My cpu overheats in like two minutes when running pcsx, even if I'm not recording. And when I try to record in epsxe with fraps/hypercam/camtasia/whatever the framerate drops to like 5-10/s. So basically my pc is too old to handle that crap - screenshots will have to do. You'll really need some way of monitoring dan's coordinates while navigating through the void in the haunted ruins and the time device. The enchanted earth and ghost ship skips are pretty simple, compared to those two. It would be worth checking if the pools of the ancient dead trick and the first trick in the lake are really faster then just grabbing the red rune or going through the building, respectively. Yes, we can skip the boss in the ghost ship. And yes, we don't have to be on the train to trigger the exit in the time device. For the gauntlet you'll have to try and get back from the dragon gate with frame advance and all that stuff. I've spent countless hours trying to make it work without those things and I never got even close. I was eager to try it out myself, but you know, an overheating cpu and having to reboot every two minutes isn't a good thing. My best bet will be to try and have the game misfire and somehow put me on one of the mentioned spots. IIRC the game does that from time to time. edit: Revisited the rest of the levels. Pumpkin gorge: Go here (it's behind the hut on the right in the first area with buildings) and do a running jump towards the wall from the marked spot and drop in the exact same place (Dan should kinda slide up the wall during the jump). If done correctly, Dan should do his about-to-fall animation every full second. Now between those animations start running and make this jump so that you end up here and can jump in the arrow's direction. In a couple of steps you should encounter an invisible wall. It's not really a single wall, this screenshot should explain it. You have to clip between the walls towards the arrow's point (this is pretty random for me), otherwise you won't be able to go any further. If done correctly you should be able to run for a fair distance before getting to this spot. You have to jump above the blue line and after passing the house continue alongside the very edge of the wall you're on - if you fail to do any of that you will be warped back to the normal playing area. This basically allows you to run straight for the green rune. You complete the rest of the level as you normally would. The sleeping village: Although we can get up of the roofs and drop right by the gate with the exit trigger, I haven't found a way to clip through it and the last pack of soldiers that you have to kill to open it doesn't spawn until you do two things, though - so we can't complete the level early. The two things you have to do are: pick up the golden head item in one of the houses and flip the switch in the house with the safe which holds the shadow artifact. You can do those tasks in any order, but both have to be fulfilled for the last pack of soldiers to spawn. There's no trick to getting the golden head statue, but just today I found a way to get to the house with the switch early. Here's the sweetspot where you can clip into the tree (it's located on the road on your right when facing the fountain from where you start the level). Just make sure you don't overshoot it and clip through the tree entirely, so you don't get stuck. Just clip as far as you need to trigger the gate to open and simply run back. Remember: you only need to get the golden head statue and flip the switch in the house with the safe - from there you run straight for the last fight and exit. Those are the last shortcuts I know of for this game, so unless you find out how clipping exactly works and we can implement it in more areas, if the gauntlet can be skipped is the last thing left to figure out as far as I'm concerned.
I very much agree with this post.
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
Congratulations! I didn't bother to read the essays, but it looked promising! :D
With your new select thing I've figured out several several (yes 2 times) spots that you can use that, to where you'd normally die, but now "Loop" the level.
Cemetery Hill
Care to mention any of the spots you found?
Hilltop Mausoleum
The enchanted earth: but in the old method you had to ride the second lift all the way up before going into loop, which takes what, 10 seconds? Now you can start falling after getting off of the first lift. You only need to loop once anyway, no matter where you start the loop. Oh, and the fall would take less time since our starting position is way lower than the old one (I assume that Dan loops after hitting the lowest vertical position possible, which cannot happen any sooner, unless we find a way to fall faster - one way or another, AFAIK, your horizontal speed has nothing to do with how soon Dan loops).
I actually got into loop mode on my first try in the lake, but went in the wrong direction and ended up somewhere on the opposite part of the level to where the exit trigger is, without encountering any solid kill triggers. That's as far as my research went for this level.
Yeah, for the pools of the ancient dead you really just want to go as far as possible in a single loop. I'm not really sure what's Dan's horizontal speed after you do the inventory trick, so I can't tell how far we can go, but I'm sure this saves time one way or another since we can at least skip that annoying battle.
Also, I never said that I got into loop mode in return to the graveyard - all the pits I've tried have solid ground underneath them (all the ones before grabbing the yellow rune, even if we could do it after that it would end up being slower than just proceeding normally).
Nope I don't care to mention at all, but actually instead of typing I story I'll make a compilation video of all the spots I've found (aside from The Gallows Gauntlet).. And then hopefully you can figure out whats what from the video.
Okay, your point about that is, it'll save time, and it will, but... Everytime I try to do it from the 2nd lift (the second you get to it), I end up dying when I to even get into the void.. Care to explain lol, how to do it? o_o
We know that the level loops vertically, but I wonder if we could loop it horizontally too, for example, what I mean is... Think of a piece of paper, say you're at the center of it, move your finger to the right, and eventually you're at the end, we'll instead of "falling off" you start back at the main beginning of the paper on the far left. In my experiences with making (not professionally, just a hobby :P), I know that the level is a predetermined huge grid that you've got to work with, however, I figured that about the layers too... Until we figured out the loop trick, now I'm skeptical if the level designers actually didn't start with a predetermined grid, due to the fact that we can "loop the level", so thats why I'm wondering about the horizontal looping.
- MANY, if not all, of the oob spots I've found, are indeed out of bounds, but... The level pushes you back into it.
Well, we already know how to get ONTO the pillar. We just have to figure out a way to clip behind it first, which I think is just rare, but possible. Also, once you get onto the first piece of wood, you can jump onto that square thingie connected to the wall and dash jump above the gate from there, so there's no need to jump to the second piece of wood.
I very much agree with this post.
Forget party hats, Christmas tree hats all the way man.
oh very nice! Just don't burn yourselves out, you two! ;)
Well, we already know how to get ONTO the pillar. We just have to figure out a way to clip behind it first, which I think is just rare, but possible. Also, once you get onto the first piece of wood, you can jump onto that square thingie connected to the wall and dash jump above the gate from there, so there's no need to jump to the second piece of wood.
Had some new ideas. Unlike the catapult in the haunted ruins, the boat in the pools of the ancient dead is NOT the exit trigger, so to speak. After you give the boat guy all the helmets, a cutscene starts where Dan rides the boat and after he goes off-screen the level ends. It appears that the exit trigger is somewhere along the boat's path all the time, even if you don't pick up a single helmet, or never speak to the boat guy. The problemiswas that even with a dash jump at a perfect angle, you miss the trigger by an inch or so. You can go around it by luring/pushing the closest fat-armored-undead-thing as close to the platform next to the boat as you can, then dashing into the bastard in order to get him onto that platform without killing him. When you dash into him at the right angle the game sometimes registers two hits instead of one, which enabled me to do this trick in real time (dunno if you really have to double hit, that's the only way I managed to force enough momentum on him to cover the gap, though). From there you just place him as close to the boat as possible, while avoiding the conversation trigger. And finally you dash jump with a boost from his belly-attack like this (the blue line is where the exit trigger is, the arrow is basically the general direction you want to go in). I also played around zarok's lair. If you enter the first cutscene on the arena with the inventory glitch and turn it off a couple of frames before the last piece of dialog ("for gallow-something!"), for some reason, only half of the enemy skeletons will spawn. Just don't go to close to where the gates and zarok are because that will spawn the remaining enemies. Your soldiers basically gang up on the helpless enemy skeletons and you can complete the fight without even picking up the good lightning while loosing maybe 1, 2 at worst, of your guys. This will probably force you to reconsider the amount of health bottles you'll want to get for the TAS - I'm guessing none. You can also make the game finish the battle before it even starts by NOT going out of the inventory glitch and keeping it all the way through the cutscene, but it'll always consider you as the loser. Tried to make the game declare me the winner by entering the cutscene at different angles, starting the inventory glitch sooner/later, dropping the inventory glitch at different times, watching/skipping each dialog - but every time zarok was all about "harhar told you", so I guess we HAVE to kill at least half of the enemies, unless we find a way to spawn at least one of our skeletons and none of zarok's. The latter only happens when you don't go out of the inventory, and even though your guys spawn a couple of frames after the cutscene, you're still declared the loser, because the game first checks if there aren't any of your guys left and you lose if that's true (which it is because they spawn AFTER the initial check) and THEN it does the same check for zarok's army. This basically explains why you'll always lose if no skeletons exist during the check. You can also delay the next boss' entrance. If you go out of the inventory after you gain back control over Dan, the boss will just then start walking out of the cage and do his intro. He's vulnerable to your attacks during that time. I could nearly waste him with the club before he even got a chance to fight back (got him to like 200hp, maybe less), but I guess that won't be a problem in a TAS. I couldn't delay zarok's intro. It's controller strictly by timing, instead of waypoints like the previous boss. Speaking of the bosses - I finally had a while to check how many chalices it would be worth getting. I'm 99% sure that getting ANY chalice is a waste of time - doesn't matter if we manage to skip the gauntlet or not. First I checked if at least getting the xbow would be worth it. After giving it some though it turns out that it's only useful for the boss at the mausoleum and that's because, at this point, we can only reach him with projectiles. We can 2-round him with the xbow, or make it almost as fast with a 3-round fight using the daggers. Just to be sure I did two runs up until after the mausoleum, one getting the chalice in the graveyard, the other without it. For measurement I used the in-game save function, which doesn't give you seconds so I'm not sure how much faster the no-chalice route is, but it at least proves that it is in fact faster. The time after the mausoleum using the route with the chalice was 0:07, and 0:06 without it. Just for some trivia I continued with both runs through the next level and the gap between the two was still a minute, so even if it's not really a FULL minute I'm guessing the difference isn't small. That closes the xbow book. As for getting any higher weapon, like the hammer or broad sword - this would be an even bigger waste of time. The club is all you need for insane damage output. It's only slightly worse than the enchanced broad sword. We can kill the boss(es) in return to the graveyard in 3-4 seconds using the club, before they even finish their first attack. The one pirate officer we have to kill in the ghost ship goes down in like 3 hits. And assuming that we skip the gauntlet, we add zarok and the boss before him to the enemies we have to defeat in the entire game list. The first goes down either during his intro or the first chance we get to harm him after that - no matter if you're using the club or the broad sword. For the latter I checked the exact damage output and assuming we manipulate him into only doing the move during which he's vulnerable to our attacks for the entire fight, the club vs anything else dispute ends right here: you deal about 400 damage/round (let's say that zarok's vulnerable state is a round, each lasts for about 3 seconds) with the club, 600 for the first and 500/round for the remainder with the enchanted broad sword. Even without testing you can tell that zarok's lair, among all the levels in the game, is where a higher weapon saves the most time - which in this case is only a handful of seconds. Sorry for the huge blocks of text.
Wouldn't low% be essentially the same as any%? Given that you have to pick up the club anyway, the only difference would be killing the mausoleum boss with your arm instead of the daggers. Unless tasvideos accepts runs with obscure goals like using only one weapon for all of the game, even though you have to pick up a way stronger one and use it at some point anyway. I'm not really sure about the rules around here. I'm not even mentioning (look what I did there) that an arm-only run would be a real pain to watch - think zarok. There are shortcuts which are probably only useful in a 100% run, so I'm looking forward to helping you with that. New ideas... Need to... Test... (not related to the gauntlet... ok, maybe)
I discovered two new tricks. The first is pretty minor and I dunno if it'll be useful for the any%, but the second is possibly HUGE. You can replenish any weapon with a percentage/quantity to the point as if you just picked it up for the first time (100% club, 100x daggers, 150x xbow, etc.) with this little trick. Remember those pesky goblins that steal your weapons? Go into the inventory at the exact frame when the "something stolen" message appears - the game will register the weapon you were carrying as stolen, but you will still have it in your inventory. Now (still in the inventory screen) choose the weapon that just got "stolen" for it to stay in your inventory for good (only exceptions are the club and the hammer - the former will be destroyed since the percentage/quantity of a weapon drops to 0 after performing this glitch, while the latter will still be equipped but will disappear from your inventory for some reason). Now simply kill the goblin and pick up the goods. This might be useful at the entrance hall or the crystal caves if we need more durability on our club for zarok's lair (assuming that there's no chest with a new club somewhere on our way - couldn't remember any). I tried overflowing the memory or forcing the goblin to drop something else by retrieving like three small swords in a go, rebuying the "stolen" weapon from the shop, overkilling the quantity of daggers/bolts, or forcing the goblin to steal your arm - but there was no apparent result, except the replenish trick. Now for the big news: I found a way to jump with speed similar to a dash jump, but without it. And after you get the dash ability, you can basically dash jump with insance speed, covering pretty big distances. You'll have a better chance of learning the restrictions of this technique with frame advance, because the timing is really strict. Basically what you'll need is a club (the only weapon with which I got this trick to work so far, because of its square button instant-hit, but I guess you could do it with the small sword and such) and something you can hit that will put you into motion, like a wall (if the timing allows it I guess you could also get it to work with a push from a monster instead). You basically have to be running towards the wall/whatever you want to hit (also, I only managed to do it while locking myself against points where two walls meet so I could run in place, using frame-advance you should check if this is in fact necessary), push the attack button, and at the right moment hold the right combination of directional keys as if you wanted to go the opposite way (Dan does his sliding animation) and jump/dash jump. You should gain a shit load of speed, when done correctly. The first thing you should test is if we can use this technique while running alongside a wall, instead of straight against it - this would allow us to cover the gap in the crystal caves without going oob. I found a spot where you could lock yourself against a wall at the right angle and just barely miss the ledge on the other side with this trick, but that spot was between two diamonds close to where you even enter the cave, so if we could do this just a tad bit closer to where the yellow rune holder is. Oh, and you could go straight for the exit trigger in the pools of the ancient dead, without luring the fat guy. And probably enter loop mode in the ghost ship with enough speed to get to the exit trigger in a single loop a bit earlier (assuming I'm right, thinking that you move at less than walking speed after entering the void with the inventory glitch). Another thing you should test, as I already mentioned, is if we can do this trick with a push from an enemy instead of hitting a wall with a weapon. This would easily get you onto the cliff from a tombstone in return to the graveyard. Unfortunately the tombstones are the lowest point from which you gain enough height with a jump - and I wasn't able to hit anything while standing on top of them. This opens up new possibilities for skipping the gauntlet: now we can also consider getting onto the blocks way infront of the yellow rune holder gate or any blocks that are close by as a valid option. Speaking of the gauntlet: try changing Dan's horizontal speed values and check if clipping through shit that you know is already possible is a result of only the right angle, high enough speed, or a combination of both - maybe with higher speed we can clip through more stuff, so in case it's true you should test what's the breakpoint and if we can reach it with this new technique. Later I'll play around with this a little more. I'll keep you posted if I actually get somewhere with it.
