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Love all of the new improvements. The one thing I did not like was turning off the sound. I wouldn't mind if the sound in the game was terrible but this has a Natsume soundtrack. How much time was saved just by doing this?
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Why does one stage appear darker in some of the team's movies? Is it a result of in-game technique or just some emulator differences?
EDIT: Nevermind I'm dumb I see they knocked the lights down
Anyway the game was short enough to keep your interest and once again shows you that even seemingly simple games can have varying techniques. I regret not joining but arcade was something I didn't feel comfortable with. Great contest though, results were close!
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I see genesis platformer I watch. I'm surprised there was so much time to be saved from this game, I've seen this run several times and it always looked pretty tight. I never did any investigating myself though.
Great improvement!
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As soon as I learned that this game ran in bizhawk, this was one of my most anticipated TAS games but I never thought anyone would do it.
Not gonna lie when I first saw this appear in the workbench I thought to myself "can't wait to see how bad this is and try to improve it!" This thought immediately disappeared about 20 seconds into the TAS, with the cool super dashes, and it only got better from there on.
You guys clearly put a lot of work into this. This game lends itself great to TASing and there were lots of unexpected glitches.
That was awesome. Yes vote!
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Yeah I noticed the water giving you extra speed as well, it adds nice variation to movement in otherwise sometimes boring stages.
For jungle gym, those pushable blocks dont float on water do they? Also, is that really the only way to reach that exit fast? it's a shame there is so much water below you could be boosting with
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.
What is your speed while riding the giant sand snake? I assume it is worth it to ride all the way to the end, but it takes a while to start up, and there are a lot of water boosts. Did you test not riding the snake?
Also, I found this and I'm not sure how useful it is yet...
Link to video
So if you are in the right position you can boost off of leftward slopes pretty far off of the slope by punching. I was not able to get this to work on rightwards slopes at all for some reason. The punch when going to the right pretty much always slows you down and I don't know why.
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Denial140 wrote:
Falling or clipping to this platform would probably save 10 seconds or so over the clip in the video above.
So after this comment I went and started playing this stage casually. Are you aware you can apparently just jump off the surface of the water? I didn't know this, but I fell by accident while holding jump
Link to video
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denial140 wrote:
I found a few new things: firstly a particularly nice application of the floor clip.
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?
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:
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?
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.
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Denial140 wrote:
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.
Sorry I wasn't planning on making another post so soon but I was playing through cresta run casually when I ran into this interesting clip. It was possible on the narrower slope too but it seemed harder if not impossible to clip completely through. At least playing through it in real time anyway, and I didn't spend much time trying.
Link to video
You might not even need to cancel the powerup, I'm not sure why I cancelled it.
Could this be used to grab the puzzle piece without the balloon?
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Denial140 wrote:
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.
Oh interesting, I never tested it to that degree. Yeah the game has a natural affinity for pushing you left, unless you're already on the very right-most block of the floor anyway, which doesn't help you. A zip to the right would be a godsend and skip a whole bunch of stuff.
I watched the WIP and it looked good but I never got around to loading it in bizhawk myself. I might take a look at some stuff this week out of boredom.
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?
[edit]
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.
I remember you said this so I was curious and did some testing. I couldn't find any way to like get the punch animation stuck or last longer, but I thought.. I wonder what would happen if we could trick the game into ducking since that animation lasts forever. Unfortunately the power of the duck was too much, as you just barely even slide down the slope. I forgot to record me doing this, but it didnt really get anywhere.
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I got around to watching your WIP, and it's looking pretty good so far. I noticed a couple things though
Link to video
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?
That's all I noticed from just glancing at it, it's a solid WIP, and will be even better once implementing the aforementioned text skips. Looking forward to more WIPs
[edit] is this game sync friendly at all? I never got around to testing that. I would assume it's not
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Speaking of getting pushed into walls, you can do it with pretty much any transformation. However since the game seems to push you to the left a lot, I have only found it possible to the left. If only the game would ever push you to the right it would be way more useful......
Link to video
I knew it was possible with the balloon from testing, but I don't know if it was known you can do this with any powerup.
Here's what you do, get a jump height that maxes your y-speed at 5. Find a variation of the jump height that would embed you the furthest in the ground upon landing. Use X to cancel your powerup the moment you reach that furthest y position. This enters the zip mode where the game pushes you left. 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.
Not sure if this was known beforehand or not, or if it will be useful in many places but figured I'd document it anyway.
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Unless the music or sound effects are obnoxiously bad, I dont think 5 frames are worth eliminating the sound from the ENTIRE movie. I realize you theorized there could be more frames from later levels but it seems like the amount saved is very minimal. If an alternate file like some suggested is deemed okay, then it's not as much of a problem I suppose.
The optimization seems okay without having played the game and having no knowledge of it, but sitting in silence was pretty weird to me. Those racing levels gave be bad flashbacks of clinger winger from battletoads.
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From what I recall you can mostly just keep spongebob for a large portion of the stages, since swapping takes so long. However, that squidward zip is pretty interesting we never really fiddled with the other characters much.
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Well for now I've given up on that bit of lag reduction. I did save 4 frames in the end though but I had many more that just caused bad RNG later. Maybe if I just move on for now I'll discover some new ways to deal with stuff.
Since you're more familiar with the game than I am, are there any strange occurences of note that you've happened to come across? Are all the progressive powerups pretty much linear? The game seems very dry in the glitch department, which is a credit to the coders. I haven't been able to find any glitches online or in casual play myself. But any small detail such as the pixel boosts off of slopes could be useful.
On another note, this jump is actually possible with very precise positioning. It generates a bit more lag but it seems to be a few frames faster:
Link to video
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I have posted just about everywhere I possibly can asking for it. It's fine if no one wants to make one I know it takes time. On another note I'm still finding ways to remove lag, and you guessed it: y subpixels...
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mklip2001 wrote:
I don't remember if Jigwally's TAS gets to that point with more than one heart.
He gets there with 1 hp. The boss dies so fast that the bubbles are not really a problem. Maybe he manipulated it that way, I'm not sure.
As of right now, I've just decided to take a death on the first boss, but I can probably just make a save state there and test it before I get too far. With how random everything is in this game, I would hate to have to redo a lot of stuff.
Edit: So I did some preliminary testing, and I have found that... they both take exactly 61 frames to take damage on. Amazing, huh? So it really doesn't seem to matter which boss to die on.
mklip2001 wrote:
Another question: how does death affect the RNG? I think part of the reason for Overswarm's deaths in boss fights was to see about getting a more predictable RNG.
Death generates new RNG, at least for the first boss anyway. It would try to sync but sometimes his second jump would go right rather than left. I did notice that you could fire a projectile just as you die (which doesnt cause any lag) and get almost the same pattern. The only difference is slightly more or less lag, and his attack could either be the 3-fireball or the orb attack. I think the 3-fireball is ideal as it actually seems less laggy. I'm not done testing it though.
On another note I decided to take a further look into the training stage, this time I was able to keep at least one of those frames I gained. This of course meant stage 2 will start desyncing like crazy. But upon inspection as I reached each section I started finding ways to mitigate lag. Not sure if some of this is because of the 1 frame difference from the previous stage, but I know a few tricks also worked.
- Sometimes hovering above ground for a bit rather than landing on it straight away would mitigate some of the lag, possibly by not loading some stuff below?
- You can cut each iteration of the push that downward slopes give by doing a glide later, giving you a better pixel value to start the clip.
- Better spawns on the double ghouls on the roof top, and this is where flying just above the roof was discovered to reduce lag.
- Jumps dont always need to be the highest or shortest, sometimes you can jump inbetween and for whatever reason you end up with less lag. This is apparent near the end of the stage.
All in all I saved 1 frame on the training stage and 49 frames on stage 2, improving my previous WIP by 50 frames.
I encoded stage 2 again, without the boss this time (when it uploads):
Link to video
As said before, subpixels are definitely a problem. Sometimes you can get an initial jump off a wall climb to move you up at 3 pixels for the first frame. Usually it starts you out at 2, but a higher subpixel is just enough to reach 3. This doesn't seem to matter as much as the x-subpixel allowing you to cling to walls a frame sooner though. Not being able to view them and just brute forcing it until you get that extra pixel from jumps is not fun either.
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mklip2001 wrote:
Not sure about shooting that one enemy during your last fall to the boss room, but if it reduces enough lag, then it's worth it.
From testing it ended up entering the door at the exact same frame as not shooting so I left it in. Probably because the game is already maxed out on lag at that point if I had to guess.
mklip2001 wrote:
Can you point to which RTA speedrun you're talking about when it comes to death abuse choices?
I'm referring to the current world record run on Speedrun.com, by Overswarm found here: https://www.speedrun.com/gargoyles_quest_2/run/me4gn49y
If I had to guess it's easier for an RTA to abuse death at that later boss because you can just damage boost and spam it with attacks. I'm not entirely sure of the level, but it looks like the Jungle boss by observing his splits.
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So I started looking into this game because I saw stuff being posted about Demon's Crest, so I figured why not give the prequel a look. I wasn't expecting to save any time but I started noticing some small tricks to save very minor amounts of frames. However after reading this thread and learning about subpixels I also realized that I would need to be able to view the subpixels somehow, which I'm not at all good at finding in RAM. Often times I noticed you could jump a pixel higher randomly. This is because you landed with a subpixel range near the top of the Y axis pixel. This is important because when jumping up to do a wall jump you usually want to be on the highest Y pixel. If anyone had a script or is able to make one, I can put it to use by improving this run further. I noticed Jigwally had a script but it's in FCEUX and I'm using Bizhawk.
Anyway, I entered the first boss door 95 frames ahead of the published movie. I believe at least 2 of them are from emulator differences as the training stage starts 2 frames earlier.
Here is the current progress file: User movie #638099523120118925
And for those who want easy viewing, here's an encode of the second stage and boss (still processing atm cause of slow internet):
Link to video
Here are some tricks I found:
- You can cut corners short by releasing your direction until the moment you clear a ledge after walljumping up it.
- You can abuse the weird hitboxes of the sloped ceilings to get slight boosts of anywhere from 8-10 pixels generally. This depends on your pixel/subpixel positioning and is almost impossible to always get 10.
- Jumping moves you less than 1 pixel/frame so you want to cut every single jump as short as you can. Gliding is a good way to do that as you retain your 1 pixel/frame speed during it.
- Not really a trick, but the overworld only polls your input every 8 frames.
Now with all of this said I'm pretty sure it's even further improvable via subpixel manipulation etc. As of right now I'm kind of just fumbling in the dark until the subpixel randomly lines up. I was able to save 2 frames on the training stage by manipulating the subpixels, but I subsequently lost them because of bad subpixels later. I might be able to keep them if I knew exactly where I was changing the subpixels. This is just one example why it is important. Also, I'm pretty sure I didn't get perfectly ideal mage spawns, as they are very hard to manipulate while keeping your improvements from earlier in the stage.
I do have one question though: I TAS'd a little bit of the boss and I wasn't sure if I should take the death here or at a later point. Jigwally's TAS takes a death here, but the speedrun does it on a much later boss. I was wondering what the reasoning behind both choices was.
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Well while playing the game just now in real time I discovered something kinda interesting. You can clip through any floor with the balloon simply by firing it's projectiles just as you're about to land on the ground. This works with solid blocks as well as semisolids. Now I have only seen the game ever try to push you left out of solid blocks so I'm not sure anywhere it will be useful but definitely something to keep in mind:
Link to video
Also for the heck of it I have made a watch file that contains the absolute basics of x and y speed, and their corresponding positions. The speed values do not take into account external forces on your speed such as conveyor belts (which move you at 4pixels/frame, double your normal walking speed).
You can find that here if you want:
User movie #638089006617572625
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Denial140 wrote:
Just found out that this game already has a thread, so I figured I may as well post my WIP here for the sake of keeping things in one place: WIP 1 (Level 1-1)
Your WIP looks pretty good from a glance. I don't recall too much about my attempt, but I didn't spend very long researching it. I don't think there's anything in my WIP that would stand out but I can still try to pull it up if you wanted to look. The balloon into the blocks thing was me trying to get a zip going, but unfortunately zipping did not happen. It still resulted in getting to the puzzle piece and maybe it's useful to get in terrain somewhere else like this.
One thing I do remember is that jumping cancels the text which makes stage 2 and similar stages very annoying (if that proves to be faster). This is a very long and weird game that didn't hold my interest very long, but it is the source of my profile pic, so I have to be involved in some way huh.
BTW the ROM cheksum is: crc32=F8C72A24
If you still have the same cheksum and it doesn't work, then I don't know. I just tried and it plays fine for me. I could maybe make an encode for you if you really want but it would take a while to upload. Also, looking at it again it's verryyyy suboptimal. It doesn't even have the hammer skip in stage 1 for example.
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The rate at which you finished this TAS had me worried, but the game lends itself to going fast. It's cool to see well-made homebrew games like this, I just wish the game itself were a bit longer.
But the mechanics are very interesting, and I'm down for more homebrew action. Already voted yes the other day.
