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Eye Of The Beholder wrote:
Oh man, that was very cool and it's a shame that it doesn't save time. In the PAL version it's possible to get a bounce in the very ledge of the door, which makes samus touch the spiked platform and get a damage that makes her go to the last platform and that in full speed without delaying for the blue suit. Unfortunatelly, when trying to bounce in the very ledge of the door, Samus just loose all speed for some reason and doesn't bounce. Thanks for testing it!
You need to reach a certain falling speed for there to be a proper bounce, otherwise you'll just lose all your speed. And that's not possible from the small height in that room. IIRC the bounce mechanic acts slightly different in PAL so it's easier to do.
And that wasn't a bounce I did in the door in GB. What happens there is a quirk of how the game works. When Samus is running or rolling on the ground, she actually has a downward speed that is 1px/frame greater than her forward speed. This is so she can run properly on slopes (otherwise she'd constantly fall of in a manner similar to when you armpump on a slope). Anyway. This speed will be maintained during an animation (like morphing), so if you have a high speed and morph just before running of ledge, this will propel you quickly downwards for the duration of the morphing animation. Same goes for turning around just before running of a ledge. Demonstrated here more clearly. Also, more interesting application of the quirk here (was used in the any% realtime TAS).
Fun fact: If you make a hack where Samus can move on the ground at 15px/frame, she can fall straight through the floor.
About the PB door. You can open it early without any significant loss in time, and it would save 20+ frames when going through the door later.
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Eye Of The Beholder wrote:
Edit 3: I managed to make it this time, landing on the last platform. From there you just have to do as Cpadolf did in his 100% run, but as i said before it wastes too much health, also it could be slower anyway. Take a look here.
I did some tests and it seems to be slower. This is the best I could get strategy wise after some short testing. I tried to do it without bluesuit, which would save some time, but didn't manage to preserve speed all the way without it as I can't do the second damage boost. It was about 15 frames slower.
Also, tested hero's idea of delaying the first R-tank and those missiles until later. Using this method, it looks like it's 2 seconds slower. So unless there's some radically better way of doing it, it seems like a no go.
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Neat strategy for the hoppers. It might be possible to get both drops in that room now.
Door-CWJ (or inverse-walljump overall) only works when Samus is facing to the right, so it unfortunately wouldn't work to do it on kraids door.
EDIT: Ok, so all in all the whole Pink Brinstar switch around saved about 3 seconds. It's 4 seconds faster than the old run, but around 1 second of that came from improving the reverse gate room.
I really like how this looks too. It's a much smoother route, and removes a couple of ugly looking parts.
Smv
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hero of the day wrote:
CP:
That was awesome! I had an idea that may save even more time on top of the smv you have. How about if you used the power bomb that would normally open the secret passage way (normally planted nearer to the grapple blocks) on the floor instead. This would open both the secret passage way and the orange door (which would be able to be opened quickly after exiting the PB pack area).
You mean like this?
It does make sense to do that. It only takes another second or so to open the door in that way, and it probably takes more than 2 seconds for the extra trip up and back down again if you take Spore Spawns Super first.
Gonna be annoying to find the sweet spot to open the reverse gate with a super as it's not going to be the same as in the RBO because of high-jump.
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Wow, yeah, that alternative route after the PB in Pink Brinstar is something like 2 seconds faster. I didn't optimize the end of the test either (the last mockball), so it could probably be done a bit faster still. Should be possible to get 2 supers to drop too (one from a hopper and one from the flyer at the end), and hopefully you can get away with using less than 2 supers on the hoppers as well.
CoolStuffINC
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If you have the energy, and if it is possible to charge the shinespark after defeating kraid and still enter the door on the first possible frame, then it seems like it saves about 30 frames. Compared to my old run anyway, but that could obviously be improvable.
Smv
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hero of the day wrote:
Health won't be an issue, as in a new run the WS attic will use the grapple technique to reach the crateria missile pack instead of the shinespark method.
Where was the video of this posted? I know I've seen it at some point but I can't seem to find it.
Eye Of The Beholder wrote:
Edit: I think i sugegsted this before, but i don't remember if it was tested or not, so i'll suggest again: Right after killing Kraid, charge a shinespark while the spikes in the ground are desapearing, enter the room in the right to get the Varia, back to Kraid's room but jumping through door transition, shoot a Super Missile in mid air and shinespark, so Samus goes over the pipe in the next room and reaches the door.
If you have enough energy it's probably worth it yeah.
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hero of the day wrote:
And in regards to the landing site spark, that is something to consider, but I bet CP had tested that in his run. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I don't remember if I tested it or not when I made the run, but I think I did. Anyway, tested it again. At best it's somewhere between equally fast and a few frames slower, at the cost of more energy. But it seems like you can't even get a good enough angle to hit the edge of the wall with the diagonal shinespark, which means it goes all the way up to the "roof" instead, making it significantly slower.
As for the final missile that is picked up in crateria, there is not enough room for a blueball there instead of a PB.
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Eye Of The Beholder wrote:
Interesting idea, so you could lay the pb when mockballing under the Chozo and you can mockball with high speed straigh to the second missile pack too. It would be great if you had enough missiles to open the door to the Reserve Tank area, so when going for the Brinstar Clean-up you could shoot a slow beam and run and jump straight through the door, mockballing under the chozo statue (if the jump was even possible). It seems your idea wouldn't be hard to test. One negative point, as far as i could notice, is the long room with that crabs in the ground and the flyers comming to you. You wouldn't have missiles to handle all the enemies and would have to just mockball through the crab.
If it had been possible to pre-open the door you could have done a blueball into the next room and destroyed the bomb blocks with your bluesuit, but unfortunately you don't have enough missiles at that point. It might still be possible to do the blueball even if you have to open the door with a super, but that would be at a much lower speed (and would be a bit tricky since you have to get to a certain speed to pass through the gates at all, even with armpumping).
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hero of the day wrote:
Very good points. I figured it may be possible to get 2 big e's from the hanging guys right below the pipe bugs, and then maybe get lucky with 4 or 5 big e's on the pipe bugs themselves. This would nullify the need for the rtank I think...
Hmm, it could be possible. Unless the hell run could be improved by enough, you'd need all 7 potential drops in the room to be a big e though, but with enough improvements it could be brought down to 6 + 1 super missile. If it's not possible to get that super you might have to slow down somewhere else to get an extra. When I think about it though, whether that R-tank would be saved for later or not, it would almost definitely be faster to get enough energy to skip that recharge animation anyway, as it takes a full second. If it's possible to manipulate the drops well enough that is.
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That R-tank was pretty crucial to surviving the run to speedbooster (entered norfair with full health and took pretty much every available energy drop leading up to the speedbooster, and still had to have 60 energy in the R-tank). So I don't think that could be saved for later unless there's some convenient E-tank laying around that I'm forgetting.
Picking up Wave after LN saves around 5 seconds (accounting for the detour of taking it early vs late and for the worse equipment you traverse the room with), and it might be possible to get away with only 2 more rounds of refills at the pipe bugs, another 3 seconds, which makes it about 13 seconds lost at best to grab Charge and Wave early. Wave saves 4 seconds or so on Gold Torizo (going by JXQ's run vs mine anyway), and then probably another few seconds in total across the entire game. I don't know how much time all the wrap around shots save combined (or if sacrifices would have to be made in order to preserve energy for them), but it sounds like it'd be a pretty close call either way.
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A question to anyone involved with the run. Did you *know* beforehand that the door at Crocomire could be opened with a wrap-around shot, and if so how (never quite got how and when that glitch works and not)?
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Reading parts of the description is almost as impressive as watching the TAS itself. So much clever thinking, meticulous planning and deep understanding of the game has gone into the making of this run. It's undoubtedly one of the finest pieces of work on the site, and probably my favorite run, not just of this game, but of any game.
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I used that in my 100% run to open the door to the springball room before that creature had destroyed all the blocks, which was useful since I didn't have wavebeam at that point.
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DarkKobold wrote:
moozooh wrote:
I agree with 4N6. Submissions like this have too much love and effort put into thm to be called trolling. In fact, this is by far the most optimized SM run to date...
So, this means SM any% is improvable?
If you mean the glitched any%, then it should probably be improvable by something like 1-2 seconds (+/- whatever happens in the rooms with the metroids, which is impossible to predict). And then you double that amount in standard "Super Metroid is never as close to perfect as you think" fashion.
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Tub wrote:
One last thing: have you considered delaying each room until the *last* sprite exits the room? This might make it easier to follow, and easier to spot the amount of improvements going on.
This would be really cool. The most entertaining parts of the video where in rooms where you had some big delay towards the end, and seeing all the Samus's catching up one by one :P
Pretty awesome video either way though.
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klmz wrote:
Cpadolf wrote:
moozooh wrote:
I've always been a proponent of following the ingame timer for this game [...]
I agree fully with this whole post. In retrospect I regret optimizing everything in the 100% run for realtime (and not just because I was 4 seconds of from 00:35). I hope that whoever decides to obsolete it follows the suggestion of optimizing the realtime route for ingame time (though the route is probably the same anyway). It's more entertaining, equally technically impressive and the sacrifices in time are too small to notice, and in places where you don't look anyway.
I am not sure, but...
If the route would be the same and the sacrifices would be too small to notice, what else could that provide to the watcher besides a smaller number on the timer? Could it be more entertaining if the pause menu would be invoked more often when the fastest in-game time is aimed for?
The pause menu would not be invoked anyway, so that's not a problem. What you gain by optimizing for ingame time on room to room basis is a cleaner and better flow of gameplay. This is because it removes some ugly quirks in movement that is required to optimize for realtime at some points, and making almost all luck manipulation taking place between rooms instead of slowing down in the rooms themselves. The only downside is that there will be a few more frames of fadeout lag during some door transitions, but it's such a small fraction of the door transitions sequence that it won't ever be noticed.
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I'm contemplating possibly doing a run that does not go for 100% kills, and which does not put absolute optimization as most important (meaning not caring about extra frames of lag here due to not killing everything as fast as possible). Whether it'd be faster or slower I don't know, but it gives you more freedom and could be more interesting, which I feel is more important for an autoscroller.
What would be the general opinion of that?
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moozooh wrote:
I've always been a proponent of following the ingame timer for this game [...]
I agree fully with this whole post. In retrospect I regret optimizing everything in the 100% run for realtime (and not just because I was 4 seconds of from 00:35). I hope that whoever decides to obsolete it follows the suggestion of optimizing the realtime route for ingame time (though the route is probably the same anyway). It's more entertaining, equally technically impressive and the sacrifices in time are too small to notice, and in places where you don't look anyway.
moozooh wrote:
The dread of going through the argumentation challenge to convince judges to get this on the site as a yet another category. :)
Hopefully people can see that it's too awesome to not publish :P
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Tub wrote:
Samsara wrote:
I just don't see why it's acceptable for any one game to have near-identical runs side-by-side while the rest have none.
If my memory serves me right, there were three reasons:
Back when the split was made, they weren't near-identical. Only now, several iterations and discoveries later, have the routes converged to a point where they are.
The ingame-run was interesting to speedrunners back when a TAS was basically a speedrun with higher precision. Not only were TASes a good tool to test different routes and room strategies, they could also serve as goalposts, as in "hey, my run is 2 minutes away from perfection. That's pretty good, right?".
But today TASes are using tricks like the Torizo escape, early WS CWJ, luck manipulation to skip ammo and e-tanks, 1-round phantoon, 4-hit Wave-PB combos and other stuff that's pretty much restricted to TASes. Not only aren't the TASes comparable to speedruns any more, they also aren't really helpful for planning speedruns. This ingame-route will never be seen in a regular speedrun.
While it is still interesting to see how much the ingame timer can be lowered, noting this fact does not require publication, nor does a number at the end of the movie make for an interesting movie by default.
The decision to publish both was also meant to prevent postpone a heated debate about the "correct" timing for this game. It had gotten out of hand and was reignited every time a new run with different timing was submitted.
Now that taco&kriole's run has undone the separation, we'll need to consider whether we'll introduce it again to postpone the discussion another time, or whether we'll simply attempt to have the discussion in a civilized manner.
I think you'll agree that all of these reasons were valid back when the split was made.
If you mean the split with mine and Hero's run, I don't think your second point was any more valid then than now. All the tricks you mentioned existed then. And the route, though less far fetched for a real speedrun than this one, was still pretty much unusable.
The rest I agree with. A publication of the same kind that the 14% runs have might be the best for this, though I wouldn't mind seeing it published and the site being more lenient with multiple categories in general.
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Mitjitsu wrote:
Saturn sure likes submitting runs that will inevitably lead to flame wars and heated debate.
This is very true. He even refrained from submitting his Redesign run, which would have almost certainly been published, highly praised and uncontroversial.
