Today, as I mark my 4th anniversary of creating my forum account on this website (which also happens to be my birthday), I have improved my very first TAS by 5,343 frames.
The first TAS I ever submitted to this site is very poor even by newbie standards I think. I had very little understanding of how to optimize things and just little understanding of the TAS tools to begin with. Years later I would improve my TASing skills and finding some things here and there that I didnt do in my previous attempt.
So some of the biggest improvements obviously would be routing, as I blindly followed the original RTA route of this game back in the day. However what I failed to realize is some stages have more than 3 placements for the green gems. For many of the stages I was actually going out of my way to grab the slower gems for no good reason. Of course now that I have a chance to look at where each green gem is in each stage I can plan my movement better.
The other big thing that's changed is lag reduction tricks. I had no idea back then what lag reduction was or how to do it. And now I realize how important reducing it is, depending on if I can easily reduce it as much as I can. There's a few ways I can reduce lag in this game, one of them is in the game map, if the main map is shown, the game will not lag at all. It will lag if a world is selected and the levels are shown. By delaying when I bring up the levels for each world, I can time it so I start each level with the least amount of lag so I can start the level loading earlier.
While playing the levels, the easiest way I can reduce lag is by letting go of the run button for one frame, as I dont lose time unless I let go of run for 3 frames, however if a section is laggy enough it's worth letting go of the button for more than 3 frames. The other big lag reduction method is at the ending of levels, sometimes the transition will cause lag. I can open backpack on the same frame I hit the trigger to end the level, and by moving the cursor, reduce a couple more frames of lag that way. This trick is also useful if I need to select an item to use in the next stage, which saves time from having to select it.
For movement in the game, it's best to stay on the ground as much as possible because jumping is not as fast as running. The ground may also have weird properties where if you are running over it, Dora will briefly go into a falling animation and slow down. For some of these, I can prevent that from happening by walking for a few frames before going back to running. This doesnt work for all instances of Dora falling but it does in some.
feos: Delaying per author request.
