Hey. I noticed on the wishlist a few people mentioned D/Generation. I wanted to make a TAS for a while and I love this game, so I'm in the process of taking a stab at it.
So far I've only done a WIP of the 1st floor. Unfortunately I had to do it over (for the 3rd time...) and lost the savestate so I can only give you a dump to use with playdump.exe. It's ~50mb so keep that in mind if you want to see it.
http://www.mediafire.com/?cce60ac98or0ty0
If a veteran of the site watches the dump could you please tell me if I'm on the right track to an entertaining run or it's boring. Thanks.
So, with that out of the way, let's discuss techniques!
The main technique for saving frames is corner boosting. Now comes a shoddy diagram...
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Ok the caret is the direction the player is running, and hopefully the corner is obvious. What happens when you run into a corner like that is you get pushed to the left (along the horizontal plane of the corner) and get pushed back (along the vertical plane of the corner). You will always get pushed further along the horizontal plane than the vertical plane.
Depending on the orientation of the corner it will be 3px across and 1px back, or 4px across and 2px back. Sometimes it seems beneficial to corner boost but it isn't. I will detail how to make a lua script to track the player's x/y position so you can find out how corner boosts are working in your favour but maybe in another post to keep this one on point.
The next technique is going OOB. There is a certain wall prop the designers used in levels that allows you to get around a wall and into no man's land. However screen transitions work by a designer explicitly marking an edge of the screen to go to a certain room, so you can't get crazy game breaking glitches this way i.e going from floor 80 to floor 87 or whatever.
You can see me using this glitch in the dump I posted. In the room I collect the laser I skip getting the key, because I can go OOB in the next room and get around the lock. Later on in my planned run I use this twice more.
The last technique is about luck manipulation. If you've played this game before you know there's item boxes you can collect and they give you random items. Turns out it's really not that random. In fact the boxes only change their contents on DAYS. Not hours mins or seconds, and input has nothing to do with it...
Anyway I will elaborate on routes and stuff in other posts if people are interested. I'll leave you with a map I made of the game. The pictures are just collages and you need to refer to the txt file for scene numbers, items, etc.
http://www.mediafire.com/?6xot5gomky43iqu