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Link to video
Through Tong City. I think I'm sick of this level after doing it twice in as many days. Some mild changes compared to the last video. Everything is intentional. You may notice a couple weird parts, but I can assure you they're intentionally done.
I think that up to this point, the movie's around 200 frames faster than my last improvement? There's a lot of unavoidable time losses, too, so I probably saved around 4-5 seconds total. Sub-13 is a possibility at this point...
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Well, we almost always accept improvements regardless of entertainment value. There are some rare cases where improvements are rejected, but that mostly happens in two cases:
* There are still more improvements to be had, or a faster TAS out there
* There's no actual gameplay improvement, as in the "improvement" is just faster text or something similar
As long as you directly improve the published run, it'll be accepted even if it's only 1 or 2 frames. Faster is faster. Entertainment is a bit of a dodgy subject, but a more "boring" movie shouldn't make any difference on what the audience thinks.
If your movie is mostly input from the published run, then it's highly recommended you give co-authorship credit to that runner. Permission shouldn't be necessary as long as co-author credit is given.
Hopefully that answers your questions.
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I followed the WIPs from beginning to end. Incredible work, incredible teamwork in the thread, incredible... everything! Here's an incredible Yes vote.
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Alright, back to work on this. I couldn't work out enemy despawning (I doubt it's possible, unlike enemy spawning), so that extra enemy remains. Side effect of the difficulty change, I suppose.
I'm currently optimizing the boss fight in Taj Base, and at the moment I've saved 10 frames over my previous improvement, which if I remember correctly was a 2 second improvement over the published run's boss fight. There's still more time that can come off of it, I'm sure, but it's really hard to optimize killing a boss that's offscreen for 90% of the fight.
At least this is the most time-consuming part. The rest of the run should come more naturally after this fight.
EDIT: Almost immediately after posting this, I saved 24 more frames on the fight. I should post more often! Optimizing this new strategy saved another 10 frames. Pretty sure this is about the best I can get this fight...
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I thought the report was a bit suspicious too, so I looked into it myself. It's giving me the exact same behavior while maintaining 60-61 FPS, so I don't think it's her system. Same thing happens on every Battletoads in Battlemaniacs ROM I've tried, including the PAL version.
Screencapped video showing that it's running at max speed. Sorry about the low sound:
Link to video
I tested in previous BizHawk releases as well: Everything works fine in 1.7.1 and 1.7.2. The bug appears in 1.7.4, but only the video has skipping/speed issues. This is consistent through the 1.8.x releases as well. The bug is entirely gone in 1.9.0, it has the video issues in 1.9.1, and the sound issues start appearing in 1.9.2 and have remained since then.
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I wouldn't be surprised if the entirety of the improvement is just from the much faster text. From a very quick comparison of the Youtube encodes (I apologize for the large images):
Published run:
This submission:
About 30 seconds of difference within the first 5 minutes of both runs. This run also loses about 4 seconds in that timespan due to fighting two Red Slimes in one battle, where the published run only fights one, so the text difference could be as much as 35 seconds up to this very early point.
This is gonna be rough for whoever decides to judge this... I wish them the best.
To help alleviate that a bit, I'll try to find a day where I can go through both runs and see just how much time is saved/lost in areas that aren't text/version differences. I'll just leave this here for my own future reference: Post #110299
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The route change came around the same time we discovered TKDL's TASes. Since we were redoing the entire movie anyway, it made sense to change the route at the time. I might still have an outdated WIP somewhere from when we were still using Bob's path... If I find it, I'll encode the stages we passed up.
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My harshness is mostly in jest. I do genuinely like the game, and it's a very fun game to play, but I still have to admit that watching it leaves a little bit to be desired. The first Splatterhouse is the same way, where there are a lot of autoscrollers and timed fights that don't really lead to the most exciting watching experience.
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The rest of the stage comments are up. I'll write up everything else later today. I also noticed when going back through the run that an extra frame of lag slipped in compared to the published run, so I went back and removed it:
User movie #24197549441528817
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I honestly think this would obsolete the published run. I asked in IRC and that seemed to be the consensus there as well. The differences are minimal at best, as I explained a couple posts ago, so I don't think it's enough of a change to warrant having both published.
I've already got it encoding on my end. Thanks for the offer, though! Much appreciated!
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Run complete, currently writing up the submission text. I might submit it with unfinished comments and without an encode if I get too tired before I finish everything up.
Final time is 19:11.25, which is a couple minutes slower than the published run, but remember that the secret areas are included in this run. Offhand, I think it's around 300 frames faster than the published run in comparable areas? I'll have a more accurate number in the submission text.
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What the hell has this game become? Voted yes, what an amazing improvement!
It's really interesting how the litany of new routes and faster wall clips actually make this 12 seconds faster than the ending warp run.
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