LiveSplit component to automatically detect and remove loads from Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex.

This is adapted from the NST load remover https://github.com/thomasneff/LiveSplit.CrashNSTLoadRemoval and from https://github.com/Maschell/LiveSplit.PokemonRedBlue for the base component code.

A video setup guide can be found here

• Extract all the contents of the TWoCLoadRemover.zip into the Components Folder of your LiveSplit folder.
• Open LiveSplit -> Edit Layout -> Click the plus icon -> Control -> Crash TWoC Load Removal
• You can specify to capture either the full primary Display (default) or an open window. This window has to be open (not minimized) but does not have to be in the foreground
• Select the appropriate platform
• Under preview crop the actual part of the recorded area the game will be displayed on (left click sets upper-left corner, right click sets bottom-right corner)
• the cropped area should not overlap, but if it underlaps a bit it shouldn't be an issue
• Now click the calibrate blacklevel button, start the timer and go into the loading screen of Arctic Antics
• After the loading screen ends a value for blacklevel should be displayed under settings (this can theoretically range from 1 to 255 but should be close to 1)
• Don't forget to set your timing method to gametime

This component only removes and detects loading screens from Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex, nothing else!

If you want to

• Auto-split based on a folder of split images: https://github.com/Toufool/Auto-Split by https://github.com/Toufool
• Auto-split and remove loads based on scriptable events from a video feed: https://github.com/ROMaster2/LiveSplit.VideoAutoSplit by https://github.com/ROMaster2
• Auto-split and remove loads from only the black screens: https://github.com/thomasneff/LiveSplit.BlackScreenDetector by https://github.com/thomasneff/.
• Detect text within an image: https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract

Special thanks go to PeteThePlayer, DylWingo, Alaapo and various others from the Crash Speedrunning Community, who helped me with testing/debugging.

The method works by taking a "screenshot" (i will simply refer to it as image from here) from your selected capture at the top, where "LOADING" is displayed when playing TWoC. It will then first check if the image is fully black and will pause the timer if it is. When the blackscreen ends it will resume the timer and note the current time in case an actual load screen follows. After this it will actually be looking for the LOADING text at the top of the screen for 360 frames (6 seconds).

To do this it will first preprocess the image by comparing color values to color the actual loading text fully black while the background will be turned fully white. This image will then be fed into the tesseract optical character recognition AI to extract the text within the image. If the extracted text equals LOADING the timer will revert back to the time that was noted at the end of predecessing black screen and pause the timer again. Finally it will unpause the timer as soon as the upcoming blackscreen ends.

If you want to use the AutoSplitter functionality, all your Splits need to have different names!. If you have Splits that share the same name, the AutoSplitter is not able to differentiate between them.

If you plan to use the load remover with PCSX2, I would refrain from capturing the actual screen the emulator is running on and recommend capturing an OBS window instead. Otherwise the screen capture runs into weird issues when the emu is using the software renderer.