And here's that update you've been waiting for! I've finished the fourth gym, finally. Movie file is at the
usual place[/url], and the
savestates[/url] .zip has been updated with a savestate for the end of the third gym. This update puts me timewise over the halfway point in the run, and I'm currently 108 seconds ahead of the test run at this point.
I think someone mentioned somewhere that one of the trainers in the Rock Tunnel could be avoided.. I checked every trainer in the original run to see which could be avoided and which couldn't, but I double checked here and every trainer I run into is unavoidable.
I noticed a couple rather large timesavers while making this segment, including noticing I've got the resources left in my Wartortle to make it all the way to the purified zone in Pokemon Tower, so I completely bypassed visiting the Pokemon Center in Lavender Town, and moved learning Ice Beam to right after teaching my Doduo how to Dig to avoid having to scroll all the way back to the top of the menu when using the Bicycle to get to the fourth Gym (which takes much longer than really necessary to do).
Doing a bit of testing, walking up the stairs in the Celadon dept. store really is faster than taking the elevator (by about 100 frames), but it is slightly faster to take the elevator back down, and looks a bit cleaner too.
I also unfortunately had to do a bit of moving around to luck manipulate a Doduo out of the bushes west of Celadon (catching it instead of a Spearow would save a good 10 seconds or so by avoiding the whole "X wants to learn Y! But, X can't learn more than 4 moves!" speech, as Doduo only knows 1 move at that point).
As always, if you've got questions/comments, fire them away here.