Hello everyone.
I have finally finished the first 8 levels in my Battletoads 2 players warpless TAS. Alyosha's WIP ended in level 8, so I can now compare how fast my movie was compared to his. In total, I ended up finishing exactly 420 frames faster than Alyosha, which means that my current WIP is faster by 7 seconds! I've already summarized earlier ITT where I saved time in levels 1-4, so I won't repeat that description here. However, I managed to save more time in levels 5 and 6 (which I went back to redo), and also in levels 7 and 8. As such, I will list those timesaves here:
Level 5:
I saved 20 frames in this level by using player 2 to fall out of bounds instead of player 1, and by falling out of bounds slightly faster as well. The reason why player 2 was faster is that you start the level with player 2 being slightly closer to the surfboards than player 1.
Level 6
Even though this level is mostly an autoscroller, I was surprisingly able to save 101 frames in this level. The reason for this is that jumping at particular times to scroll the screen makes the snakes turn their heads slightly faster/sooner, which allows for a few frames to be saved on each snake. This adds up over the course of all snakes throughout the level, which ultimately allowed for a relatively large timesave.
Level 7
I saved 99 frames in this level compared to Alyosha's WIP. Some of this timesave came from the first half of the level before the flying section, by killing enemies slightly faster and by having one toad do 2 mid-air punches to kill the 2 rats while the other toad runs to the right edge of the screen so that the screen can be scrolled slightly sooner. Additionally, I saved time in the flying section by keeping as far to the right as possible for every checkpoint except for the last one. On the last checkpoint, I kept as far to the left as possible, and since the screen scrolls faster before you hit the checkpoint, I was able to save about 30 frames on this last checkpoint alone!
Also, I embedded a secret message in the middle of level 7. See if you can find it! :)
Level 8:
Up to Robomanus, this fight is a copy of Alyosha's WIP, so no time is gained or lost. Alyosha's WIP desyncs during the Robomanus fight, so this marks the last point that I can compare my WIP with Alyosha's WIP. The start of the Robomanus fight occurs 420 frames faster in my WIP compared to Alyosha.
In the Robomanus fight, I finished 11 frames faster than the fight I did in my original WIP of the game, and I also finished 39 frames faster than the 2 player warps TAS did, since I had faster attacks and didn't perform the speed-entertainment tradeoff of getting squashed by the boss after he is killed.
Next up, I have to TAS the longest and most difficult-to-TAS level of the game: the Terra Tubes! Wish me luck!
Here is a link to my WIP:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/62355587629478395