Nice work!
Is the 1-2 clip something that works on the NA/EU version of the game as well? I remember trying to mess around with it but wasn't able to make it work. Perhaps it should still have worked and I just missed it :) (Edit: I just noticed I missed a sentence in your submission text: it is indeed exclusive to the JP version)
I am curious if you know how much time you save from having the fire flower to kill the piranha plant at the end of 1-2, because I seem to recall from my testing that collecting items in 1-2 is quite slow in comparison. I don't have my spreadsheet to hand for the exact amount but I do wonder if it might be faster to forgo the fire flower until 4-2. That being said, it does look like the piranha plant is in a not very favourable part of the cycle.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
89/37 is not bad given the size of the denominator, around only 0.00016 off, but I suspect this isn't as close as you were looking for.
Of course, this came from continued fractions until hitting the relatively large denominator of 7; 89/37 = [2;2,2,7]
You may prefer the much closer 197sqrt(2) - 101 - 35pi - 24e with an error of 5.45*10^-9 and which was found by a brute-force computer search.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Challenger, eien86 and I would like to present to you... a WIP with more than the first two levels, for the first time (on the US version) in 18 years.
Input can be found here; an encode is below.
Link to video
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Note that the lines that get drawn are from (0, 1-t) to (t, 0) for t rational, with equation y = (1-1/t) x + (1-t).For given x, this is maximised when (some calculus) t = sqrt(x), with y = x + 1 - 2sqrt(x). As a side note, we may rearrange to (y-x-1)^2 = 4x, which we recognise as the standard equation of a parabola. When I was first shown this weaving pattern by a teacher when I was young, they claimed that it was a circle :)
For the area, note that it is 4 times the area between y = 1/2, x = 1/2 and the curve.Solving the quadratic equation shows that this occurs when sqrt(x) = (2-sqrt(2))/2 i.e. x = (3-2sqrt(2))/2.So our area is 4 times the integral from (3-2sqrt(2))/2 to 1/2 of 2sqrt(x) - x - 1/2, which is (8sqrt(2)-10)/3.
EDIT: It is maybe worth noting that the above solution is very handwavy about exactly which lines are drawn and for which n. For those who have a thing for rigour, this can be patched up with a continuity argument using density of the rationals, along with the fact that the "mesh size" is arbitrarily small as n is taken arbitrarily large.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
1 - On Barmy Army, it's possible to grab that puzzle piece then lost a life some frames faster by taking advantage of the punch attack hitbox (I played this game again).
The current strategy walks on the ground for one frame before dying to trigger the textbox from this level without it actually appearing. It may be possible to keep this timesave and use backwards hitbox (or possibly even punching backwards hitbox, but I'm struggling to see how at the moment), I'll look into it.
3 - I thought you were planning to choose world 5 before worlds 3 and 4. The extra lives were helpful after all.
I was originally planning to end on world 3, but I realised that I miscalculated with the overworld movement, so it ends up faster to end on world 5 instead. Indeed it's close enough that without these walljumps in Rain Forest, ending in world 3 would still be faster :) I also realised that I didn't walljump from as high up as I could, so I have since saved around 15 frames there.
6 - For the world 3 boss battle, it's possible to shorten the punch attack by being closer to the enemy.
You can also take advantage of the punch attack hitbox and attack him while facing right direction.
I tested being closer before uploading the WIP, but wasn't able to make it faster just by doing this. However, facing right indeed made the attack shorter, and saves around a second overall.
Thank you again for all your comments and kind words :)
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Consider me signed up.
I'm not sure I have the time or the motivation (hi teams looking for an extra player, great advertising right here) but I'm not known for thought-through decisions so here we are
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
For oil wells stage, nice it seems like there's an easy extra life now which should help with death routing a lot, maybe even cut out a 1-up grab completely from somewhere else.
The water where the first life is in the oil wells stage is actually a mirage - the water always disappears if you jump into it. So this life was already planned :)
I finished the life reroute after looking a bit more closely at world 3 due to key shenanigans, and the only lives I expect to get that lose any time are marble alley (cherries) and cresta run. Both lose 40ish frames. In fact now that I am more familiar with world 3, there are enough lives to skip these, but unfortunately the bottleneck is currently lives by the end of world 2, and reordering the worlds would lose 128 frames in movement between doors.
What is your speed while riding the giant sand snake?
Iirc you move at 3 pixels per frame, which should be the same as the boost as with the water boost.
The water boost should depend on the body of water itself. For example, the water in Brass Monkeys doesn't give a boost, but the ones where you would usually have to float with the bottle will push you forward, since the bottle normally has no movement speed at all. The only exception to this is the water at the start of Temple of Gloom, which for some reason still pushes you forwards.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
This looks exactly like the walking on water glitch from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGfRnw9oO4A (see 2:25:17) - I haven't been able to replicate it and the uploader didn't respond when I asked if they knew anything about how to trigger it. Your setup is much easier to replicate though. It looks like ducking off the edge of the elevator is enough to trigger it. I guess ducks can swim :p The slightly strange thing is this looks like a completely different cause to the longplay.
A first try saves about 28 seconds (!!) as we can skip the flamethrower and all subsequent sections completely.
Ducking again removes the state but otherwise it seemingly lasts forever.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Nice one! Are the walls in this level segmented? As in, can you not wall jump up the very left wall using the turn around trick?
The walls are segmented, but I think these blocks can't be walljumped on when approached from the right. This varies by the transformation and also possibly by the blocks? For example, the lightbulb transformation has no trouble walljumping from the right in the Darkroom, but I haven't had any success at all walljumping from the right on the ice blocks in world 2 with the normal Jelly Boy*, or any success with walljumping at all with the flamethrower. Perhaps it's not so much "the hitbox is bigger behind you" as an asymmetry between the left/right-facing hitboxes.
You also reminded me that I'm not sure I tested these blocks with the skateboard, so that's something I'll look into.
*Actually with hacks I found that the walljump is possible if you can get 1 pixel further into the wall, and very occasionally I have seen jelly boy move an extra frame into a wall than normal. I'm not sure what causes this or if it's possible to manipulate. My main idea with this is to walljump up to the puzzle piece in Brass Monkeys, but this would likely require a chain of a few walljumps like this.
Also nice, glad to see this trick getting more use. Now you have to look at every place you can possibly get damaged. If the floor was thicker than 1 block would it still work?
I think getting hit just puts you in freefall, so if the floor is segmented and more than 1 block thick you would just fall until you reach that floor. One thing I tested was the elevator where you pick up the flamethrower in Brass Monkeys, although getting hit required hacking the position of the falling gnome. Either way, this just put you on the floor underneath the elevator, and unfortunately not through this floor onto the platform with strawberries below. I think this also rules out clipping straight to the end of Brass Monkeys as well, although I couldn't lure an enemy to hit me through the floor there either.
Also I noticed with this flamethrower powerup, whenever you use the flame in midair your vertical speed gets reset to 0 when the animation ends. Unfortunately seems like the animation lasts too long to be able to spam it. If there was a way to cancel your flame really fast then maybe it could have been used for extended jumps or something, not sure.
This was another idea I had for the strawberries platform. I briefly mentioned it in a previous post but I have a tendency to ramble unclearly sometimes :) Combined with resetting via transformation cancelling it was enough to make contact with the side of the strawberries platform, but a fair way off being able to land on it. It would be very cool if there was a way to cancel it more quickly but I haven't been able to find one yet. Falling or clipping to this platform would probably save 10 seconds or so over the clip in the video above.
I feel like there was one more thing I wanted to say but it's slipped my mind :)
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
I found a few new things: firstly a particularly nice application of the floor clip.
Link to video
Annoyingly, even with all the jump-extending techniques, the battering ram seems necessary to make the jump following the breakable wall, meaning that the second item must be collected while clipped into the floor. The end transformation height increase can't be avoided in the same way (attack + jump) as most transformations, since the battering ram attack causes a small jump. Luckily, it does allow for it to be delayed, which just allows you to pass through the breakable wall.
Next, when you're fully clipped into the floor, getting hit by an enemy will push you down through it. This saves about 6 seconds in Brass Monkeys:
Link to video
Unfortunately this means the slope sliding is cut out, and I'm not sure it will make its way into the final movie. A bit of a shame, as I was quite fond of it, but 6 seconds is 6 seconds.
I also tried to clip through using the gnome before the first set of ice blocks, which would probably save another 5 seconds or so, but wasn't successful. The floor pushes you left very quickly, and most of the ceiling to the right of the gnome is too low to clip into the floor at all, so the only option is directly under the springs with the flamethrower box. It's just about possible to clip into the floor to the right of the gnome this way, but the floor pushes you into the gnome before the transformation can complete. The only solution I see would be to spawn the gnome so that it travels left despite you being on the right of it when spawning, but it seems dubious that this is possible.
Finally, the game gets confused if you try to duck with a transformation that doesn't have a duck animation. In normal cases I think this doesn't do much, but for textboxes that trigger on floor touch, it gives you a 30 frame window to jump instead. This allows a textbox skip in Marble Alley, for example by combining it with the puzzle piece textbox, even while collecting 100 cherries:
Link to video
The false ducking + textbox state is quite weird - it allows you to continue travelling off ledges, and even jump off these "extended" floors. This feels like it could be quite useful, but there are just so few of these floor-triggered textboxes. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Marble Alley (where I don't think it's useful), Drum Solo (ball transformation is very late on, and dubious if it would be useful since the ball already allows you to roll on extended floors for a bit. For now I will combine it with the puzzle piece textbox), Barmy Army (which is currently skipped using the puzzle piece, and would lose time to carry it into Blocks Away), and Fire Pits (the only reasonable transformation is the mini jelly boy ('jelly baby' transformation) which has a duck animation).
This fact that you can carry textboxes over to subsequent levels is the one potential saving grace, but it still feels very unlikely.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
By the way, have you already routed out all the 1-ups and intentional deaths? Like, doesn't the order of the worlds matter for that, or are there plenty of 1-ups?
I had routed it, but the new discovery in Cresta Run (saved 12.8s on my first testing! Very happy this got found) will likely change the optimal route since there is no longer the life on the way back up with the balloon.
The order of the worlds is quite important - there are nearly enough lives you can get without losing time for all of the deaths, but 3 or 4 extra will be needed. Previously, the order was going to be world 1, 2, 6, 5, 4, 3 but it now may end up being faster to end on world 5. More testing to be done :)
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Eventually it will push you back up once the un-transformation animation finishes, but you can use it to at least push yourself through small sections of wall.
The pushing you back up turns out to be the standard height gain after un-transforming, which can be negated by pressing B as the un-transformation finishes. If you are on the floor, this will usually jump. However, a jump can be negated by pressing Y on the same frame. It turns out that the two of these combined allow you to stay at the lower y-position, so you can zip indefinitely or sometimes walk through walls. Unfortunately not as useful as it sounds since the zip direction is usually unhelpful - I found a 1.5s timesave using it in Fire Pits (first level of world 4) but I'll keep looking elsewhere.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
I tested Cresta Run (second stage) recently and it's possible to reach the top platform without the ballon transformation by jumping to the top platform with precise timing.
For Snow Falls (fourth stage) wouldn't be faster cancelling the ballon transformation (X button) then dying by touching that enemy next to the puzzle piece?
I found this in Cresta Run too but much to my annoyance it lost around 30 frames due to the longer countdown and extra transitions - I've tried hard to get the puzzle piece without the balloon but to no success. In particular, it seems too far away from any of the platforms on the way down to jump to it, and I've been trying to clip through the floor at some of the slope boundaries with the new glitch but again no success. The flat snowy floors seem to only push you up out of them, and the slopes are built in a way that makes it hard to get into them at all. I'll probably keep trying a bit, because it would be very nice to make this work.
Another thing I was trying was to skip to the final area earlier in Brass Monkeys. I had a couple of methods in mind - either the new floor clip by going back to the section before the treadmill, or simply by falling down the hole after the treadmill and using whatever gravity-lowering techniques I could (grabbing flamethrower, vertical speed reset on finishing flamethrower use, getting rid of flamethrower seemed best so far - still end up about 30 pixels too low) to land on the ice blocks below.
I don't remember whether I tested this before or not, but I had a look just now at Snow Falls and it ends up about 10 frames slower because the dying by getting hit animation is so long. When I read your message I also expected it to be faster, but apparently not.
Thanks for the feedback :) I'm glad the world 2 boss looks good to you - I'll still have more of a look at it to try to squeeze out a few more frames because I haven't tried too hard to optimise the height of the boss jumps yet.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Here, if you turn around just as you reach the ledge you can land on ledges you couldnt normally land on. This works for any ledge, and I guess it's more of that backwards hitbox jank. I noticed this because you jumped down and had to let go of right for a bit. This seems to save a few frames anyway.
Second, in Marble Alley, one of the later slopes can be jumped off of like 2 frames later to preserve more momentum. In your posted WIP it occurs at frame ~6188. [edit] I'm dumb and forgot the extra orange collected adds to tally at end of the level. I never really did any analysis on this, does 1 extra orange cause the tally to negate this improvement?
[edit] is this game sync friendly at all? I never got around to testing that. I would assume it's not
I have been using the turnaround landing and Challenger's floaty landing from the World 3 videos, but evidently I never clocked rewatched far enough back to realise they could be used in Drum Solo too :) The most striking use I've found for them is Cloud Eight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R1OGUcdqDU
Indeed the extra orange loses 5 frames from the extra 5 time, and jumping later only gains 2 frames. Either way, Marble Alley has seen quite a rework since the second WIP - I'm hoping to have one out soon covering the first two worlds. I've also LOTADed the rest of the game to get a feel for which lives to pick up, so hopefully it will be a bit faster from here on out.
On the whole the game syncs just fine - the loads sometimes vary by a couple of frames, but within levels it syncs provided you were on the ground at the end of the previous level if you need the jump. Bosses are a bit of a different matter, because the bosses besides world 1 seem to be some of the few things that actually use the RNG - the only other thing I can think of are the chimneys in the bottom half of Cloud Eight, but this is not a problem as in the above video. The bosses are annoyingly also quite hard to optimise, and the world 2 boss is the one thing holding me back from WIP 3 before this new clipping into the floor trick to play around with :) But perhaps if I post my best attempt someone will spot some improvements to it.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Thanks! Nice find - I hadn't discovered this yet. This allows skipping the wallclimber for the puzzle piece in mini maze and saves around 250f. Will look into other uses, this was just the first thing that came to mind.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
I discovered some weird behaviour in the physics engine - during an attack while on a slope, the speed limit increases by a fixed amount (I think depending on the steepness of the slope) every frame, so you can gain (in theory) unbounded speed with this, given an unbounded length attack.
For the regular punch, the attack is too short so that this loses time even on the shortest slopes unless the punch hits something, which extends the attack by a few frames. For the blowtorch, the attack is essentially unbounded in length, and this has a very nice application at the end of Brass Monkeys in world 2.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
Very nice work - it's good to see that cancelling the mini transformation can be used somewhere. Before walljumping was discovered, I had found you can get pushed into a wall in mini maze where the final mini transformation is, but in that case it was useless since there was no other platform to jump off.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
If you return to a finished stage, this trick also allows start+select command usage. This can be useful for Mini Maze stage of world 1, for instance.
I just realised this and came to post about this! Moving the puzzle piece section of Mini Maze after the Darkroom allows the jump at the beginning of the Darkroom and also the exit after the puzzle piece. Of course, this also saves us from collecting a life somewhere. But I hadn't realised that it also skips the textbox in other stages - this seems to work on the ones that pop up with advice about the game too.
Unfortunately pausing and unpausing takes too long to make the faster ending to Barmy Army quicker overall, but e.g. on the one in the first stage it saves 21 frames. Thank you very much for pointing this out!
Edit: This and many other (mainly small) improvements here.
Current TAS:
[SNES] Jelly Boy
[NES] Street Fighter 2010
