The Robot Masters are done! On to the Wily stages. This movie actually plays through Wily 1, but it's pretty rough right now. I didn't encode it.
Compared to my previous userfile, this movie finishes Crash Man's stage and does all of Wood. But there are also some changes to the earlier stages, which are detailed below.
Metal Man
Switching at the beginning of the stage always saves 13 frames. It turns out that shooting the drill only saves 9 frames...so the early switch is worth it. This plus a slightly better Item 2 placement at the end were enough to break the menu frame rule and save 8 frames! Hooray! But the rest of the run got desynced...
Bubble Man
I was able to copy and paste inputs for this stage with minimal changes. But there was a problem: when entering the boss room in an optimal way, I could not get good RNG, resulting in a much slower fight. I had no option but to slow my entry by a health bar frame rule (a confusing feat due to underwater lag), which caused me to miss the menu frame rule. Normally I'd be sad about that, but it actually synced the run back up, meaning I didn't have to redo any more stages!
Flash Man
Shinryuu showed me that you can abuse the ice physics to get perfect subpixels every time you need to turn around. I did that, as well as optimize the tin can man section a little bit. Unfortunately, this was not enough to break even a health bar frame rule.
Crash Man
In addition to finishing the stage, I found a nice timesave in the second screen. It appears slower, but my first Item 2 despawns much sooner, which is what makes it faster. This saves 12 frames, which gets transformed into 16 by the frame rules. I also saved a lag frame by facing left for no reason, so I actually saved 17 frames.
Wood Man
New content! I love new content!
Watch as I defeat the first Friender. There's a frame perfect ladder grab there that lets me avoid hitting the first ledge, and get my fireball in sooner. It only saves 2 frames, but it's still pretty cool.
Watch as I defeat the first Friender. There's a frame perfect ladder grab there that lets me avoid hitting the first ledge, and get my fireball in sooner. It only saves 2 frames, but it's still pretty cool.
I'd like to point out that my boss fight is one frame faster than the published Any% TAS. Does it beat a frame rule? No. But who cares about those? :D