I just tested and the upper route to the medicine is about 40-50 frames faster. So that will have to be edited in.
How does clipping downward through the floor even work? What kind of flawed mechanic is that?
Is that long detour down needed? Can this be clip be done on midair by bruteforcing A/B presses?
The clip itself takes about 3 seconds, and its a long climb up (around 9 seconds), but this opens the door to new routes. My first idea is key first, then diamond, enter diamond vulture and go from there. Whether or not this is faster is still to be determined.
Current route:
1. vulture to balloon after diamond: 42 seconds
2. balloon to vulture warp after key: 36 seconds
3. entrance to medicine: 18 seconds
Potential route:
1. fall to balloon from start: 14 seconds
2. balloon up to surface: 33 seconds
3. diamond vulture to medicine:
So if the second route adds up to less then 96 seconds, it will save time.
The first part is roughly 14 from where the paths diverge.
Going back up will take some work. But a rough TAS looks like it will take 33 seconds to get back to where the route rejoins the route to get the diamond.
So about 47 of our 96 seconds is used. Leaving 49 seconds to get from inside the vulture to the medicine. Playing through by hand from right after the clip, it looks like it is going to be very close.
Another route idea I had, that probably is actually faster, is to use the diamond vulture warp after diamond and then exit right away at the balloon vulture and go get the key from there. I will test this now, but I am optimistic for at least 5 seconds savings.
Since the OoB areas seems to be filled with random junk, is there a way to quickly spawn an elevator there over and over or some other sprites?
So I tried to clip by the elevator by riding it down a bit and jumping back up (hoping it would disappear once off screen) but instead it stayed even though another one appeared above.
Out of curiosity I tried to make more and more, and I got up to at least 10. At that point other things like enemies wouldn't spawn as I rode them down, but I could still do things like shoot bullets.
Possibility for some kind of stack overflow to happen I think, but who knows if the results will be useful, its also pretty slow to set up.
Being able to get the key this way, there is nothing stopping us from getting the key first.
Then we can go back up and get the Raj Diamond.
then jump in the vulture near the diamond.
If we can perform wall clips in the vulture cave area, we can go from the lower one up to the higher one and exit at a different vulture.
This will save a lot of running around, the question is if going down to get the key then going all the way back up is worth it.
First to test wall clipping in vulture area. Result: clips are not possible there, back to the drawing board.
but there might still be a route with key first being faster.
Nice improvement! The zip that avoids the death over the spike pit was pretty cool, though the escape from the girl's room is also interesting. Would it save you any frames of input to jump before the ending and let momentum carry you down to the location that triggers the ending screen?
I've tested two particularly useful spots and found them to be possible to wall clip through. The question of whether the run could be faster depends on how quickly I can get through those walls. I'll have to test completely. One of them looks more likely than the other to be a time-saver.
