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Profiling without Source code – how I diagnosed Trackmania stuttering

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Lars Thießen

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Description

Profiling without Source code - how I diagnosed Trackmania stuttering is a July 2025 blog post by Lars Thießen on larstofus.com about finding frame spikes in Trackmania 2020 without engine source.

It shows Superluminal captures on unnamed main-thread frames, reading system library symbols such as DirectX waits, ruling out Steam and Ubisoft overlays, digressing into a WebmDecoder menu video thread found via Process Explorer, and finally tying spikes to OpenPlanet plugin scripting whose own stutter warnings did not attribute the cost. An addendum notes the bad plugin was likely niche rather than a popular default.

It is for intermediate performance engineers and players who profile shipping games with commercial tools and third-party overlays.

Access is a free narrative article with profiler screenshots; tools named are Superluminal and Process Explorer.

It is useful as a case study in attributing stutters through DLL names and plugin isolation when symbols are missing.