Hello everyone,
As some of you know, I've started working on an improvement of the 96 exit run. The reason I'm posting is I'd like to get some input from everyone on a specific topic, fadeout lag.
For those of you who don't know, after each exit (regular goal post exit, key exit, boss exit), during the fadeout sequence, the game lags. How much it lags depends on a number of factors, the most important one being your score. In the past, worrying about fadeout lag for the 100% runs (96 exit Super Mario World and 120 exit Super Demo World) has been considered unnecessary and or stupid, because optimizing it is such a difficult task. Your score has to be carefully planned throughout each level, with all upcoming levels in mind. Basically an impossible task for the 100% runs. Of course, it also puts a very serious restraint on what you can do, which enemies you can kill, which shells you can bounce off of, etc.
Now, what I've planned to do for this upcoming run is to handle fadeout lag the same way me and JXQ handled regular lag in our 120 exit Super Demo World run (a game filled with lag), trying to optimize it within each level. In SDW, when we would go back maybe 15 levels to change something, we would lose all the time gained from that improvement when returning to the "current" levels, because of much less favorable lag. Because of this, we decided to complete each level as fast as we could from its current starting state, not worrying about redoing half the run and hope for more favorable lag. In the same way, for this run I've planned to optimize fadeout lag in each exit seperately, meaning I'd try to manipulate the score within each exit to produce the best fadeout time for that particular exit.
To put things in perspective, in most exits we're talking about optimal fadeout having 0 extra lag frames and worst possible fadeout having maybe 4-5. In some exits (particularly boss exits), the difference can be much greater.
Now, there are some pretty good reasons why this is not a good idea. The main argument is, like I said, it likely would limit what I can do for entertainment pretty severely, and I'm certainly not convinced redoing this run and ending up with a faster but more boring movie is something I want to do. Furthermore, doing this is a quite tedious process and would definitely make progress much slower, as well as increasing the chances of me wanting to give up.
All in all, I'm not sure what to do here. Everybody's input would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks.
Edit: To clarify, this wouldn't come close to saving 5 frames per exit, since in many cases optimal (0 extra frames of lag) fadeout lag won't be possible from that level's starting score at all, and I of course don't have the worst possible fadeout lag in every exit of my old run.
This will likely be your only chance to personally have a significant impact on this run, so speak up please!
