basically think of it as a score-running version of LiveSplits.

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Spoiler

This is nice for if you want to keep track of the pace of your run, so you and your viewers can easily see if you're ahead or behind of your personal best at different parts of the run! You can define splits segments however you want, so you can split once at every stage, or have splits set up at different parts of the game (so for EoSD you could do Stage 1, Rumia, Stage 2, Cirno, ect).

The project is still fairly immature in terms of development. This is now working with all of the main Windows Touhou games (with the exception of Phantasmagoria of Flower View). I also want to make it easier to configure hotkeys, since right now changing the defaults requires modifying a XML file by hand. After that I'll probably take a short break, but if there's interest then there's some other nice-to-haves I'd like to add well like options to configure the UI and extending the framework to make it easier to support games outside of Touhou.

If you run across any bugs or have any suggestions on things to change then please reach out to me, either by posting here or sending me a PM! I've only tested this on a couple Windows 7 and 8 computers so far. I'm fairly confident it should work fine on all versions of Windows XP and newer, but if you run into any problems then please let me know. If you encounter a crash, the program should give you the option to save a bug report - please include that when submitting any bugs.

Lastly, thanks for reading up until the end!

Webpage with download link and instructions: https://bitbucket.org/MPOstermann/touho ... /wiki/Home

[Nameschonvergeben]

Cool stuff, I think I'll try it out, even though 2hu is too hard for me!
Something that would be nice to have for the future would be maybe adding more data, such as piv and lifes/bombs to give a better idea of the pace than just the score by itself. Though some of those would be specific to just one game and I fear that the table might get a bit overloaded with too much data, so I'm not sure how realistic that is.

[Despatche]

This is extremely important, and basically my dream for the past four or five years. Thank you.

Putting forward scorerunning as a similar thing to speedrunning will be our salvation.

[CloudyMusic]

Very nice. I wish every game could have this sort of thing.

[Bananamatic]

This is extremely important, and basically my dream for the past four or five years. Thank you.

Putting forward scorerunning as a similar thing to speedrunning will be our salvation.

[marus]

Something that would be nice to have for the future would be maybe adding more data, such as piv and lifes/bombs to give a better idea of the pace than just the score by itself. Though some of those would be specific to just one game and I fear that the table might get a bit overloaded with too much data, so I'm not sure how realistic that is.

That's certainly possible, and it's something I briefly considered! It probably wouldn't come for a while though since at that point we're adding data which is game-specific, and to support that I'd need to rework the UI and other parts of the code to be more configurable first (which is something I want to do at some point, but I'm not sure when exactly). The main concern I have is I'm not sure how to display all that data without cluttering the UI - I'd have to spend some time thinking about that.

At the moment, despite the project being named Touhou Splits I'd like to support adding non-Touhou games first before supporting stuff that's game-specific. It all depends on what kind of feedback I get though - if it sounds like the only people interested are Touhou players then I'll focus on adding features for Touhou. Plus now that this initial version is done, I'd like to spend some time actually playing games again

[Shepardus]

Nice work, I'm surprised nobody did this before! I can imagine something similar being integrated with MAME (perhaps as a plugin) so you can specify the memory location of the score and other metrics worth tracking and have those recorded.

One "nice-to-have" is a log of all your runs over time that can be exported as a CSV file for importing into your favorite spreadsheet editor or data-crunching tool. Another feature would be to have the program automatically track what stage you're on so you don't have to hit the button yourself.

[CStarFlare]

Is this something that could be integrated into a score tracker? It's fantastic tool and yeah, it would be great to have it compatible with a wider range of games.

[marus]

Nice work, I'm surprised nobody did this before! I can imagine something similar being integrated with MAME (perhaps as a plugin) so you can specify the memory location of the score and other metrics worth tracking and have those recorded.

One "nice-to-have" is a log of all your runs over time that can be exported as a CSV file for importing into your favorite spreadsheet editor or data-crunching tool. Another feature would be to have the program automatically track what stage you're on so you don't have to hit the button yourself.

A pipe dream of mine would be to get this working with MAME, but I haven't actually looked into what this would take yet. I don't think my current method of reading values directly from the Windows process would be feasible just because MAME is always being updated. It might be possible to create a plugin like you said that exposes the score and makes that available via a service or something.

The rest of those are good ideas too! I'll be sure to keep those in mind.

Is this something that could be integrated into a score tracker? It's fantastic tool and yeah, it would be great to have it compatible with a wider range of games.

That's not something I thought about but yeah some kind of score tracker integration should be possible! I'll keep that idea in mind too - it'd be cool to enable things like comparing scores or uploading new PBs.

[Shepardus]

A pipe dream of mine would be to get this working with MAME, but I haven't actually looked into what this would take yet. I don't think my current method of reading values directly from the Windows process would be feasible just because MAME is always being updated. It might be possible to create a plugin like you said that exposes the score and makes that available via a service or something.

Yeah I don't think you would want to read from the process directly since as you said MAME is always being updated, and people build variants or their own versions of MAME (and not just for Windows). I suggested a plugin since this could be essentially a fancier version of the memory-watching functionality that the cheat plugin provides.

[CStarFlare]

Is this something that could be integrated into a score tracker? It's fantastic tool and yeah, it would be great to have it compatible with a wider range of games.

That's not something I thought about but yeah some kind of score tracker integration should be possible! I'll keep that idea in mind too - it'd be cool to enable things like comparing scores or uploading new PBs.

You could upload everything, actually - give a fully detailed log of all runs you've done.

Heck, with Touhou if you're reading data from the program you might be able to get really ridiculous and log things like whether individual spells were captured, what their bonus was, and what the bullet cancel bonus was. Some of those would be really interesting for dedicated to players to have at their fingertips without having to dig through a replay or video to compare where exactly things went differently. Toss in a screenshot and replay upload feature as well.

(that would all be much more involved than a livesplit-like setups where you hit a hotkey to record scores at a certain point, but would certainly be interesting)

[Aldnox]

Amazing!! I love it!! I wonder, would it work with other games or just 2hu? I would like to use it for Eden's Aegis.

[marus]

I can definitely try adding it! Theoretically this should work for any 32-bit Windows game, as long as it's not doing something weird/special to keep track of the score value in memory.

Also just to update everyone, getting the other Touhou games working is still on my radar but it'll have to wait a little bit. I only really get time to work on this on the weekends, and some personal stuff came up last weekend and this weekend I'll be out of town without my computer. I should have a chance to work on this next weekend though - stay tuned!

[Firehawke]

MAME handling would be done through a Lua script and the use of LuaBridge. See http://docs.mamedev.org/techspecs/luaengine.html for details. Looking at the existing highscore-saving script would probably give you some basic ideas on where to work. You'd probably generate a DAT file with per-game memory locations for stage, lives, current score, max chain (where applicable) etc.

[marus]

Hi everyone! I finally got off my lazy butt and added support for the rest of the main Touhou games. I also added support for Eden's Edge and Eden's Aegis by request. I haven't thoroughly tested how this works with each game, so if you encounter any bugs or weird issues then please let me know.

I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!

[Deadliar]

This is extremely important, and basically my dream for the past four or five years. Thank you.

Putting forward scorerunning as a similar thing to speedrunning will be our salvation.

Heresy. Survival runs are the only true measure of skill. The future is a game where you don't need to score to be gud, and the first one to die is the lesser man.

What I'm saying is we need to go lock up some shmuppers, Jigsaw style. Winner gets to play Mars Matrix.

[SuperSoaker360]

Holy heck this is neat! I'm going to give it a try with Eden's Aegis over the weekend, this might be the perfect tool to help give me incentive to improve my personal scores.