Merry Christmas TASVideos! This is our improvement of 1367 frames, or ~22 seconds over the previous run.
This run has taken us a few months and we found many more improvements than we initially thought was possible. If you wish to enjoy the movie to the fullest we suggest you watch before reading ahead.
Level comments in (brackets) are over our previous smv, which is for the same submission but replaced 07/01/12 (dd/mm/yy)
Yoshi's Island 2 (4)
ISM suggested an idea of losing subpixels in order to perform additional corner boosts in this level. These are lost early in the level when 6/5ing. We perform 2 additional corner boosts. Then it became clear that performing one more boost would cause the goal to spawn a frame earlier; we managed a corner clip on a pipe near the end, which is set up via the corner boosts.
Lag is reduced at the goal too, by landing further to the left it seems. Lag is temperamental in this area.
Yoshi's Island 3 (27)
Many frames are saved on the duplications due to PangaeaPanga. Improvement of the sky level is taken from ISM's 96-exit wip.
Yoshi's Island 1 (-2559)
For information on the Item Swap glitch, please see the
previous movie's comments.
Many optimization improvements occurred in this level. The aim of yi1 is to eat the Clappin' Chuck as fire mario by using the item-swap glitch; this yields a Goal Point Question Sphere, sprite 4A. We have two strategies to perform this. The first one (
smv) is to collect a sprite coin from Jumping Piranha Plant while it is on Yoshi's tongue. We burn the Piranha Plant with Yoshi flames from the red shell near the midpoint. We turn the Piranha Plant into a coin, then collect it while it is on Yoshi's tongue. This triggers an item-swap. This strategy might be thought to be very fast, but because of bad placement of the Piranha Plant and the Clappin' Chuck, it costs a lot of time to die. The second one, which we've chosen in our run, is to fill sprite slots by dropping four resereved powerups and then use the fifth reserved powerup to item-swap. This strategy has an advantage, that we can die with no cost of time, but it costs a little time to collect powerups and we also had to R-Scroll.
(Until recently, these strategies matched after heavy optimization. But thanks to insight from regnum0nline (Dawn), 8 frames were gained for the latter strategy. This idea involved 49 hopping most of the way.)
Yoshi's Island 4 (-2559)
No change.
Iggy's Castle (1287)
The large portion of the improvement in this run happens here. The Goal Point Question Sphere we acquired from Yoshi's Island 1 is used.
Donut Plains 1 (1287)
No change.
Donut Secret 1 (1291)
Just before the first pipe entry, speed oscillation is changed from 17¨15 to 17¨16, which saves a subpixel and hence a frame. In addition, this enables us to beat the frame rule of sprite interaction so we can hit the red koopa a few pixels further to the right as it is unnecessary to slow down and it saves another frame.
To reduce key entry lag, we hit the sleeping fish to the left, with no loss of time thanks to the timing of cape spin.
(A frame is lost due to level transition lag.)
Donut Secret House (1290)
(A frame is lost due to level transition lag.)
Star Warp (1292)
We beat the frame rule of star warp and gain 4 frames on previous movie.
Related addresses:
- $7E0013: In-Game Frame Counter
- $7E1F19: Mario's Y Position in OW (2 bytes)
- $7E1DF7: Star Warp speed
- $7E1DF8: Star Warp Rotating Timer
OW transition starts as soon as $7E1F19 hits a certain value or less, and warp speed increments depending on the in-game frame counter, or more precisely, it increments when the value of the counter modulo 8 equals 1. So the star warp has a frame rule whose cycle is 8 frames long. Due to its strange behaviour, beating just a half of its cycle may save a frame , and hence the other half 7 frames.
Star World 1 (1296)
New optimization idea of smashola saves 4 frames. This gives us glitchy colours in this level, also.
(A frame is lost from level transition lag.)
Delaying key entry by 2 frames may remove 2 frames of lag.
Star World 2 (1296)
No change.
Delaying key entry by 4 frames may remove 2 frames of lag.
Star World 3 (1296)
No change.
Star World 4 (1302)
By platform boosting at the beginning, we gain some subpixels allowing us to corner clip once more. This saves us a frame. At the keyhole we reduce lag.
(A frame is gained from level transition lag.)
Delaying key entry by 3 frames may remove 2 frames of lag.
Star Warp (1302)
We managed to beat just the whole cycle of the frame rule, which means no time is lost due to the frame rule. If this was not the case, we could sacrifice a few in-game frames, in such a way we would end up losing no time after star warp, to remove lag frames. We were previously on this plan, but the new sw4 improvement finally enabled us to beat the frame rule and this old plan became useless.
Bowser (1367)
A new innovative method involving manipulating Bowser phases allows us to end input much earlier. We can reset a long counter during a phase by hitting Bowser at an appropriate time. For example in the second phase, by hitting Bowser as he begins his routine to drop a Big Steelie, we can avoid this and instead have him throw Mechakoopas on next round. Addresses 7E14B0-7E14B9 are important in this.
The credits would never be triggered by goal spheres being used at any places of Bowsers Castle. It only puts Mario to the overworld.