The submitted BK2 file includes the name entry on the high score leaderboard. Discounting that, the movie time at last input should be 35805 frames instead of 39564.
Highlights
- Ends input early
The TASing Process
This is a frustrating game to TAS due to lag. The mechanisms which create or don't create lag are so cryptic and beyond my understanding. This prevented me from getting this TAS done for the longest time until now, where I decided to just not be as much of a perfectionist with my work. To reduce lag, I mainly attempted to simply reduce the number of sprites on-screen, without bothering to test every conceivable combination of inputs that might reduce lag. Reducing the number of sprites on-screen is generally achieved by reducing the number of papers thrown, moving papers offscreen as they hit their target, and progressing through the level as far to the left as possible. That last one is important as a lot of lag-heavy cars spawn in the street; staying as far to the left as possible relegates the street to just a tiny part of the lower-right corner, reducing lag from these cars.
Difficulty
Pressing "Select" on the level select screen will take you to a sub-menu where you can change between "Normal" and "Frantic" difficulty. To my knowledge, frantic difficulty simply has the bees spawn right behind Paperboy at the start of each level, forcing you to always pedal at max speed. Selecting frantic difficulty wouldn't change the overall TASing strategy and would just result in more lag, so I opted to simply continue with normal difficulty.
New "Select Glitch" Discovery
If you hold Select while the level is loading, you'll be able to pull up the Select menu on the first frame the level loads in. Pressing B to exit this menu will cause the level to start immediately, skipping the day of the week text, and saving 129 frames each time. However, it will put the game in a glitched state where none of the sprites are loaded in properly. Bales of papers will be yellow squares and point sprites will be blue rectangles on Monday. For all days though, many cars will be invisible! But those sprites being invisible does not change their tangibility nor the amount of lag they create. So in all, the select glitch does not affect how we actually play through the levels.
Damage Bonus
While the objective of Paperboy is to deliver papers to all the blue houses (the newspaper customers), you are also encouraged to straight up vandalize the gray houses (the non-customers) by breaking their windows, statues, and trampling their flower beds. However, doing any of these will increase your damage bonus, which usually creates more lag and which wastes time to tally up at the end of each level.
Papers
You are given ten papers at the start to throw, which can be selected by collecting paper bales. It is usually beneficial to collect each paper bale for lag reduction. When we must throw a paper, mitigating its lag can be tricky, although we do have some control over the angle at which it's thrown. Throwing a paper while moving left results in a more forward paper throw, throwing while moving straight is a normal diagonal throw, and throwing while moving right results in an almost horizontal paper throw. That last one is perhaps the most useful as you can oftentimes scroll the paper off the bottom of the screen before it hits its target, resulting in less lag.
Monday
Unlike my Easy Street TAS, it is NOT fastest to get a perfect delivery (throwing a paper at every blue house's doorstep or mailbox) on Monday-Saturday. This is because the bonus awarded for a perfect delivery in Middle Road is twice that of Easy Street, and takes twice as long to tally up on the level end screen. Through my testing, I found it was fastest to deliver to all but one house on Monday, sit through one very long "customers turning into non-customers" animation on the score-tally screen, and then get perfect deliveries on Tuesday-Saturday.
The one house I delivered to was deliberately chosen to reduce lag. Any time you fail to deliver a paper to a customer, they will turn into a non-customer the next day. When this happens, enemies associated with that house will become more aggressive. In the case of this particular house, an aggressive dog (which cannot be stopped with a paper) would've come out and chased the player down the sidewalk, generating a lot of lag along the way.
Tuesday-Saturday
After Monday, it is fastest to get a perfect delivery for the rest of the week. The perfect delivery bonus is now greatly reduced because there are not as many customers to deliver to. Each time we get a perfect delivery, there will be a "re-subscriber" for the next day, starting with the first eligible house.
Sunday
Since there is no score tally screen after Sunday, we are free to not get a perfect delivery. We need to deliver a paper to at least one house to prevent a game over, though.
Even though you must hold Up or B to pick up speed on the bike, our last input is made three houses from the training grounds, as the bike preserves its momentum for quite a while. And even though the bees catch up to us before we make it to the training grounds, we made it far enough to get a favorable respawn point and finish the game.
Darkman425: Breaking news: A judge has claimed this submission for judging!
Darkman425: Input file replaced with one truncated to the last input needed to complete the game to better represent the game completion time of the TAS.
I have uploaded the originally submitted input file here: UserFiles/Info/638903972741081883
Interesting how the Middle Road route is the slowest of the three routes. That's a pretty good analysis on why losing almost all subscriber at the start is faster overall, and a lot of lag management was done throughout the run. Nice work!
Accepting to Standard under "Middle Road". Publishers, please use the originally submitted input file for the publication as it includes entering a name on the high score table.