Bump because I'm kind of upset about losing 140 frames for an unknown reason.
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/1897019008/bmbm%20wip2.fm2
So when I kill the Area 5 boss and grab the Dive Mechanics, I'm sent back to the beginning of the "dungeon," but with no enemies onscreen. It seems like the fastest way to take a point of damage is to exit the dungeon, immediately re-enter, and then head to the right to run into an enemy. Another direction may be preferable, but anyway...
In the current run, he's sent back to the beginning of the dungeon and there don't seem to be any enemies, but he begins walking to the left and, conveniently, one of the little guys appears directly in front of him. He takes the fatal point of damage 7 frames after the fade-in, rather than 147 like in my current WIP.
Why is that guy there for him and not me? It isn't the RNG state, since that doesn't update during the fade-in. What gives?
In other news, the boss kill in Area 5 is much faster, though I'm trying to see if I can change things up a bit to have less bubbles, and thus less lag, during its death animation. Even though the lag continues well after the bubbles leave the screen, I was earlier able to have only one lag frame occur during the explosion sequence, but after a significantly slower bossfight.
Oh, and in other news I still don't understand the weapon switching thing at all, but with some trial and error I removed most of the "extraneous" switches, keeping only the ones that actually save frames, and saving 17 frames total as well as making it less annoying to listen to. Notably, whatever is going on there is reset by continuing. After removing weapon switches I had to tweak input to adjust for new or removed lag frames, but the input after the first continue lines up perfectly as before. The RNG, 0x0013, is reset as well on continue.
This indicates to me that input from immediately after a backtracking continue should be re-usable, so if I want to switch to a run that doesn't skip area 4 after finishing the run this way, I'd have to redo Areas 4 and 5 but I could re-use 6 up until its backtracking continue, redo the following backtracking up until the continue in Area 7. But I think I'd be able to keep everything after the continue there. Which, overall, is a lot of work, but isn't as intimidating as I was worrying about.
EDIT: Ah ffffffff- ...I've gotten better at TASing, and techniques I was using during the Area 5 bossfight have revealed to me that I kind of botched the Area 1 bossfight. May need to redo Area 2 and 3, but on the plus side, my redo of the latter part of Area 1 has saved 34 frames so far...
edit: WAIT, I have an idea. That intestinal-tract-like room before the final room in 8 has empty sky outside the walls, as opposed to solid walls like everywhere else in the game. It just might be possible to bounce over to the left, carry over 3 tiles of glitchiness from the room just left of where you start Area 8 in, and pop right into the boss dungeon's little door there... I'll see what I can come up with when I get home from work today.
It's only one tile lower than the exit door, so if you could offset your visual position about a screen or so to the left of your map position (or significantly further to the right), then you could jump up to the door... but swimming around thinking in that context, it does definitely seem to be trying to auto-correct the map around you to your actual visible position. So yeah, it's almost certainly not possible to offset things much further than 5 or 6 tiles. I will look for shortcuts in Area 3, or for actually trying to beat the boss in Area 4, but that will be messy too.
On another note, I'm discovering that switching weapons when pausing and unpausing to remove door transition time somehow affects sub-pixel positioning or something. I'm going to need to dig around in ram and figure out what's going on there, and may even need to restart the run if it seems useful/harmful. There were some doors where I left in weapon switching just because I was being lazy and copy/pasting holding right or left the entire way through the door transition, but releasing the direction for the one frame when I unpause sometimes causes the video to desync.
