In this pastebin are some thoughts and critique on the lack of provided tests and input files (for e.g. alternate room strategies or late improvements that didn´t make it into TASes anymore) outside of the final TAS product when TASes are submitted on TASVideos. This basically came up during a conversation, but the problem seems to exist for years at least for this game. I didn´t want to have to rewrite all of this in a better form, so I´d kindly ask to read through it (mostly the bottom parts, since the upper stuff just introduces into that) and understand my point:
http://pastebin.com/ufG9ZuQt
I´m generally against this old, obsolete-able fashion where people in the past actively kept some of their resources back/in secret, and it´d be nice if some concept of providing more than just the resulting TAS (in case there exist further resources that are deemed to be potentially useful or promising) could become a new (though I don´t know if this is done for TASes of other games in general already or not) standard for TAS submissions in general (if resources aren´t provided in posts already anyways). At least I could imagine that the TASing community as a whole would benefit from it.
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Here is some routing analysis for 13%PB-Ice that uses the trick at Draygon where ammunition gets reduced and the time-dependent count with respect to positive direction of time pretty much continues to flow "downwards" (with negative derivative) past the value 0, where it jumps back to the maximum (the word underflow makes so much more sense from a numerical/mathematical perspective, no matter what anyone says ;P):
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/218520158963105792/221437313522204673/004.jpg
Regarding upcoming room names, I mainly refer to this list of rooms with their corresponding names:
http://deanyd.net/sm/index.php?title=List_of_Rooms
One would turn Moonwalk on (for example due to the amount of movement suitless within water), Ridley cannot be done before the thing that I call Underflow happens (due to lack of ammunition), and other Powerbombs than the 2 Red Brinstar ones mentioned in the linked picture should all be way too slow to get.
Route A does Wrecked Ship late, B if it works should be the fastest route (and does Phantoon early), and if route B doesn´t work, then route C which uses early Wrecked Ship remains to be compared with route A.
(In PAL, by the way, after taking Varia and Ice and then the 2 PB packs, it´d also be possible to use the Red Brinstar GGG to enter Maridia from further up.)
For climbing frozen enemies (such as crabs) in general, instead of doing what Saturn does in his RBO TAS (which is turning Ice off and then on again, which without Highjump obviously would need to be done much more often), one could use Ice-less Ice-SBAs, i.e. starting an Ice-SBA, then turning Ice off so that all the 4 particles individually freeze a crab only for a few frames anymore (to just stun it shortly) which allows Samus to spin-/Flatley-jump off of it once per particle without the need of menuing as long as one has particles left to time landing on the crab right after hitting it with a particle.
Technically, in all cases, one could probably get Ice, then Varia and possibly the Kraid-E.T. (in this order), but I estimated that this would just be slower than vice versa.
The asterisk (*) in the picture (in the NTSC case, only) for route B means that 1 part is not confirmed possible (and could thus be impossible). This part consists of climbing up the right Cacattack Alley room. In PAL, it suffices to Flatley-spinjump off of the bottom, static, frozen Cacattack to start wall-climbing. For NTSC, my suggestion would be to try it like this: Lure the ceiling Cacattack to the far right, have an Ice-SBA´s last particle prepared, with frozen bottom Cacattack and shortly beforehand gained invulnerability frames such that a started Flatley-spinjump to the right allows Samus to go through the ceiling Cacattack without knockback, and the remaining Ice-SBA shall freeze the ceiling Cacattack immediately afterwards (so that one doesn´t need to freeze it manually which would lead to breaking out of spin, and freezing it that far to the right initially wouldn´t allow to move through it), then Samus while still rising a bit during the spinjump shall align to the frozen Cacattack to gain more height quickly and at the latest possible point in time, one should move away from the ceiling Cacattack to hope that the remaining upwards speed allows Samus to "catch/grab" the wall to start wall-climbing. If this doesn´t work, then I guess this part is impossible and route B cannot be used.
One probably only wants to underflow Missiles and Super Missiles, but not Powerbombs, since those will not work/explode as long as their count exceeds 65536/2 from what I know (except that Kejardon said that there should still exist a few values above 65536/2 that allow layed Powerbombs to explode). And the free spark gained via the Underflow needs to be used to escape pre-Draygon room.
In case A, after Draygon, I estimated that it wouldn´t make sense to go to Phantoon and then to Ridley, just to then go back up again, due to backtracking, so this option is left out.
Regarding the "fastest way to Tourian", there would be the Red Brinstar route, Blue Brinstar route, and Green Brinstar route available (but I didn´t bother estimating which one is the fastest in this scenario).
Regarding the "fastest way to Norfair", there would be the route including the Maridian Tube, the route through Snail-room and the bottom sand room, aswell as a route through Botwoon and pre-Botwoon room and Everest room available. In the last 2 cases, one could also pick up the Botwoon-E.T. meanwhile. In case B, Botwoon though will still be alive.
In Lower Norfair, even though one could use Ice to clip through the ceiling in Mickey Mouse room (after luring 1 certain Multiviola 4 times back to the right side so it can travel upwards), it should be faster to go through the Pillars room and WRITG. Otherwise, within Norfair, the path towards and away from Ridley should be clear. For Tourian, Ice for Metroids and the extreme amounts of Missiles/Super Missiles for Mother Brain´s room can be used.
