argiopetech / timer

A statistics-enabled split-based timing application for NCurses

Timer

A statistics-enabled splits-based timer application for NCurses.

Rationale

Split-based timing is encountered in a variety of fields. This specific application is designed for and tested with speedrunning.

Where most split timers are primarily focused on personal-best times and their associated metrics (sum of bests, possible time saves, etc), this timer focuses on consistency. It saves all splits (including invalid splits, see below) and outputs them to an R (programming language) data file which is read by STAN. STAN fits a (admittedly simple) empirical Bayesian model to the data and updates the splits.yaml file.

Status

Timer is alpha software. It does not have a stable API, input or output format, or even statistical model. It probably won't rm -rf /, but I won't guarantee anything.

Having said this, I use timer almost daily for speedrunning. My splits.yaml file will be available for reference as soon as I finalize it.

Use

timer

The core of the system. Reads a splits.yaml file in the current directory and saves to splits.dat.

Keys that change use when the timer is running

Key	Timer Stopped	Timer Running
SPACE	Starts the timer	Moves to the next split
RETURN	Starts the timer	Pauses the timer on the current split
r	Resets the current run	Nothing
s	Saves the current splits to a file and resets	Nothing

Other keys

Key	Use
q	Quits the application without saving
i	Toggles between valid/invalid for the current split
PgDn	Skips the current split, invalidating both it and the split following
PgUp	Moves the current split to the previous split, adding the current time to the previous split's time (see also "Invalid splits")

Saving Splits

In a complete run (all splits have a time), all splits (valid and invalid) are saved.

If not all splits are complete, the last split is not recorded. The rationale for this is that if the run was not completed, the last split was probably stopped prior to its completion (making it invalid).

Invalid splits

Splits marked invalid are saved in the data file for the purposes of calculating personal best "full run" times. Invalid splits are not exported to STAN.

When an invalid split (the "current" split) is combined with the previous split using PgUp it validates the current split. Additionally, if the split previous to the previous split (the "grandsplit") is valid, it validates the previous split. This behavior is desirable to account for accidental uses of the skip functionality. If the previous split is actually invalid, it can be marked as such with the i key.

level-bests

Outputs the name and best time for each split.

total-time

Outputs the total time for all splits and all runs.

output-split-timing

Outputs all valid split data for each split in a format compatible with tools/unisplits.stan.

update-split-timing

Reads a stansummary CSV file and updates a splits.yaml file based on the contents.