Hi everyone. I just wanted to post a quick update with what's been going on with the Battletoads 2 players warpless TAS...
After it was pointed out to me by AIVV73 that I could save over 150 frames by doing the void jump trick in level 3, I decided to go back and re-TAS the earlier parts of the game.
I also decided that since I was basically starting over that I would switch to using BizHawk to make this TAS.
If I recall correctly, I got the inputs for level 1 from Alyosha's WIP of the game, which in turn got its inputs from Feos's TAS of the game. I re-TASed the level 1 boss since the RNG was different there, however.
The first half of level 2 is also Alyosha and Feos/Samsara/Meggusah's TAS of the level, but about halfway through the level everything completely desynced, so I had to re-TAS the second half of the level.
I TASed level 3 myself, though I looked at Meggusah/Feos's game-end TAS to see what movement strategies were used there to quickly kill enemies.
As a result of all of these efforts, here are the new timing results as compared to both my original WIP I posted for the game a few weeks ago (which used Alyosha's WIP for the first 3 levels), and compared to AIVV73's WIP of the first 3 levels:
Level 1:
I finished this level exactly tied with the original WIP. I was also 4 frames faster than AIVV73's TAS of this level due to a faster boss fight.
Level 2:
I finished this level exactly tied with the original WIP, and finished the level 64 frames faster than AIVV73 did due to better lag management.
Level 3:
I finished this level 162 frames faster than my original WIP due to the use of the void jump trick at the end of the level. However, my level 3 was 28 frames slower than AIVV73's level 3. I looked through the level, and found out that all of my timeloss compared to his WIP was from time spent waiting for the rat enemies to fall from the ceiling, which are on a global timer. For that reason, I don't think it's possible for me to finish this level as fast as was done in his WIP, but it could be that there's something I'm missing.
All told, this WIP is 163 frames faster than Alyosha's WIP, and 40 frames faster than AIVV73's WIP through the first 3 levels.
I'm planning to leave this here for a week so that people who are good at the game or interested in this TAS can look at what I have, and see if they can find any timesaves.
However, after a week, if any small timesaves of a few frames are found in the first 3 levels, I'm not going to be going back to re-do those levels, since battletoads is a very hex-unfriendly game, and re-doing earlier levels will probably involve a lot of work to re-sync everything that comes after that.
EDIT: I just found a way to save 15 frames in level 3. Disregard the above WIP. I should have an updated version posted within 30 minutes to an hour.
DOUBLE EDIT: I saved the extra 15 frames in level 3. Here is an updated link to my TAS:
http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/61269677130913745