Stage 5 is improved 16 frames.
Before I forget, the route change at the corner between Segments 7 & 8 was inspired from watching a DTC6 team. I forget who, but it definitely isn't Team 4.
The Charge Swap thing with barriers is documented as Fragile Barrier over in Game Resources.
The reason why I didn't grab the ladder in the older route (
new route makes the point moot) was because we were far too close to the top of the camera. For ceiling clip to work through three solid tiles, we need a particular camera position. Additionally, we're actually high enough at that moment that wall jumps will not work, we lose that along with ceiling collisions for being too high.
EDIT:
Some notes about switching weapons with an existing barrier...
Object stats offset +0x10 is the important thing to look at. It is essentially the animation counter of the weapon. It tends to increment every 4 frames (
some type of animation frame rule, based on when it came into existence). This thing helps the game decide what next sprite to use, modifying offset +0x08 as appropriate.
The game assumes the animations of whatever weapon you equipped, not as the projectile of the original weapon. Each weapon has a different animation length. Bubble has a pretty long animation length, so it can get to some pretty high numbers. Flame has fewer. If you switch from bubble to flame at a moment +0x10 is too high, we're past the end of the animation table for flame, it grabs a buggy sprite index for flame, which is in the thousands when it shouldn't usually exceed two digits, and since that doesn't lead to a workable pointer, the game promptly crashes.
I don't know about hitboxes of these glitchy index values, it might be possible to get some oversized boxes that instantly hit something before it has a chance to draw the game crashing sprite. More exploration might be needed.
However, it is also possible to select numbers where the game instead puts a zero into offset +0x08. This actually disables the projectile without properly destroying it, and removing a projectile like this will not decrement our shot counter. Some animations (
like ones described as Gone Barrier) actually destructs the projectile "naturally," removing it and reducing our shot counter as well.
This sort of glitching can take a bit of exploring and mapping. Offset 0x10 is our important thing to pay attention to. I recommend finding
local function DoBllt in my basic script and adjusting a number in there to show it.