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electricslide wrote:
I think I've misunderstood how speedshoes work. Doesn't each character need to use a speedshoe?
No, you're correct. It's just that I believe that optimizing this is not that straight forward.
Imagine the very simple case where you have 2 victims, and both of your characters start at the same place. One victim is in a straight line, while to save the other you need a detour.
Since both victims need to be saved for the exit door to appear, you are actually better off starting the shoes at the same time. Because the limiting factor will always be the "last" victim anyways. Of course this is a simplistic example, but in practice, each pair of victims can somewhat be reduced to an example like this.
When routing I basically tried to find out which character was the "limiting factor", and made sure they were the ones who started the shoes first. Sometimes this meant I had some leeway with the other character, sometimes not, because of the single screen constraint.
And don't worry about sounding critical. I appreciate the feedback :)
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electricslide wrote:
As for the improvable sequences vs tradeoffs for entertainment (IE, not waiting as long as you could for the ideal drops), how many drops were you actually short?
It looks like you had speedshoes the entire time, and had sufficient keys. Also, would it be possible to post a list of total equipment that you needed in the run and the 'ideal drop sequence?'
Might be worth the time to test the rolls to get an 'ideal sequence', and see what that does for overall time.
This is hard to answer. In an ideal world, I'd only get speed shoes, since the potions were basically a backup. Basically, for every slowdown point in your other post I would need 2 additional shoes.
As for your specific points:
- Monster potions are useless in this run since the monster form can only go at normal walking speed
- Level 35: shoes and ghost potions is definitely faster than ghost only. The area at the beginning and the hidden hallway to pickup the tourists is long enough to justify the use of shoes
- Level 36: You mean monster potion for the fight with the boss? Would be slower for sure. The monster doesn't do much damage to the boss and it's harder to move around with it.
- Regarding the "dividing speedshoe timing", I don't think this is doable in practice, since you have to keep the characters in the same screen. So if one character is walking at normal speed, the character with the shoes is stuck at the edge of the screen anyways, and you lose all the benefits. You might save a few frames if you start the shoes only after the character is at the edge of the screen, but you also have to take into account the routing. For instance, one character takes a detour to save a victim, but then the other character needs to do this too so I think it balances out.
- Skipping some boxes: there wasn't anything useful in a resonable timeframe (30~ frames), so I didn't bother.
- Level 1 strategy: I'm not sure what you mean. I do start level 2 with both shoes. And on level 1 there are only 3 boxes. So, bazooka-shoes-key is needed, else the detour on level 1b is too big.
In general, my strategy was to use at the very least 1 shoe per character per level, with 2 shoes for long levels. I had a rough list of what I needed, but I only realized that most of the later levels don't have boxes at all around midway through the movie. I think I could definitely have tried to get additional shoes in the earlier levels, but RNG doesn't always want to cooperate. I went for the 30~ frames self rule because even though I could have 100% ensured that every single box dropped shoes, I also didn't have a good enough estimate of how much would those shoes save in the worst case, because you also have to take into account the time for taking the detour to get the box.
The RNG can be very tricky in some points, you have some enemies that trigger RNG calls every frame, so there is no consistency to work with.
moozooh wrote:
I don't know about 39 minutes (it didn't look like a full 3 minutes were spent without using shoes where it could be helped), but one thing I'd definitely look into when planning the improvement to this run is listing everything (most notably weapons/items) that advance RNG so that shoes can be received from loot boxes without delays. The Pandora's Box (the golden chest item) can certainly be used for this purpose when there are no enemies around.
The pandora's box idea is a great suggestion. And the whole list of things that increase RNG would be nice to have too for whoever is willing to improve on this.
Personally I don't believe you can save 3 minutes on this run, but I'd love to be proven wrong
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EZGames69 wrote:
What's this? A version of this movie that syncs in BizHawk 2.4? http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/62368582410616263
The main reason I wanted to resync this was due to a bug in 1.x versions of bizhawk, it causes playback in avi dumps to not be throttled correctly, you might have noticed that with the Konami logo sounding too fast.
So side effect of this is the movie is about 5 seconds longer due to longer loading time, I also edited the re-record count back to what it is in the submission.
This is awesome! Is there a tool to do this that I just missed? I swear I actually did try to make it work on the newer versions.
Maybe one of the mods can make this the official movie file for this submission? I'm replaying it and so far so good (up to level 7, but there's no reason to believe it will unsync after)
CoolHandMike wrote:
Daaaaaamn. That was fun to watch. Gotta ask. How many hours did it take to do this?
I think on average it was about 3-4h per level? + some time for routing, writing the lua hud... I don't even want to add it all up :)
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Easy yes vote. High quality run!
I'm glad someone finally took the time to figure out the RNG in this game. Do you think you could post the script you used to get the whole 65k possibilities? (Or the results on a pastebin/excel :) )
Great job.
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XYZ wrote:
Allbeert, after all taking damage helped to reduse time?
In last boss level for example.
I am mostly certain it does.
The flamethrower causes damage following the flame sprites. Which continue to move during the hit animation.
The actual problem however, is that the movement of the spider changes a lot. For instance, if I tried to moved away to avoid getting hit, the spider would move on a different direction, and all the frames I already spent shooting would be useless because they would never hit.
Overall the fight was very tricky, it doesn't help that webs spawn below you making movement harder, or that the things (?) that the spider shoots are also all over the place.
All this to say that if I really wanted to avoid getting hit, I could have. But I think the fight would have gone slower.
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So, after roughly checking the differences in only gameplay itself, I need to eat my words.
The total tally is:
I'm faster in 31 levels out of 50. (I'm counting the credits level, and the kill count at the end of the game as levels).
Overall, in terms of gameplay alone, I save 126 seconds.
Here is the table along with comments on where time goes every level:
http://puu.sh/psVDY/13a8bb2b46.png
[MOD EDIT: Un-embedded large image. --Mothrayas]
On another note, personally I find both runs equally entertaining. At least in any%, there is not much room to differences, since the path is mostly straight in most levels. But a 100% run would be very different between 1 player and 2 players.
I do admit that I could have added more entertainment value during "downtime", meaning, while waiting for the door to spawn, but it is very limited anyways. I wanted to go back and add this after I was done, but it seems random movement could randomly add load frames, which changed the RNG sequence, and basically desync'd the run. So I had to leave it as is.
Also, I find it funny that the 100% run, which I find extremely more interesting is a Vault run :)
That said, I'll leave the decision on what to do with this run to the judge of course!
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Samsara wrote:
I doubt 1-player actually provides an improvement to the actual gameplay (I wouldn't be surprised if gameplay time is lost in every level)
This is not quite true. There is significant improvement in gameplay time in my run. I didn't go that much into details in the submission, but I would bet that at least 40 of the 48 levels are faster. I'll look into it later today.
A lot of the changes comes from prioritizing drops, and using speed shoes in many many more levels, I also get to use different routes in some levels because I had enough skeleton keys. The only level in which I had to make a detour compared to the previous TAS is on level 48, but this is minor compared to the time I save on the other levels.
Boss fights are obviously slower in single player, but only by a few seconds (I'd say less than 10 between the two?)
Another thing to note, the fadeout comes faster if you press A. From the looks of it, the previous TAS didn't do it, but I haven't really checked his movie inputs. So this would indeed be another time save that doesn't really count towards the actual gameplay.
