Well, a lot has changed since the last post here was made.
First, a couple of new people have picked up the game and really gone to town on its individual levels. Some people have even implemented strafe jumping into their runs, which is harder than it sounds, because you have to tap the jump button on the same frame you hit the ground, or else you'll lose speed. You can't buffer your jumps in this game like you can in Quake. Strafe jumping is also generally harder to do with a controller, so that makes it even more impressive to me.
As far as TASing goes, I've always put off this game because I want to optimize the movement, and that's just not feasible with the tools Dolphin currently has. Dolphin 5.0 LUA is alright, but it means you're forced to use a really old version of Dolphin. Plus, I was never able to get its version of TAStudio to work properly. I've always done TASes with just the TAS input, frame advance, and savestates, but this game's movement is complex enough that I couldn't do it justice with just those tools.
Thankfully, there is a
development version of BizHawk that adds support for Dolphin, so you can TAS GameCube and Wii games with all of BizHawk's features. That means I can take my Dolphin 5.0 LUA scripts,
rewrite them to support BizHawk, and I even get to use TAStudio.
Today, I finished a TAS of the Bad Diplomacy mission. It's the shortest on-foot level in the game, and it's the one speedrunners have optimized the most. Despite that, this TAS crushes the world record by 6 seconds. That's a lot for a level this short. With that, I'm also happy to say that I am going to be starting a full-game Agent Under Fire TAS in the very near future.
https://youtu.be/l1SUB--80bQ?si=pumzo94cqDVhk9XU
