Hi, I'm back with another improvement to the "highest level" branch of this game (along with Samsara's own improvements of 00:02.89). This time my primary timesave is much more unorthodox, taking gameplay out of the main "challenge mode" and into an unexpected place:
The level editor
One of the cool inclusions in this game is the level editor. Once you've beaten any (non-tutorial) level in challenge mode, you can use that level as a template to create your own. The level geometry and the background remain the same, but you can put your own objects in, including a functional Starite exclusive to the level editor. Once you've put in a Starite, you can play the level from the level editor or from a separate menu called "Extra Levels". You can also send levels to friends and strangers using NFC or Wi-Fi (back when DS online servers were maintained).
Playing the level from the Extra Levels menu makes the game mostly treat it like a regular level from challenge mode, including giving you money and merits at the end. The catch is that neither of these are retained once you are done playing Extra Levels. This is where two oversights/glitches both involving the level editor and Teleporter come in.
The oversights
I originally was looking back into Scribblenauts stuff for RTA purposes. I was reading the glitches page on an ancient Scribblenauts wikia (different from the one that everybody uses), out of pure curiosity, and saw this interesting entry:
How to teleport across levels.
Go to a player-created level and summon a time machine
After using the time machine and entering the hidden level, kill yourself with a nuke, meteor, etc.
After you die you will find yourself not at the begging of the player-created level, but the level the player-created level was modeled after.
When you complete that level, you will find yourself at the title screen for a different world
I played with this a bit on my Collection copy, and it did indeed work. I found that you can use it to get credit for beating a level that you didn't have access to on that save file, although this wasn't a useful application as it requires a secondary save file that's already beaten that level. It also doesn't unlock the world itself; once you exit the vanilla level, it puts you in the last level select you used in challenge mode. However, I noticed that it let me keep the ollars I had earned from playing the custom level, even though the game would normally clear it after leaving Extra Levels. I also found that the par multiplier is the same as the vanilla level, so you can farm your custom level for the same value, or even more if you set the par to 9 (the highest it ever goes in-game besides A10-11).
Contrary to my expectations, I found something major, and I knew I had to go and TAS it out. hydride_gs saw my initial findings because I shared it in a discord server, and found the same ollar preserving exploit I did, although our work was independent. Once I had finished my first movie with this route, he also shared something that saved about 2 seconds, which was using the pause menu to restart, instead of summoning an object from the notebook to kill Maxwell.
In summary, you can beat one level in a world in order to edit it using the level editor. You can set the par to 9 to get the maximum possible value out of a level in this world (in this case, 2180 as opposed to 1586 that we got from A3-2), and then head over to the extra levels mode to beat the level as many times as needed to rack up 25000 ollars, all without getting the pesky hint or merit screen every time. The game would normally revert any ollars you got this way, but by using a teleporter/time machine to go to one of its levels, and then retrying the level, it places you back in the original level that your custom level was based on, and keeps your money. From here you have to beat the original level one more time in order for it to fully save your money, and then you are free to buy anything you want with it.
So what exactly is different about this run?
I redid all the input from scratch (except A10-11), since I wanted to make sure I was getting all the timesave I could. Besides the points mentioned below, everything ultimately looks the same as the previous submission, which includes routing ideas from me, hydride_gs, and Samsara.
University:
When doing the Collection TAS a couple months ago, I found that the rock in the pool in 0-4 is a tangible rock, and therefore can be used to skip the prompt about swimming. I didn't apply it to the previous submission because the subsequent plane tutorial skip was too precise for me to attempt to resync, but this time it seemed to work pretty easily.
I summon a Cold Gun (more commonly known as Freeze Ray) instead of an Ax in 0-6, since it takes the exact same amount of time to beat A3-1 with Nothing, which we already summon later in the tutorial. The Ax doesn't get used anywhere else, so this is a perfect opportunity to spawn a different object that will get used later without having to worry about the New Object merit. The Cold Gun gets used in A10-4.
I found that it was ever so slightly faster to scroll the camera away from Maxwell in 0-7 before the second tutorial prompt happens, so that it doesn't try to double correct the camera. It rests slightly right of Maxwell, so you can still pick up the baseball and throw it in the direction of the target.
After my submission, Samsara came up with several small optimizations throughout these tutorial levels, including using the desk from the Classroom in 0-9 to nudge the Starite slightly left (D E S K S T R A T S).
Gardens:
When using the tank for one of the level repetitions, I realized that you can drag the tank over Maxwell to reposition him onto the Starite, thereby getting there quite a bit faster than by running and jumping normally. Unfortunately I don't think this kind of solution would work any other time, unless you keep getting merits for summoning new vehicles.
After my submission, Samsara found that using the word reuse button in the notepad actually saves time for the reused words in this section (the game spends some time loading the previous word, but in this case it was faster than retyping Classroom or Study).
She also implemented a slightly different form of D E S K S T R A T S for when the Classroom was used, forcing Maxwell to jump so that he doesn't have to wait for the Starite to fall in order to grab it (similar to how the PC is used for Study).
After Samsara's improvement, I realized that we left this world with 20 extra Ollars, which is exactly enough to sacrifice to summon another tank at the end of the grind, and save another 00:00.77.
The Peaks:
I do only A3-1 in this world in order to gain access to it in the level editor. As mentioned above, using a black hole to clear the level takes the same amount of time, giving an opportunity to summon a different object instead of the Ax which will save more time.
After I make a quick level with nothing but a Starite, I play it until I get 25000 ollars, and then use a teleporter to get back into challenge mode and preserve my money. Normally the teleporter and time machine cause a flashing lights visual effect for a couple seconds, but it turns out that collecting the Starite while "riding" the machine overrides this behavior, which I don't think saves time but it does make it nicer to watch (presumably especially for photosentive people).
Unfortunately, you don't get quite enough money from doing A3-1 twice in order to skip one iteration of the custom level in this run, so there is a bit of extra left over that I don't need, and this remains true even if you go further in world 3 to do a more valuable level before and after the custom level grind (I did the math for A3-4, A3-7, and A3-11, which progressively are more valuable than A3-1).
The custom level grind saved 00:23.48 over the previous submission, bringing the time to under 10 minutes!
Mish-Mash:
This world is the least changed out of the 4 in this run. However, I do substitute A10-4 for A10-3, since it can be cleared without any merits now that we are able to summon the Cold Gun (normally you'd get No Weapons and Savior here, but the gun is a weapon, and killing the Scribblenaut with the huge ice block takes care of the other merit). This saved 00:00.77 over doing A10-3, since clearing A10-3 effectively forces us to get the Savior merit.
As mentioned above, I copied my A10-11 movement from the previous submission (the movement is stupidly precise). Due to my latest improvement, I was unable to get Maxwell to slide across the green gate unless I waited for 3 frames on the level select. I did try to redo the input, but he always landed short of the gate and fell off to the right.
There's also the bits of smaller optimizations in levels seen in the previous publication to complete them a bit faster as well, but I wasn't going to write more with the mouse or try shrinking the text. Anyways, nice work!
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2858
Location: Northern California
If it makes sense to include hydride_gs and Samsara as coauthor again, please do so; I wasn't sure since I made the input from scratch but some of their ideas remain.
About that...
User movie #638837415817934163 - 173 frames faster with some scattered improvements, including two separate kinds of D E S K S T R A T S. This game's way too much fun to mess around in.
TASvideos' Third Strongest Site Admin 🩵 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
User movie #638837415817934163 - 173 frames faster with some scattered improvements, including two separate kinds of D E S K S T R A T S. This game's way too much fun to mess around in.
encode:
Link to video
Using the previous word button is crazy, but makes sense for a 9 letter word. Desk strats are cool and I feel like I should have thought of them for A1-1 since it's similar to the Study strat but I obviously didn't. Anyway, I'm glad that the improvement chain continues. There's probably some other possible routing timesave but I couldn't guess what it might look like.
I realized that having 20 extra money after world 1 means we can afford to summon another object that counts towards the par, so I reordered the initial grind a little bit to allow for adding another tank clear (I also tried Nothing, but it's too slow to type/reuse and loses 12 frames compared to APC). I also incorporated Samsara's remaining classroom reuse mentioned in the usermovie description, since I already had to resync anyway. Together these save 46 frames
User movie #638838412100516145
I also did some math and determined that even though it sucks that we end the world 3 grind with quite a bit more than 25000, it's still likely fastest to do it this way instead of doing more levels like A3-4 or A3-7 and creating a custom level from those. The difference would have to account for 2 custom level clears (4216 Ø) in order to have a chance at saving time.
Edit: encode
Link to video
I found a TAS WIP of the Japanese version (intended to clear all levels but stopped after two worlds). https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm32454903
There were a couple interesting things that I thought could save time so I tested them (different plane skip in 0-4 and different black hole movement in 0-10), and these weren't faster than the current input.
However, I also noticed that A3-1 was done with a black hole instead of an ax, which means that for this TAS, we could summon something besides an ax in the tutorial and use a different object to save time. It apparently took the exact same amount of frames between doing Nothing or Ax, including with typing differences (and I couldn't squeeze out any more frames from Nothing). At first I wanted to eliminate the merit from A10-3 but this didn't seem likely (you could summon a sun to kill the vampire in that level but it seems to take too long, plus the camera needs to pan a bit over so that the sun-on-a-string is close enough to him). I decided to try A10-4 instead, using the gate freezing technique. Normally you'd get No Weapons and Savior here, but summoning a freeze ray counts as a weapon and killing the Scribblenaut with the huge ice block takes care of the other merit. Bizarrely, I wasn't able to get Maxwell to skim across the green gate at the very end of the run unless I wasted 3 frames on the level select (yes I tried resyncing it via other means first). Overall saves 46 frames
User movie #638839869639736803
I'm on a time crunch so for now have this SD encode
Link to video
[16:36:31] <Mothrayas> I have to say this argument about robot drug usage is a lot more fun than whatever else we have been doing in the past two+ hours
[16:08:10] <BenLubar> a TAS is just the limit of a segmented speedrun as the segment length approaches zero
Considering the frequency of improvements in such a short time, should I set this submission to Delayed?
Idk I always think I'm done and then I come up with something else in the next day, and such is the nature of Scribblenauts routing imo. Although presently, unless Samsara has anything else they thought of, I'm out of optimizations to try out.
Joined: 11/13/2006
Posts: 2858
Location: Northern California
I don't plan on working on this further, so it's good to go on my end.
TASvideos' Third Strongest Site Admin 🩵 Currently unable to dedicate a lot of time to the site, taking care of family.
Now infrequently posting on BlueskywarmCabin wrote:
You shouldn't need a degree in computer science to get into this hobby.
