OOOooooohhhh.
Start dosen't work on the delay to start the game, or the opening movie. It *DOES* work on alllll that dialog BS that should be cut from the speedrun anyway. Seems to take roughly 2 seconds to activate... but thats MUCH more acceptable then the minutes it takes to flip through it all.
Thank you very very much for pointing that out! And confirming it. As soon as I read it I said "No way" and had to try it out... hehe =)
I've been really chewing over doing this even just for myself if it's not up to nesvideo standards. I really want to see it done as fast as inhumanly possible. My standards for this are very high though, so I'm not sure how long it's going to take me. But I'm going to give it a shot.
Didn't post yesterday, even though I did put another 4-5 hours into studying the game on my own copy (I'm close to finishing floor 10 now), and on the emu. Here's what I found...
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1B (Calm Bounty) found in 3-2(Rare needed to find card for 1B3R99+ final story room)
Floor determines layout, world determines rewards & treasures.
If you make Pooh's world floor 10 (last of 2nd set of world cards) you skip the biggest floor you can. Although it seems like Key to Rewards drops every few fights, and the experience is high. On my cart, I made pooh floor 6 (Doh!).
Tests in Randomness:
1-1:
First fight always 3 heartless and card Tranquil Darkness(2). Frames, collecting items, swinging keyblade and jumping won't change it. You can't hit doors or leave the room without fighting the frozen heartless. Door takes a 2 so this can't be manipulated and is a required fight.
1-2, things change. First fight always seems to give a 0 card, door takes a 3+ (0 works though - somewhat normal behavior). Interesting. Second Fight is semi-random cards with random numbers on random frames, thats determined at the time of the last strike/death of enemy. Semi-Random since it seems to be drawing from the base Red room pool and Green Meeting Ground, the simplest of the map cards. Reloading a game where I saved right after I hit the attack button but before the enemy got hit and died always yielded the same card. In other words, at the frame you press the attack button to hit and kill, you will always get the same card. However, the save before that where his deathblow would come at different frames would be quite random - but in maybe 10 attempts, I did get G-Meeting Ground(5) about 5 times. I doubt these were on the exact same frame, but possibly all within the second of each other. Does it cycle the map card roughly once a second, or is there just a high probability of getting this card?
If you take just the first 0 card and use it, you go to 1-3 with two exits. One is 1+&Beginnings, other is 1+. The first battle in this room also always seems to drop a 0. Upon hitting the Beginnings door, you get another little map tutorial about using key cards.
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All the "Tests in randomness" were done on the same game using a ton of savestates and 50% speed. I plan on revisiting this section with another fresh game just to re-verify it's how I wrote it. I'm also considering even using frame advance and forcing the death blow to happen on the exact frame under different circumstances (different room, different enemy on the map, different lengths in combat) to make sure thats exactly accurate.
I'm basically condensing all this into a Game Mechanics FAQ I'm thinking about putting on GameFAQs weither or not I do decide to go all the way with this. There hasen't been any technical documents I've found so far, even with the 6+ walkthroughs posted.
I also started a "needed" card list that will have a list of every card I need to advance the fastest through the worlds, as well as my own map for floor 10 since it's not in the FAQ I'm using. Both are still far from complete. (MysticalMoon's FAQ on gameFAQs is the one I'm using. Map is in the same psuedo-3d style his are. I'll post it when I finish labeling it all if anyone is interested.)
Thats it so far. Just got home from work, going to play a little bit and work on this some more, but probably not for the hours the last few nights I have been. I have to get up very early tomarrow. =(