For clarity, here's the old unoptimized 40min WIP:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/408853094/MW4-WIP.gmv
This is the latest true WIP:
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/650957579/MW4-Latest-A.gmv
Can you still gain a frame, Sonikkustar? (Sorry, I didn't watch your GMV yet.)
I'm not sure whether my sub-pixels are optimized when entering the doors and getting the chest?
I'm happy for the discovery that it is sometimes faster to use the shield instead of the sword when running off ledges.
Also, for fast acceleration, it is better to take a few walking steps before running.
---
It seems that I never posted my semi-finished plan for collecting coins, so here it is:
We need 5500 gold to buy a sword after the sewer boss.
This "5500-sword" is the only thing worth buying in an optimal TAS. Everything else wastes time.
There are two options for getting the money:
1. The Gold Bar Route --> Get 3 gold bars from chests and exchange them to money (worth 6000 gold at this point of the game).
2. The Lucky Coin Route --> Get exactly 777 gold, so an Easter egg in the game magically raises it to 7777 gold.
Here are estimated lost frames with the
Gold Bar Route:
~930 frames wasted for the gold bar chests. (It takes ~310 frames to open a chest and we need three of them.)
~750 frames wasted in exchanging the gold bars to money.
~30 frames lost in item usage, because gold bars take items slots.
Total: ~1710 frames lost
Here are estimated lost frames with the
Lucky Coin Route:
After some testing, it seems that less than ~100 frames are lost while collecting coins to get 777 gold!
But 1260 frames are lost while the game is halted and gold is counted from 777 to 7777.
Total: ~1360 frames lost
I'm pretty sure now it's faster to get 777 coins instead of gold bars. (My old WIP collected gold bars...)
It requires some work to plan where to get the coins, though.
Luckily, there are lots of coins directly on the route.
In my old WIP, I accidentally managed to get 594 gold without even trying, 0 frames lost.
777 - 594 = 183
So, we still need 183 gold in less than 450 frames for the Lucky Coin Route to be faster than the Gold Bar Route.
I already managed to get 86 extra gold wasting only 11 frames:
23 gold in the first castle (from a pig dude while waiting a lift, 0 frames lost)
18 gold from three coins in volcano (by jumping higher on a door that has five coins above it, lost 6 frames)
45 gold from two coins after volcano boss (lost 5 frames)
That leaves 97 gold to be collected from somewhere.
From the volcano we could get:
random 38-95 gold, a bag from stoneman (lost ~3 frames)
random 38-95 gold, a bag from stoneman (lost ~5 frames)
25 gold, three coins above lava fountains?
1 gold, one little coin from a green worm? (Wastes ~8 frames, but can make huge difference, if we would otherwise end up with a sum of 776)
In the volcano, there are also these "inferior opportunities", but these are probably used for enemy manipulation anyway (yeah, collecting coins affects enemy movements!):
~6 gold, jump to get a coin that is directly on the route (lost 16 frames)
~6 gold, jump to get a coin (lost 16 frames)
~6 gold, jump to get a coin (lost 16 frames)
~6 gold, jump to get a coin (lost 16 frames)
~12 gold, jump to get two coins (lost 16 frames)
6-9 gold, jump higher over a fireball (lost ~5-15 frames)
After the volcano, in the sewer, we could get:
~19 gold, from three (or a few more) coins in the water falls (lost 6 frames or a few more). (We may already have 7777 gold at this point.) In any case, the waterfall coins will probably be useful for manipulating the upcoming miniboss bird.
This should be all, pretty much. All other coins are either too far or unavoidable, so the 777 coins need to be gathered using some combination of the options listed above. It requires some testing, but it's not too hard.
(Sorry, if the plan contains mistakes. It was done a while ago.)
---
Good news:
While planning the coin route, I edited the old 40min WIP multiple times, so I can verify with a 100% certainty that ALMOST ANY PART OF THE RUN CAN BE EDITED AT ANY TIME WITHOUT DESYNCHS! 8-D
I'd like to TAS this, but I'm busy. Maybe I could co-author tiny parts, someday...
Repeatedly kill the goat (about 7 times), so that the dead dead dead goat moves off screen and comes around from the other side. If you exit and re-enter the goat screen now, every screen, every enemy and even the menu is messed up permanently. Maybe there's some potential for useful glitching?
So far, I've been able to reset to the intro screen or crash the game, but nothing useful yet. The position of the goat seems to cause different results.
The RAM tools in Dega are clumsy, but maybe it's possible to manually poke the goat's coordinates to quickly test many positions?
Before:
After:
