Halo Race Leaderboard

Halo Race Leaderboard is a public timing platform I built for Halo PC and Halo Custom Edition Race servers. Participating servers submit completed laps to a central application, where players can compare times across maps, inspect lap details, and follow server activity.

Why I built it

The project began with a limitation in existing Halo PC server leaderboards: lap times were available inside an individual game server, but players could not browse them externally. I wanted to record those results in one web application and make them available outside the game.

I began documenting the project in 2018, after the first web application and server-side integration were working. It has remained an active project through several rounds of server, validation, API, and interface work.

The original integration

The original server integration used a SAPP Lua script to identify completed laps and confirm that the player was driving the vehicle. The script generated JSON and passed it to a small Rust library built with Hyper.rs, which submitted the result to the web application.

The Laravel application accepted those submissions through an API controller and queued the processing work through Supervisor. That process created or matched the relevant server, player, and map records before storing the submitted time and their relationships.

What HRL provides today

The live application presents leaderboards for servers, maps, and players. Lap details include recorded times and checkpoint splits, while activity views show recent server and player participation.

HRL also exposes a public, read-only JSON API for active servers, maps, map leaderboards, players, and individual laps. A separate submission endpoint receives completed laps from participating game servers.

A long-running development project

The project has required more than recording a final time. Development has included checkpoint validation, player and vehicle state checks, ping-stability detection, split-time comparisons, player-name character handling, readable URLs, server management, and support for both Halo PC and Halo Custom Edition.

HRL remains active. The live application and its public API show the current state of the project, while the related development posts preserve earlier implementation decisions and investigations.