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Copypasta from what I posted on SDA:
Below is the RNG sequence in SPO. It calls this most frames while the game is active, regardless of whether you're in a fight or not.
00b15a jsr $ccb7 [00ccb7] A:0002 X:0000 //Start RNG sequence
00ccb7 lda #$00 A:0002 X:0000 //Clear the accumulator
00ccb9 xba A:0000 X:0000 //Clear X
00ccba lda $0090 [000090] A:0000 X:0000 //Load the Button Masks
00ccbd clc A:0000 X:0000
00ccbe adc $0091 [000091] A:0000 X:0000 //Add to the Direction Masks
00ccc1 adc $004e [00004e] A:0040 X:0000 //Add to current Button Sum
00ccc4 sta $004e [00004e] A:0089 X:0000 //Store back into Button Sum
00ccc7 lda $0043 [000043] A:0089 X:0000 //Load decrementing frame counter
00ccca sbc $004e [00004e] A:00c7 X:0000 //Subtract the Button Sum
00cccd tax A:003d X:0000 //Transfer Accumulator to X
00ccce lda $bc2f,x [00bc6c] A:003d X:003d //Load from RNG Table
00ccd1 sta $004d [00004d] A:0085 X:003d //Store into RNG address
00ccd4 rts A:0085 X:003d //End subroutine
Different buttons correspond to different bits in the Button/Direction Masks. Pressing multiple buttons/directions at the same time will have both bits be set for as many frames as they are held. It also means that not pressing any buttons will make the Button Sum not change. The RNG Table is at 0x00003C2F in the ROM.
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Sorry I can't be of more help on stage 4 :-/ I have a lot of frustrations with it in real-time runs as well.
I tried to dig in and find some addresses related to the directions bombs push you in, but I still came up blank. I might have found a clue though: I can manipulate the direction of the first bomb in stage 5 by dropping down at the start and forcing one of the infantry to spawn. I'll keep checking, but for now it may be something related to the order that enemies spawn in.
I also tried to dig around and find any sort of flag or otherwise that lets you clip through the beam barriers. Couldn't find much, but I have a feeling it's related to the bomb directions. For example, it might be some overall mechanic of just saying "for explosions, you will be pushed down and to the right" for a given object or timeframe. If that property carries over to the barriers, it makes sense that getting boosted to the right would still hold for the barriers, and they would essentially be pushing you through them. I still don't have any evidence to support this though.
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Sounds great Dooty! I can't wait to see it tonight.
I'm not sure if you already use this or not, but you can clip through the first small barrier (before the ON switch) with a Ballistic charge. I haven't done it but it was in one of the trick videos. The setup was just going to the far right on the ledge and then doing the charge. I guess you have enough speed that it just doesn't collide with the laser tube thing. Could save a couple of seconds.
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Interesting... I'm curious to see which path you take with Ballistic to get to the right side of the stage. Having to use the Havoc at that point doesn't surprise me though. Do you have to wait for the elevator or are you able to climb up without it?
I will paste through my notes on the spawn points when I get home tonight. Below is what I have from memory though:
-2 enemies are spawned at the start of the stage, one on the left and one on the right. Killing either will cause more enemies to spawn on the other side.
-The 2nd "wave" has one enemy spawn on the left, one on the right, and 2 in the middle. They are not active until you reach that particular area.
-After this point things get messy and I don't know the exact conditions for enemies to appear. My strategy is as follows:
--Stay just left of the bridge and use aerial mines to kill as many of the units as possible. One will spawn on the left and one will spawn in the middle in the air. Then another will spawn just left of the bridge and another will come from the left.
--After, proceed right and two more will spawn from above. Take them out with mines and continue right.
--As you go down the second slope a unit should come towards you from the right. Kill it, then turn around and go back toward the bridge. Two more units will spawn from above.
--Wait to the left of the bridge; two more units will spawn from the left. I usually kill one of them and start moving back right and the other one will chase me.
--Move all the way back to the right and down the 2nd slope. If you're quick enough you can get underneath a mech that spawns in the sky and then moves to the right where you can't hit him.
--Move back a little to the left and just wait for another 6-7 units to spawn. They should all appear in range. After the last grouping, head left and you should find one more unit. The last unit to spawn always appears from the sky just to the left of the bridge.
I will try to flesh it out a bit more when I get home; I think it's mostly correct, but I may be off by a mech or two. Sorry I can't be more helpful with the amounts or trigger conditions.
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I played through the whole game with the script, it does work in every stage and for the bosses. It even shows (some) of the loading zones for stage completion, so that's good to know too. There are some oddities due to shuffling hitboxes when you get out of/in a new mech, but pretty much anything that we'd care about shows up.
Thanks! Now I can play around a bit more with the triggers in a few stages and see if any other animations can force clipping inside of objects.
EDIT: I tried digging in to find the exact victory conditions for clearing Stage 4, but I wasn't able to find much. I was able to find the address that determines when you've "cleared" a stage though:
0x001FB3 : if set to 01, the stage has been beaten and it will begin the process to the load the next stage.
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Yeah... It is a really troublesome stage to optimize in real-time for the same reasons. I will say that there is a somewhat set order to their appearance and is not always a spawn-left then right then left issue. I think that after a certain amount of time has passed, they will spawn again on whichever side you are on.
What this means is that each enemy has set spawn locations, but the order is not necessarily set. Optimizing the stage requires keeping up spawns at a constant rate, but you may not have to kill some of the enemies before another group is able to spawn. I use this a bit near the end of the last wave: I just stay a bit to the right of the ship's bridge and allow most of the enemies to come to me. I know there is already one enemy on the left and the final one comes from just to the left of the bridge, so I only have to walk left once more instead of traveling back and forth. An optimized stage 4 probably just includes the least amount of traveling left and right. It's easier said than done.
I can provide you with my notes on the spawn locations and ordering if you think that would help. I'll also play around with it a bit more tonight and see if I can find a quicker way to spawn a large group of them at once.
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I kind of figured that as well. Some of the later stages are more vertically-oriented (such as stage 8) and if you can get to position ~1500 horizontally, you can zip all the way to the stage finish. For the other partial clips (Nitro, Havok) I don't see them being useful just due to the conditions needed to make them work. There might be some oddities with doing it on moving objects like the crushers in various stages. You may also be able to "push" yourself further into the wall with properly-timed melee attacks and/or L+R, but I wasn't able to find anything in my testing.
I just watched the new WIP. It looks great! Your stage 1 is 6.5 sec better than my best-ever RTA for the stage, and stage 2 is 7.5 seconds better. I really enjoy the routes you're able to take; I'm much too ingrained in routes that aim for consistency, so these other setups are really fresh.
I thought about some things that might help in the remaining stages that are different from my current RTA routes:
Stage 3
-There is a way that you can simultaneously drive the ship and your mech; I have no idea how to do it though. It may be faster than trying to travel inside the ship, but I have no idea of the requirements to make it happen.
-At the reactor room, you can instead travel down and to the left if rockets come out of the "port" and use those to go to make a left path. It may be faster if done optimally.
-You can save a little bit of time by dismounting Nitro and traveling up the shaft as a pilot and then taking the Havok. This loses time overall since you don't have rockets to work with, but you might be able to find some faster way through.
Stage 4
-This stage makes me cringe a little. There's probably a different pattern that can make them spawn faster, but all of the other ways I tried had the level complete at roughly the same time. Perhaps the rockets or seeker can help a little?
-Even though they appear on the lower part at somewhat fixed intervals, many of them are already spawned and flying around above the ship. If you get out and fly around you can aggro them and make them come down, but it's hard to say if you can do this in a way that will save time overall. You'll have to repeat several times since they only spawn so many at a time.
Stage 5
-Some way to bomb boost or clip through the big barrier in front of the gun could save a lot of time.
-There may be a faster way to damage or kill the gun rather than waiting to fall inside. Reverse rockets, for example.
-Since this stage is cycle-based if you have to fall into the gun, enough optimized movement may get you to the end a cycle earlier than I'm normally able to.
-Getting a push to the right from the bombs at the beginning will allow you to walk through the electric barrier in the mountain.
Stage 6-1
-Being able to clip through a barrier would again be a big help here.
-There's probably a more efficient way to reach Spider, but I'm not sure what it is. Gia had a different route that went to the end with Nitro, but I found it to be slower overall to get there with Nitro rather than transitioning with Ballistic.
-Make sure to get all of the rocket boosts! They save a healthy amount of time.
-If you could take the lower path (maybe with Booster) and clip into the wall and zip up to Ball, it may save some time.
Stage 6-2
-Big lasers again impede us.
-There might be other places to clip & zip, but I think the spots that I found are optimal given the layout of the stage.
-It may potentially be faster to clip with Spider all the way to the top and next to the boss door after you hit the laser switch. You can kill him with a reverse rocket or pause trick. I don't know if it would be faster though.
-Again, this stage is cycle based. If you are able to get through to the pathway before it goes under the lava, you can save some substantial time over the current route.
Stage 6-3
-If you can get through to the top of the stage via clipping or otherwise, you can cut off a huge amount of time. I wasn't able to find any clippable walls though.
-There are faster ways to get around the Havok than what I currently use. It's too inconsistent for real-time though... If you go to the left half of the second vine on the bridge, the Havok will always shoot through it. Surviving the next part depends on his placement.
-You can clip through the lightning with a boost, probably. I've never done it completely, but I've gone at least partway through.
Stage 7-1
-Booster + 3 Shot at the beginning might give better results than Rockets with an optimal path.
-Some rocket bots throughout can give decent boosts if manipulated.
-Maybe some other non-rocket paths. Note that you do not need to be in a mech to finish the stage, but it would be difficult to get there without something to shoot through the buildings/floors.
Stage 7-2
-Pause trick might save time on the Worms if done optimally. They have 4 separate damage phases.
Stage 8
-Again, being able to clip in to the wall somewhere around 1500 horizontal would allow you to zip all the way to the top of the stage if you're past the small alcove on the outside. I haven't found any way to do this yet though.
-Diving will get you through barriers the small two-tile areas left by bombs. You'll probably need boosts from bombs to push you through them though.
-The ceiling dumper enemies can occasionally give you huge boosts. I don't know what causes this.
-Every time you press dive, your current damage is halved. Useful for maintaining enough HP in this stage.
Stage 9-1
-You need a mech to finish this stage, so even if you could zip through to the top you'd be stuck. I was wrong, you can finish as just a pilot.
-You could skip almost the whole stage if you can clip through to the right at the beginning. I don't expect this to be possible though.
Stage 9-2
-The big problem with this stage is that you only have access to Havok and he can't get up the moving platforms early at all. As a pilot you can get through the main vertical section in one flight, but I couldn't find a way to get through the destructible blocks to the Prometheus.
-Zipping isn't of much use either since everywhere you can zip to still has the issue of not being near Prometheus.
-The victory region for the stage is the entire top part of the stage, but requires a mech. So if you can clip through to vertical position 12 or so, you can win without fighting the boss. I wasn't able to find anywhere you could do this though.
-You can fall on the boss's head if you time it right and sit on him firing down to kill him off pretty quickly. If he turns you will fall into him and instantly die, though.
-It may be faster in a TAS setting to fight the boss as Havok with Shot 3.
That's what I wrote in my notes. Hopefully some of this helps!
EDIT: Just made a pretty major change to 9-2 that saves 20 seconds and takes no effort. I feel really stupid for not noticing it before. There is a random item box on the left underneath one of the moving platforms in the first section that you can pick up a gravity pack from. Allows you to skip two full cycles of the platforms. In a TAS setting you may be able to manipulate a gravity from the first crate above the entranceway and get through it two cycles faster yet.
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Video below.
Link to video
Synopsis:
1. You can slightly clip into any ledged wall with any mech. No use is known for this yet.
2. Switch glitch example. It really messes up the tiles and stage layout, but is very difficult to set up.
3. Drache clip 1. Moving platforms can sometimes move you into places that will clip you into walls. The rest of the time they kill you.
4. Drache clip 2. Since you have a smaller hitbox during a dive, you can fit some places you normally could not. You can abuse this and the momentum from enemy shots to push you into some walls.
5. Drache clip 3. Some walls can be freely moved into if you partially clip into them. No practical use for this though.
6. Spider clip 1. You can clip into any corner with the spider if you properly time your landing on walls. This is an example of going down. Only use for this so far is to get to a blank area in Stage 1.
7, Spider clip 2. Clipping into upper walls lets you climb further up by alternating directions and the jump button.
8. Spider clip 3. Areas that are small enough allow you to clip through them with the right setup and if you can align yourself with a floor.
9. Spider clip 4. You can continually increase height by exiting Spider in certain positions and getting back in. This way you can clip through larger pieces of land.
10. Spider clip 5. Spider's hitbox is odd when it's on the ceiling and for some reason its legs aren't considered part of the main body. In this way, you can just walk into some areas and exit Spider to allow for pilot zips.
What I didn't show were some clips you can do with Ballistic using its charge move while partially clipped into objects. In general it's not useful, but you can get pretty far into some surfaces with proper execution.
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Damage boosts are pretty helpful in a lot of parts of the game, but there's still a lot we don't know about them.
What we do know:
-Unless bullets come from directly below, the will push you down.
-Bullets coming from either side affect your horizontal speed by a constant amount and in the direction of the shot.
-Every impact is the same, except as noted below.
The big notable exceptions:
-Floating bombs. They can move you in any or no direction, and are not affected by how your sprite comes into contact with them, i.e coming from the left or the right does not matter, you will be pushed in the same direction.
-Any of the "ceiling dumpers" (stage 8, 9) can occasionally give huge boosts to vertical or horizontal speed with their projectile, but I don't know how this works.
It's still really difficult to figure out the direction they will send you ahead of time, but it might be a property attached to individual bombs rather than a global variable. I will try to play with it a bit more tonight, but it's difficult to test since I don't know any one thing that changes the direction yet.
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Yeah, I later noticed that the pilot addresses are dynamically allocated. I need to check which ones are set up dynamically, but I believe at least the position addresses are consistent.
Great work on the lua script dooty! I'm excited to see what you came up with for the first stage; I'll check it out when I get home from work. I can add a bit to the script too so that you can track what the next item coming out of boxes will be.
EDIT: My new real-time run with the most up-to-date strats is here. The routes were pretty solid, however not getting rockets in 1 or 3 cost me time and my stage 4 was subpar as well. There is a faster strat for getting by the Havok for 6-3, but it's way too inconsistent in real-time.
Link to video
EDIT2: I really like the route you came up with in Stage 1. For picking up the second rockets though, is it quicker to do the extended hover or to fall all the way down and then jump from the ground with additional acceleration?
Also I just noticed something in Stage 4. If you exit the mech and fly around a bit, you can see that a lot of the mechs are already spawned above the ship and just waiting around. I think there's a spawn limit of 5-7, but you may be able to abuse this by getting them to chase you early and taking them out before their normal spawn triggers.
I plan to write down some things to test on each of the stages for alternative routes that may prove better in a TAS setting soon. I will also making a video detailing how to clip into things and some of the interesting things that follow from it.
EDIT3:
I spent some time trying to find out how the impulses from the bombs work, but wasn't able to come up with anything. The best I can do is determine that they change sometimes. I couldn't determine any solid way to change the direction it pushes me, just that it changes every once in a while. In that way, it very well may be time based. This is unfortunate since optimal boosts might require non-optimal amounts of time to achieve. But I still have no idea on what's actually going on, so we'll see. I tried digging into the assembly a bit, but the calculations for speed are fairly complex and I couldn't track anything down.
On second thought, the direction the bombs send you could be determined at spawn-time, which would make things a bit more tricky. I have been able to change the impulse by spawning a bomb then wandering far enough away and returning. So that might be a clue.
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My earlier statements about the drops is wrong. The distribution is still roughly the same (one less bounce and one more rockets), but my interpretation of how the RNG operates on it was wrong. It's not so straightforward to determine drops.
It will go through this algorithm to determine the "new" RNG, and also the RNG that it will use for the current operation:
-load address 0x000024, then rotate low byte left (carry will go into the right-most). XOR the two; rotate low byte right.
-Increment address 0x000025, add with carry to result of XOR. Store back in low byte if carry clear.
-AND with address 0x00f0 (0x1f) to get final result
The value for the item that appears is stored in 0x000B04, but it isn't loaded until the crate is open. It's a little harder to work with, but I can write a lua script to spit out the next item based on the current RNG.
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Investigated a bit more today, turns out that the speed values actually start one byte earlier than I reported and have a smaller subpixel speed component. This only actually affects vertical movement (horizontal movement moves only in whole pixels), but it makes it a little harder to track. For reference, these are some acceleration times and distances. I will try to explain them as best as I can, but the vertical physics in this game are a little annoying.
Pilot Vertical:
-Raw speed increases 1 px every 32 frames
-In that 32 frames, you will move a distance of (current_speed - .5)*32 + 1
--This means if your speed is 3 at the start of a cycle, you will advance 2.5 * 32 + 1=81 pixels by the end of the cycle.
-Vertical speed for pilot is not capped, as best as I can tell.
Pilot Horizontal Flying:
-Takes 27 frames to reach full speed.
-Travels a distance of 38 px to reach full speed.
Mech Walking:
-Max speed of 2, takes 8 frames to reach max speed.
-Travels a distance of 9 px to reach full speed.
Mech Horiz Flying (Nitro):
-Max speed of 3, takes 11 frames to reach max speed.
-Travels a distance of 16 px to reach max speed.
Mech Vertical Flying (Nitro):
-Initial speed of 2.
-Accelerates up to 4, but actual speed is more like 3.5 px per frame.
-Takes 54 frames to get to a speed of 3, and then another 32 to hit 4.
This will vary for other mechs slightly, but I'm not about to go through and test it for right now.
What this does mean though:
-You get better vertical acceleration starting from the ground than from the air. Any time you need to go up, try to go from the ground instead of just holding it and waiting.
-Horizontal movement should not be too tricky. If blocked by a barrier that will disappear with time, start back a certain number of pixels so that you get through the obstacle at max speed.
-All mechs fall at about 5 px/s even though it reads 4. Pilot does fall at 4, however.
-It doesn't matter whether you start from the ground or not as a pilot, you will have the same acceleration. However, if you can avoid hitting your head as a pilot you can maintain your acceleration which could keep you rising quickly.
Some other speed tips:
-Floating bombs can speed you up a ton, but the direction they repel you is taken from some random element that's not the usual RNG. Needs further investigation.
-The small missile bots in some stages can also give you a huge boost if the missiles hit you from behind. Use this whenever possible.
-All enemy shots will push you forward a bit. Make use of this when possible.
-It is possible to cancel landing lag by using your thrusters at the right time, but I'm not exactly sure when that is.
-Some other enemies, such as the ceiling crawlers that dump lava on you, also give significant boosts in one direction or another.
I updated the address listing to reflect the new findings.
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I can't say for certain. All I did was play around with positioning by poking the coordinates for the mech. In the case of 9-2, the entire top of the stage is a trigger to advance, but requires you to be in a mech. The loading zones for other completions are smaller, at least in the few cases I know about.
EDIT: Some new addresses:
00117 - 2 bytes, signed. Vertical Speed, down is positive.
0011A - 1 byte, signed. Horizontal speed, right is positive.
00617 - 2 bytes, signed. Pilot vertical speed.
0061A - 1 byte, signed. Pilot horizontal speed.
019FA - 2 bytes, signed. Pilot's horizontal position.
019FC - 2 bytes, signed. Pilot's vertical position.
01E16 - 2 bytes, signed. Camera left bound.
01E18 - 2 bytes, signed. Camera upper bound.
01E26 - 2 bytes, signed. Camera right bound.
01E28 - 2 bytes, signed. Camera lower bound.
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I just finished up some testing for item box drops. I have to expand it a bit more to make sure it's consistent across all random item boxes, but based on the RNG value you will get the following items when you open a crate/kill a cargo bot:
0 2 Shot
1 Booster
2 HP
3 Rockets
4 Gravity
5 Grenades
6 Homeless
7 Grenades
8 Grenades
9 Rockets
A HP
B Rockets
C Grenades
D Booster
E Rockets
F HP
10 Bounce
11 Bounce
12 Gravity
13 HP
14 1 Shot
15 HP
16 HP
17 2 Shot
18 1 Shot
19 Gravity
1A Bounce
1B HP
1C Homeless
1D Gravity
1E Gravity
1F Rockets
It ands the number with 1F and uses that to determine the drop, so it should be pretty easy to tell what item is coming up next.
EDIT: I did some more research, and the above numbers are wrong. The RNG goes through its selection sequence first, which shuffles things up a bit. The RNG algorithm is a few posts down.
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Revivifying this thread because this game is awesome and strongly deserves a good TAS.
Just based on the current speedrun strats, a proper TAS can probably achieve ~19 minutes. There are a lot of small optimizations, and plenty of glitches to test out. Some big ones that are still largely unexplored:
1) Switch glitch. Basically, when you hit a switch it goes through a very simple algorithm and just sets the current tile to be +1 (or some other index; doesn't matter) the current one. Thus, "ON" becomes "OFF". The problem is that it uses your location at the end of the "pressing buttons" animation and not the location of the source tile. So what can happen is that if you get pushed off the area with the ON background tile, it will still execute the algorithm, but now it will be based on whichever tile you're currently on. This can mess up the stage layout pretty significantly, and has some other oddities with the spark lines. Regardless, it's difficult to set up since something needs to move you off of the tile. Easier to do in multiplayer.
2) Clipping. The Spider clip is the most well-known, but every mech can clip through walls to some extent. The other most notable is with Drache, since getting inside some of the scenery can allow you to zip up with the Dive attack. Other mechs can slightly clip into every partial wall just be positioning jumps on the edges. In some cases you need to be "pushed" further into a wall by enemy shots to take advantage of it. I haven't been able to find any use for this yet, but I think it might be useful in some areas. Ballistic can get into walls as well, but I'm not clear on exactly which conditions are needed.
3) More experimentation with other shoulder weapons. The typical speedrun route relies on rockets from random crates at several points throughout the run, but there may be benefits to getting turbo or high-level shots from some crates as well. This is worth looking into, but not realistic for real-time routes.
Some other minor glitches such as pause damage may be useful as well, but are not as significant as the above. I have knowledge of a bunch of RAM addresses and other mechanics as well; I can share them if needed.
EDIT: The RAM addresses that I have been watching, all in little endian:
000015 - 1 byte. Increments every 5 seconds and under certain other conditions. Not sure exactly what it does.
00001C - 1 byte. Shot counter. Not sure exactly what it's used for.
000024 - 2 bytes. The game's RNG. Increments by one every frame that B is held and in some other conditions. Gets shuffled any time the RNG is actually called (happens a for bullet patterns).
0000F0 - 1 byte. Contains the mask for the RNG; it gets changed around depending on what calls it. Usually it contains 03, but can switch to 1F for crate drops and some other things.
00010C - 2 bytes signed. Most recent mech's horizontal position. 0 is on left.
00010E - 2 bytes signed. Most recent mech's vertical position. 0 is on the top, going down increments value.
00014E - 1 byte. Your current damage phase. 0 to 7 for every mech.
000150 - 1 byte. Your current phase's damage. Counts up; threshold varies by mech.
000194 - 2 bytes. Time (in frames) left on shoulder weapon. Rockets, boost, gravity, etc.
000522 - 2 bytes, signed. Dynamically assigned enemy HPs. Same for 622, 722, etc. 622 tends to contain boss HP, such as last boss. Enemies die when their HP goes negative.
EDIT2: Some things that still need to get figured out:
-Bomb boost directions. This is something that seems random, but does not rely on the RNG. It's also consistent within most actions/time. I don't have any information about what causes it at this point, but figuring it out may give us access to a few more barrier skips or otherwise. Related, I'm also not sure what the impulses from bombs change about your mech's properties that allow it to go through barriers.
-I tried looking for speed addresses, but wasn't able to locate any. I didn't look very hard, or maybe I was assuming wrong conditions. In any case, being able to track position should be enough for the time being.
-I have observed a variety of corruption occur while playing on a cart, and I have no idea why. In some cases this just causes the name to be warped, but in others it overwrites the controller settings for certain mechs. I've seen the latter happen most frequently with Ballistic, but it has also occurred with Spider. For example, checking the controller setup for Ballistic showed a square where a Y should have been. No immediate use for it, but if it involves some sort of buffer overflow or otherwise it might be possible to get some pretty wackey effects out of the game.
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I have some knowledge of the Robotrek internals, so if anybody is interested in picking it up I'd be glad to share what I know. In particular, all the battles are manipulable as of the frame you enter them. The game copies a frame counter into the part of the crypto chain that it pulls from for battles and drops shortly after the screen fades to black. You can also restart the RNG fresh in resets to force patterns where there would otherwise be none.
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So I've recently started working on this for real-time runs and I've found a couple of improvements to the currently published TAS. The first is non-gameplay related; you can soft reset at frame 53 after booting and you will be able to skip the Sunsoft and Iguana logos. The next two are gameplay improvements.
-In Forest 2 right before the Super Dive 9 you can do a wall-jump on the tree (right above a checkpoint) to skip it entirely and take you directly to the boss. Saves about 8 seconds.
-There's a death warp in Factory 2 that takes you directly to the trolley without having to go through the upper crusher sequence. Just double jump near the tesla coil on the right side of the 2nd floor, then get eaten by one of the end rollers. This should save a couple seconds.
There are a couple other things I've noticed, such as being able to clip through some slopes, but I don't have a use for it yet. Also, it may be possible to just wall jump up the right side of Forest 2 to get to the boss directly and not mess with the stage at all.
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Copypasta from the publish thread:
After watching through again, I noticed several places for improvements:
-In 1-3 and 2-1, don't pick up the clock powerups. This adds time at the end since the time is counted up to be added to your score. It may not be able to sync though, as I'm not sure if the RNG freezes during score counting.
-Along the same lines, a fair amount of improvement can be had from trying to keep the "Bonus" score low. I'm not exactly sure what this is based off of, but it looks like enemy kills. This would be especially helpful in stages like 2-2 where you can have decent control over which enemies you can kill without losing time. Combined across all stages, I think this kind of optimization would bring the total time below 19 minutes. It would require redoing the entire game though, as many more tradeoffs between entertainment, lag, and bonus score would come up.
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After watching through again, I noticed several places for improvements:
-In 1-3 and 2-1, don't pick up the clock powerups. This adds time at the end since the time is counted up to be added to your score. It may not be able to sync though, as I'm not sure if the RNG freezes during score counting.
-Along the same lines, a fair amount of improvement can be had from trying to keep the "Bonus" score low. I'm not exactly sure what this is based off of, but it looks like enemy kills. This would be especially helpful in stages like 2-2 where you can have decent control over which enemies you can kill without losing time. Combined across all stages, I think this kind of optimization would bring the total time below 19 minutes. It would require redoing the entire game though, as many more tradeoffs between entertainment, lag, and bonus score would come up.
That aside, I was really impressed with what you were able to pull off, Dooty!
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I am watching this run very closely. I don't have the time to put into it until I finish Timecop and Congo, but this has been on my list of real-time projects for a while now. Keep up the great work :)
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Excellent work Dooty! It surprises me after each WIP how many new things you were able to put in, for both entertainment and optimization. Yes from me.
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Yeah, I've done as much optimization as I could and I don't think we have any more opportunities for tricks unless a new way to zip comes along. I'm getting closer to submittable runs on my end, so I don't think I'll have anything else to add. New strats on the pirate and final boss thanks to the hitbox viewer, so that helps.
Good luck on the final version! I'm excited to see it :)