Ah, I knew exactly what you had done as soon as I read you made the X-ray spark possible, so damn cool man :)
No other known applications for a shinespark in particular (as far as I know), though the trick itself has been used before. In my 100% run for example, it was used at ~1:50 in this video, but to get speed echoes instead of actually charging a shinespark.
The trick is that you can preserve your speed (and booster level) if you are morphed, and instantly unmorph after taking damage after bouncing from a high enough fall, and I think the damage must be taken from certain enemies/surfaces. So it's very weird and very restricted (and wicked cool). IIRC it was discovered more or less accidentally by Namespoofer when he was still quite new to the scene.
=D
You never fail to deliver! These techs will cut a good chunk off the published TAS, awesome.
Next step: finding a tech for reducing door transition.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
Cpadolf summed up the speed preservation trick pretty well in this post. I am still looking into further applications for it.
Here is another tech I just created. Thanks goes to Cpadolf for his samus on crack demo, showing that grapple + speed booster + damage boost can lead to some pretty nifty stuff.
here ye be
It saves 85 frames compared to the spark that is done in the current run. This demo doesn't show it, but there is a problem with using this in the actual run. The last 2 enemies in the room must be killed before the door will even open. This may require some tinkering before it can be of use in the 100% run.
Nice techs, but...
...this will unfortunately not be of use in a 100% run, because the position of the robots on the way to the Reserve Tank will be much worse if not using the traditional shinespark here, resulting in a bigger delay to clear the passage either way.
There are still good news though. You can save ~13 frames by using my GravityKagoTech, which offers a optimal combination of the early PB placement, as well as closer position to the morphball hole once you fall off the statue's hand.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
Here is my latest creation.....
"The Hero Charge Bluesuit on a Dime"
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/437710861/hero_.smv
This trick also lends itself to some of the craziest game physics ever, breaking the game in many ways. Hint: Try jump or reversing direction while in this state.
I am currently looking for nice legal uses for it though... I am sure I'll be posting quite a few.
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
It would work, but only if there was a viable damage source near by. It requires a '60 frame recovery time ' type damage, which unfortunately is not available in the red brinstar shaft :/
Joined: 8/1/2004
Posts: 2687
Location: Seattle, WA
They worked fine with VLC standalone. Thanks for the encode.
The speed preservation tricks are really rad. I'm glad that people are still trying to pick apart the SM engine after such a long period.
any updates on that?
I still haven't figured out what happened in that smv (and how it should be useful when the game crashes afterwards), so I'm curious about actual uses.
That's a difficult one, but I'll try ballpark figures.
Arm pumping increases your position by 1px/frame whenever used.
The ingame-time of the any% is 23.5 minutes. Subtract the time where Samus is rolling, jumping, damage boosting, shinesparking, fighting or waiting for something, and you'll end up with maybe 10 minutes of running (probably less).
Just to have some numbers, I'll estimate the average running speed to be 8px/frame, with arm pumping 9px/frame. Then we'd save 75 seconds just by running faster.
Add savings from shortcuts that are impossible without arm pumping. The torizo skip saves another ~20 seconds.
The TASers probably have better estimates, but I'm confident it's somewhere between 1 and 2 minutes ;)
Joined: 11/14/2005
Posts: 1058
Location: United States
Well it turns out that I was not able to find any useful spots for it, which is quite disappointing. The part where the game crashes is optional. If you wanted, you could simply stop the SMV while samus is blue, press down, and bingo you have a shinespark (charged in zero distance). Having the ability to charge a spark in without moving forward would be incredibly useful except that we need a spike to run on top of, and there is no good spots in the game for that.
Also, I think your estimates for the armpump are pretty spot on.