Ive been contacted on irc last month by Uroboros who did a Hunk run for Resident Evil2, I was pleased by the quality of the run (especially for a begginer) and convinced him that first it would be better to do the main game, we decided to co-op and do the 4 A/B movies (outch!).
Soon afterward Ajax decided to submit his run, while at first look the movie looked great I figured it was missing precision when looking closer to the input file, we decided then with Uroboros to optimize this movie before going further with RE2.
This is
03:41.85 faster than the
canceled movie (note that the canceled movie end 63 seconds too late, if the movie ending doesnt fit audiance/judges this can be changed easly). Id like to give Ajax proper credits for doing a good draft/test run, it wasnt very hard to optimize our movie with that reference, yet no input was kept so I dont put him as a co-author. We use original mode because it is faster.
Thanks also to Spider-Waffle for pointing out the glitch with the plant to get the armor key without chemical, i dont know with precision how much this saved but its over a minute, and this is the main twist compared to Ajax's movie. It might be possible to optimize further the skip and damage itself, but thats the best we nailed down so far.
The difference route wise with canceled movie is that you dont have to get the chemical so it avoid the whole right wing exploration of the mansion in the begin, but this also prevent the meeting with barry (giving acid rounds), this switch the
set of cutscenes, forcing you to listen to barry behind 002's door, note that if you get the key before listening to that dialogue, then you can open door and get an extra cutscene with barry, leading also to barry not saving you at the plant boss.
If it wasnt for that trick we would still been about a minute faster, while following the older route we did save ~20seconds for reaching the serum room trought various optimizations. To be totally frank the canceled movie was poor technically (but still pretty good on route), just on the main menu we could save over 100 frames, you can even notice real time the intro starting after menus.
Im not going to be a lot verbose on the technical aspect of this movie, I dont think this is "perfect" but I think we did quite a good job and explored many strategies, the menu "trick" that Ajax did use prooved to be slower in most cases, Im not even sure it save anything for real time speedrunners because the time it take to go menu is higher than the time it take for Jill finishing her animation (and yeah the time in menus is counted for final time), this is usefull for snake basicly it save a few frames because you are forced to switch guns, if you press menu too fast then damage doesnt register.
We founded a few tricks, but you can hardly call them "tricks", for exemple when you USE an item, instead of letting the menu disapear by itself, you can press start after waiting one frame and remove about 6/7 frames from the fade out, rapid shooting works like in RE3 (turbo the R1 key and hold X), Jill doesnt run faster with a one handed weapon in this game.
The snake boss required some luck manipulation to register full damage with grenades, but otherwise we arent really needing to manipulate luck, the ammount of rooms affect by rng is very small (4 or 5 by memory), it affect usually the AI of the zombies, otherwise the game is flat deterministic and its one of the most syncable game I tased so far, probably due to the fact this game is a nest of frame rules (cameras, menu, doors ect...).
The range for further optimization depend of the ammount of route change involved, if the route is stricly the same i dont except more than 5-10 seconds to be saved, unless we did some errors that we are not aware off. The complexity of the cutscenes sets may allow for route based time savers, but it require long and tedious testings, maybe avoiding the bazooka could save time but thats probably tight.
Now one more question you guys will want to know about is why PSX and not NDS, well, im all for having the 2 versions published, the games are quite differents with the cutscene removal and extra movements
ect... Yet, i dont feel like the screen split would make the NDS version prefered _over_ PSX, if I had to choose only one then I would go for original PSX full screen and cheesy acting.
Then finally why Jill and not Chris, I believe both should be published, Best ending would require several more minutes not sure if its worth to do it, we went for Jill first simply to reuse the draft from Ajax, we are now going to do Chris before going further into RE2.
