I'm not super familiar with this game, but is there any chance that the moonwalk clipping glitch shown above allows for the "low%" run to get an even lower %?
Without going out-of-bounds, no. You need a total of 4 missile/super missile packs for Mother Brain's first form (it works on a per-hit basis), a Varia Suit and 3 e-tanks to survive her rainbow beam, Morphball, bombs, and powerbombs for accessing various areas of the game, Charge to damage bosses, either Ice or Speed Booster to skip Zebetites. Neither of them is skippable by clipping through the floor.
Warp wrote:
Edit: I think I understand now: It's my avatar, isn't it? It makes me look angry.
I believe it would be fun and educational, if encodes included a "hitbox viewer" screen.
I'm a viewer, not an in-depth expert who knows the exact memory layout of the game. I recently discovered "hitbox viewer script" videos on Youtube, which taught me what's going on when the Samus glitches out of bounds, the camera's stuck in place and Samus is drawn moving on and off-screen. Turns out she isn't in the map at all, and is interacting with OOB tiles you can see in the "hitbox viewer" but not in normal encodes. By looking at the right side of every room, I also learned that collision data is stored in a linear format, where every row of tiles is pulled from RAM, shifted by a room-dependent offset.
Without going out-of-bounds, no. You need a total of 4 missile/super missile packs for Mother Brain's first form (it works on a per-hit basis), a Varia Suit and 3 e-tanks to survive her rainbow beam, Morphball, bombs, and powerbombs for accessing various areas of the game, Charge to damage bosses, either Ice or Speed Booster to skip Zebetites. Neither of them is skippable by clipping through the floor.
I guess Bombs might have the most potential to be skippable? You can get Power Bombs without them nowadays, so the only thing you'd need them for would be jumping in Morph Ball form, something that's rare enough and physicsy enough that there might be some way to skip all those points individually.
Joined: 10/29/2014
Posts: 176
Location: Bavaria, Germany
In order to skip bombs while staying inbounds, with at most 2 Missile packs together with an E-Tank and Morphball, you would need to do at least 1 of the following things:
(i) Get past the 2 blocks wide and 3 blocks high bomb block wall in Parlor, the 2nd room on Zebes (from where one then could go to Brinstar and clip through the Etecoon floor and get the powerbombs down there).
(ii) Get to and past the top right yellow door in Landing Site (to access the Craterian powerbombs)
(iii) Get all the way to the room behind Mother Brain, coming from the Climb room, in reversed manner (to trigger the escape flag and end the game).
(iv) Get to the Craterian Super Missiles or clip through the bottom right green door in Landing Site, together with clipping through the yellow door in pre-Moat room (on the way to Wrecked Ship) (to get to the usual Red Brinstar powerbombs)
(v) Get bombs and somehow (inbounds) delete them from counting towards item percentage by changing the corresponding bit flag.
(vi) Get past the large powerbomb block wall in Blue Brinstar (to access the Blue Brinstar powerbombs)
(vii) Clip through all of the bomb block walls on the path through Gauntlet (at the top left of Landing Site) towards Brinstar (in order to access the Etecoon powerbombs).
None of these things have any hints pointing at some of them being possible so far.
But yes, if I had to estimate and evaluate how close some item would be to be skippable, in order to achieve 12%, then bombs would be a good candidate. Other aspects that have been thought about and were tried out for the purpose of finding a breakthrough that would lead to 12% are:
(1) Pulling off an Elevator-CF-Flashsuit with an upwards moving elevator instead of a downwards one (this seemed by far the closest thing to being possible, but no ideas worked out).
(2) Making Missile hits and or Super Missile hits count twice (in order to reduce the amount of required ammunition expansions) when they hit Mother Brain 1, for which there is 2 mechanics (Super Missiles consisting of 2 projectiles that can separate from each other and hit twice in the case of hitting environmental blocks, and the other mechanic is one that prevents Samus projectiles from vanishing upon contact as long as they are touching certain unresponsive enemies) that (under certain circumstances) would hint at this being possible provided some additional key element was found.
(3) Reducing Mother Brain's rainbow beam damage from 300 by at least 2 damage to 298 or lower in order to survive with 299 health, skipping another Tank.
(4) Finding a new way to underflow ammunition (or finding a way to underflow health), possibly by combining already existing mechanics that drain or reduce the amount of currently carried ammunition.
(5) Somehow making Mother Brain think Samus carries Varia without actually having the suit, in order to trick the rainbow beam into doing 300 damage as opposed to 600.
On the other hand side, provided that variations of 13% that involve the underflow are candidates for new low% submissions, one could aswell compare those 5 options (Chargeless PB-PB, Chargeless PB-Speed, Chargeless PB-Ice, Chargeless PB-X-Ray, Charge-Speed) and check which is the fastest. But then again due to moonfall applications, the existing 13% TAS can be sped up.
collect, analyse, categorise.
"Mathematics - When tool-assisted skills are just not enough" ;)
Don't want to be taking up so much space adding to posts, but might be worth mentioning and letting others know for what games 1) already some TAS work has been done (ordered in decreasing amount, relative to a game completion) by me and 2) I am (in decreasing order) planning/considering to TAS them. Those would majorly be SNES games (if not, it will be indicated in the list) I'm focusing on.
1) Spanky's Quest; On the Ball/Cameltry; Musya; Super R-Type; Plok; Sutte Hakkun; The Wizard of Oz; Battletoads Doubledragon; Super Ghouls'n Ghosts; Firepower 2000; Brain Lord; Warios Woods; Super Turrican; The Humans.
2) Secret Command (SEGA); Star Force (NES); Hyperzone; Aladdin; R-Type 3; Power Blade 2 (NES); Super Turrican 2; First Samurai.
(last updated: 18.03.2018)
Joined: 10/29/2014
Posts: 176
Location: Bavaria, Germany
Here's a fresh WIP for a new 100% Item Collection TAS that is in the work. ^_^
The reworking process of Sniq's previous work (which wasn't made public back then as WIP and is some months old by now) on the 100% branch up to around Ridley / Lower Norfair was/is done by Nymx. Sniq's WIP came to a halt at Ridley since the fight constitutes a major time investment to properly optimize, so that one would want to make sure one is optimizing the Ridley fight with the most favourable combination of attacks which depends on ammunition and hence drops from enemies. So at the point of approaching the Ridley fight in the TAS, the next step consists of checking various drop opportunities together with their corresponding time costs or slight detour costs, which is where Sniq stopped, and wouldn't want to continue without thoroughly checking these potential options and optimize the Ridley fight possibly with unoptimal equipment, since this could lead to having to entirely rework the Ridley fight in case a concrete method would be found later on that allows to get to Ridley with more benefitial equipment at hand.
The changes made by Nymx include a total of 13 frames improvement over Sniq's WIP coming from a moonfall application in Norfair, aswell as an idea to shift and help to center the screen in a time-saving way around the elevator using Moonwalk in the elevator room in Brinstar that connects to Norfair after coming back from Kraid, since the screen scrolling in this room is triggered by touching certain air tiles (they are there so that the screen wouldn't scroll to the right and unveil the open space behind the wall) so that the screen scrolling needs to catch up with Samus. Other than this, Nymx also has redone the entertainment part in Ceres and has double-checked and tried to apply new ideas and variations of Sniq's inputs throughout the covered content of the WIP, which for the very most parts according to Nymx turned out to be without success but helps as supporting work for the stability of the wanted optimality.
Link to video
collect, analyse, categorise.
"Mathematics - When tool-assisted skills are just not enough" ;)
Don't want to be taking up so much space adding to posts, but might be worth mentioning and letting others know for what games 1) already some TAS work has been done (ordered in decreasing amount, relative to a game completion) by me and 2) I am (in decreasing order) planning/considering to TAS them. Those would majorly be SNES games (if not, it will be indicated in the list) I'm focusing on.
1) Spanky's Quest; On the Ball/Cameltry; Musya; Super R-Type; Plok; Sutte Hakkun; The Wizard of Oz; Battletoads Doubledragon; Super Ghouls'n Ghosts; Firepower 2000; Brain Lord; Warios Woods; Super Turrican; The Humans.
2) Secret Command (SEGA); Star Force (NES); Hyperzone; Aladdin; R-Type 3; Power Blade 2 (NES); Super Turrican 2; First Samurai.
(last updated: 18.03.2018)
I have a curiosity question about the low% TAS: is there any reason Varia Suit is taken instead of Gravity Suit? In another wording: Can't you get Gravity Suit without Varia Suit?
Sniq's submission notes to the 13% run state: "Varia - Required for surviving MB's rainbow beam attack, which would otherwise require me to acquire double the amount of tanks to survive it, which would defeat the purpose of this low% category. Also required for surviving heated areas since Grav is not acquired."
You can get grav without varia, but for low% it doesn't make sense. I think varia halves the MB rainbow attack, and that attack is the reason for all the amount of health upgrades.
