Submission #1673: AnS & Randil's NES Darkwing Duck in 10:59.5

• Constant jumping all the way - actually it's needed always, not only after first jump (as explained in current movie description), but from the first frame when you're able to control DW. Darkwing waits 4 frames not after landing, but before walking
• Strategically using arrows to hit hidden enemies/bosses below DW, or to deliver double damage (-6HP means instant kill for most of them) with single arrow
• Taking damage while being ejected from a wall (usually spikes) - this way you don't lose control for dozen of frames
• Shooting last frame before catching bottom of platform/hook (and releasing A button in that frame). This way you can press A again next frame - 1 frame earlier to make next jump!
• Abusing object collisions to quickly eject DW up - frequently used with arrows and platforms, at some cases this even helps to skip catching bottom of platforms)
• Abusing background collisions to get stuck in a wall and eject DW forward (Megaman-like wallzipping) - very difficult to achieve, strongly connected with subpixel coordinates and vertical acceleration. Used only once, with little effect
• Abusing collision detection bug: falling arrow can hit enemy on the top of screen (see Moliarty tower)
• Reducing lag and rearranging unavoidable lag to get some indirect benefit - with LagMeter tool it was quite easy, although little tedious
• Jumping up before the game realises you're standing on air (intro scene at Bushroot battle, just frame-perfect input)
• Taking damage at the moment when boss dies - helps to jump down quickly, instead of waiting for automatic movement (see Bushroot battle)
• Managing health by manipulating refill drops just in time (Liquidator level)
• Manipulating boss to die near the bottom of screen, so that it doesn't need to fall all the way down (Megavolt battle, seems impossible in Bushroot case)
• Heavy subpixel optimization for creating perfect collisions with background landscape (was put in practice only after 4th level) - nfortunately, even huge amounts of rerecords can shave only few frames per level

Lag comparison Table:

Level	Old movie	New movie
Wolfduck	48 frames	16 frames
Quacker	21 frames	1 frame
Liquidator	25 frames	0 frames
Moliarty	46 frames	30 frames
Megavolt	38 frames	4 frames
Bushroot	6 frames	2 frames
Beak	54 frames	0 frames
Total	238 frames	53 frames

At the beginning of the year I was involved in little Darkwing Duck ROM hack project, so I learned a lot about the game structures. But somehow I didn't think about obsoleting old Famtasia movie here, mostly because Walker Boh's movie looked very solid, and I don't like obsoletions that are less than 10 seconds improvements.

Then, after some forum discussions Randil PM'd me and asked about teaming up, so here we are.

To say the least, it was very interesting experience. Randil makes challenging WIPs, and it was fun to search for improvements in runs that seem unimprovable at first.

From the very beginning I knew that the game can provide more arrows than we can use, so I never traded time for item drops, instead I frequently used 2-3 arrows (6-9 points) even for 1-frame timesaver.

At first I though that final record was gonna be 11:05+, but after discovering several big timesavers (like Bushroot battle) a little hope to cross 11 minutes mark has appeared.

Then I revised my old Choujin Sentai TAS and thus learned about subpixel optimization (plus became even more obessed with polishing up things). Because first three levels of DW run were made without this knowledge, I think the submission can be improved by more than dozen of frames. Plus, today I know how to reduce lag in third level even more. Also there still may be something we didn't notice. For example, there may be some other way to get stuck inside a wall, or whatever.

Right now I'm little tired of the game, so I don't think I'll be improving the run in observable future. How about you, Randil? ;)

Lag Counter Tool:

This was one very long project. I started this somewhere in April, almost exactly 4 months from now, so this was a long project. After doing a testrun, AnS appeared and showed in-depth knowledge of the game, as well as quite a few new tricks. I asked him to help me out on this, which was a good choise - it turned out that AnS was awesome on TASing this game, and it was much thanks to him that it's as optimized as it is.

Personally, I TASed this game as I TAS most games - frame by frame, constantly looking at memory watcher. I had memory watcher full of addresses this time, and I also optimized subpixels. This wouldn't have been possible at all without memory watching.

Although I started this project, AnS did most work on this run, so I'm putting him as main-author and myself as co-author.

All in all, I don't think I've ever worked so hard to frame perfect a game, only to see AnS improve it even more. :) It's not perfect though, since we found ways to improve the first few levels by a few frames. But neither of us feel like redoing it for those frames anyway, so we'll let it be. To put things short, here we have a very optimized run, which I'm proud of being part of.

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NesVideoAgent: Hi! I am a robot. I took a few screenshots of this movie and placed them here. Here goes! Feel free to clean up the list.

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