I'm probably a bit late to doing this, but I figured I'd better make a post here in case people are wondering about all the edits and why an improvement was submitted so soon after the first publication.
So after the first submission was published, and I returned and was able to start working on stuff again, I figured I wanted to play around in SegaSonic for the lolz and see what else I could find that could potentially be an improvement. The day after I got back, rodonic messaged me with a 14 frame improvement in the first part of the game, which we added to the original movie and sent to ThunderAxe (the judge) to update the movie file. The next day, me, rodonic, and SpectralPlatypus had the following breakthroughs:
- I discovered a faster way to fall off of ledges, which saved over half a second in Icy Isle and contributed to another timesave in Landslide Limbo.
- Spectral showed me a faster method of reaching the second set of rafts quicker in Wild Water Ways, which also saved about half a second.
- The week before, Spectral had theorized that maybe we could skip the vines in Landslide Limbo using intentional deaths and respawning another player on the other side. I toyed with this in one-player mode, and found out it was viable for singleplayer runs, not just multiplayer. This saved another second and a half, and brought us past the 10:31 barrier into the 10:30 region. Like I mention in the submission text, there is a variant of this that is over a second faster that involves spawning the second player in after the first player dies. However, we agreed this did not fit the "one-player" branch that we were going for, so we skipped out on that.
These last three optimizations not only helped the TAS with saving time, but it's also helped the RTA SSTH speedrunning community save time as well! After we found these, we put them into the movie and had the input file updated again. So far, we haven't found anymore improvements (as far as I know) and we are still working on theorizing potential timesaves. If we do find any, I will either make a new post here or wait till the next submission.