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Welp, should have tested rather than assuming, because it's actually looking a bit more complicated. At the time I made that post, I had managed to zip directly into an acid pool and sure enough, I started taking damage and the oxygen meter came up.

As it turns out, "glitchable" and "drillable" aren't actually tile properties - they're spawned objects which are able to directly alter the tile map. This is also true for regenerating blocks. So when you zip into a room, they aren't active - you'll be dealing with the underlying data in the tile map. For example, the glitchable blocks in the passage connecting Eribu and Ukkin-Na are stored in the map as normal solid tiles, and regenerating blocks in Eribu are just empty air tiles.

On the other hand, "solid", "liquid", and "does damage" are actual tile properties, so if you zip into a room you'll still be able to drown in water, take damage from lava, walk around (obviously), etc.

I haven't yet had a chance to check "instant destructible" blocks (the ones that can only be destroyed by the red coat or certain glitched enemies), so I can't say yet whether this is an actual tile property or a spawned object effect, but I suspect it's generally a tile property.

This also helps explain more things about the inner workings of the game, including why some zips work as long as you leave the room while others require you to unload the room and come back, but I'll get into that in a later post.
Has anyone been able to come up with somewhere where zipping is useful? I've been drawing blanks for most of the important items following drone.
Hey, I'm still in the process of actually beating the game atm, so I haven't been keeping up with the board, but I stumbled on a small glitch just now. Skimming through the thread, it doesn't seem to have come up, my apologies if it already has. Its likely not useful, but I figured more knowledge is better, plus it seems to be mechanically related to drone zipping.

Basically, it seems that if you die while landing on a moving platform (possibly vertical only), you are respawned in your last save room, or rather, at the x-coordinate of your last save room and it seems the y-coordinate of the moving platform you died on, relative to the zone of your save room. You'll still be 'in' the save room, but you'll be navigating in the other room. You can restore normal context by exiting through a door (same as drone zipping).

Like drone zipping, it seems that if the y-coordinate is below the save room, you will be zipped upwards until you are on the save platform itself, so it seems to be common behavior that when you are out of bounds in some way you are always zipped upwards?

Here's some videos to hopefully illustrate what's going on:

Y-coordinate above the save point:



Y-coordinate below the save point:



I don't know if zipping has any applications yet, but it's fun to do, and it's better to know about them and not need them than to need them and not know about them.
Hmm...
Quote:
Version 1.12, 5/26/2016
-----------------------
Fix for drone passing through 1-block thick walls
Edit history:
Synophis: 2015-05-30 03:36:29 am
Synophis: 2015-05-30 02:45:16 am
Synophis: 2015-05-30 02:25:22 am
Synophis: 2015-05-30 12:39:52 am
Quote from angelar:
Hmm...
Quote:
Version 1.12, 5/26/2016
-----------------------
Fix for drone passing through 1-block thick walls

Well that's completely unnecessary fix :/

I found one zipping place which is semi-useful. You can get to the grapple room from the small connector between Kur and E-Kur-Mah. You just need to drill a couple of tiles. If you skipped the grapple, you can pick it up when leaving E-Kur-Mah with the red coat, though it's not the easiest thing to navigate your way to the grapple blind. You also need to save warp out of the room once you've got the grapple. Other than that, most of the more promising zips don't do anything and you just get stuck inside the tiles.

I was figuring out the blind route to the grapple when I stumbled upon a new glitch:


I don't even know Cheesy You just use the drone, teleport to your drone's location and then shoot the drone against the outer wall of the map. This may be impossible on PC due to recent fix with the drone going through walls. This also works if you leave your drone to another part of the map. For example, I left my drone at the last save point at E-Kur-Mah and when I used the glitch my drone ended up at the middle save point at Kur.



I tried a couple of promising locations but you'll actually get stuck outside of the map. You can't teleport to your drone and the drone's movement is restricted to jumping and shooting. The minimap is also full black. The only way to get out is to destroy the drone.
Edit history:
angelar: 2015-05-30 02:10:58 pm
angelar: 2015-05-30 02:07:48 pm
angelar: 2015-05-30 02:06:48 pm
angelar: 2015-05-30 02:06:31 pm
angelar: 2015-05-30 01:44:03 pm
angelar: 2015-05-30 10:46:22 am
Evidently his concern was that non-runners could use it somewhere but get stuck, but it's like... how? Between drone recall and teleport requiring trenchcoat, how do you get stuck? And where is that anything more than negligible when you can save when you quit?

The nornal route to trenchcoat is significantly longer and peppered with obnoxious jumps. One of those armored bug things on a 3-tile wide platform.

And yes, that glitch looks to most likely exploit a 1-tile wide wall on the edge of the map, so it is most probable it does not work in current version. Will check later.

EDIT: Confirmed it does not work.

Anyway, just for posterity, there does seem to be a relatively easy (though perhaps not the fastest) route to the grapple from the E-Kur-Mah passage way:

The 2nd white block from the right indicates the part where minimap moves 1 square. I then calculated the first available spot directly above it using that horizontal spot on the minimap, and the solution is a few drone launches away. Cues like the number of drone footsteps are useful for navigating to where the grapple  is. (I don't have a save readily available where I could actually perform it on video, though.)

The main caveat of this usage is does traveling back out of E-Kur-Mah manually to obtain the Grapple (or changing your save warp route from below Edin to the last save in E-Kur-Mah) save more time by allowing you to skip Sentinel than simply skipipng over grapple in the old route and killing Sentinel?

It is also not incredibly obvious yet if grapple is needed to kill new Athetos on low% hard. It is definitely not needed on normal.
That find by SMK... dis gon be good!

Yah, I saw that patch note too. I do not approve. Sad

I see you have been busy, Synophis. Looks like if the drone ends up in an invalid location, it's position is reverted to the last known valid position.
Looked at what could be skipped with what SMK found, but sadly I could not find anything.
On PC, the leaderboards for low% now have the proper sort order, with completion rate prioritized over time.
Edit history:
angelar: 2015-06-01 01:09:57 am
angelar: 2015-06-01 01:09:40 am
angelar: 2015-06-01 01:09:22 am
Really probably needs to be more dynamic. The criteria for what is the "best" run creates odd ordering such as this: https://gyazo.com/2fc6470990c8ed107905d97b23202907

A 3-8 hour run really isn't a speedrun, especially not compared to the 60 minute range. (But eh, in-game leaderboards.)
Probably just needs to have completion time added as a secondary sorting criterion.

Still, it's a big improvement over just sorting all the sub-40% runs by time.
It's certainly not a perfect solution, but having runs that have no business being near the top they are so long is just silly.
It's obvious that % takes priority.  That's why it's called "low%"!

And did the dev really remove drone clipping?  That's really disappointing, i thought the dude said he actually likes speedrunning, yet this reduces some tech possibilities.  Kind of a dick move.
Edit history:
angelar: 2015-06-02 05:23:13 pm
angelar: 2015-06-02 05:22:53 pm
angelar: 2015-06-02 05:21:54 pm
angelar: 2015-06-02 05:20:50 pm
It's fair enough re: low%. I feel like it could be better, but perhaps at the cost of needlessly complicating things, so no biggie.

He's tweeted about glitches & speedruns a couple of times.

Definitely agree that I don't see the damage drone clipping was doing, especially when you can save on quit. Everyone's bugged out a game at least once and lost progress for it. They don't need to have their hands held.

There's definitely way worse bugs/glitches in the game, and some are far more important to speedrunning than drone clipping. Mostly his decisions on the matter seem arbitrary. The Athetos platform was one thing since it indicated poor boss design, but still...
Quote from duckfist:
And did the dev really remove drone clipping?  That's really disappointing, i thought the dude said he actually likes speedrunning, yet this reduces some tech possibilities.  Kind of a dick move.


Indeed. I tweeted about it to him and it seems others have too.
I can understand patching out the Athetos platform, but it would be nice if the boss was more speedrun friendly in the first place.

Kinda scared that Mr. Happ will read this thread and removed all grapple/drone clips. I am sure he won't pull that much of a "dick move" though.
Edit history:
Synophis: 2015-06-06 10:05:43 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 09:53:10 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 09:52:54 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 09:51:58 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 09:50:17 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 04:14:02 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 03:35:44 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 02:22:02 am
Synophis: 2015-06-06 02:17:00 am
I finally got the chance to try out the new final boss and I already figured out a couple of strategies.

The way I think the enemy AI works is that they'll move towards the position you are currently at when they start moving (in about 3 second cycles). So if you time your jumps just right, you can keep the enemies in the ceiling infinitely. So this led to the most obvious strat of Kilver + Red coat spam with precise jump timings. It works really consistently on normal with three health upgrades and four power upgrades. The only really dangerous part is the last cycle since those enemies hit a bit harder so it's really important to hit the right jump timings. The health drop rate seems to be increased so that helps as well and you can even create a back up health pool in one of the corners of the room. Getting damaged seems to cancel the red coat cooldown. If you manage to get an enemy underneath you, you can "bounce" of that enemy and chain a lot of red coat dashes together, doing a lot of damage in the process and keeping your position close to the ceiling. It's also worth noting that the enemies themselves do a lot less damage than their projectiles.



Another strat requires you to have both the grapple and the address bomb. Using the address bomb makes the enemies both shoot and move really slowly. You can take the advantage of their slow movement by grappling in the ceiling and leading them towards a corner. When the enemies are close enough just dash through them and blast away at the monitor. Once the enemies start moving towards the floor, grapple towards a corner and repeat the cycle. This works best with the second cycle enemies (tri-shot). You can keep the second cycle enemies alive for the entire fight if you can avoid doing too much damage with the red coat.



As for the game as a whole, so far I've only seen very minor changes. A couple of rooms played out a bit differently but nothing too drastic. The biggest change in the route is getting the trenchcoat the intended way. There's also now two graphics options. Option 1 works the best as it eliminates all the slow down from boss explosions. On option 2, slow down is only really noticeable on Uruku's explosion and it's still nothing like pre-patch slow down.

Quote from CoolJosh3k:
If you have the grapple, you might as well just grapple clip out of the top and just aim down. Nice work though, since I cannot help but feel that this boss battle is the reason we are not seeing many speedruns anymore.

It's not that simple because you need additional stuff to deal damage through the roof. You either need to get more size nodes or a different weapon.
Quote from Synophis:
Another strat requires you to have both the grapple and the address bomb. Using the address bomb makes the enemies both shoot and move really slowly. You can take the advantage of their slow movement by grappling in the ceiling and leading them towards a corner. When the enemies are close enough just dash through them and blast away at the monitor. Once the enemies start moving towards the floor, grapple towards a corner and repeat the cycle. This works best with the second cycle enemies (tri-shot). You can keep the second cycle enemies alive for the entire fight if you can avoid doing too much damage with the red coat.


If you have the grapple, you might as well just grapple clip out of the top and just aim down. Nice work though, since I cannot help but feel that this boss battle is the reason we are not seeing many speedruns anymore.
Edit history:
angelar: 2015-06-06 08:44:44 pm
angelar: 2015-06-06 08:44:30 pm
angelar: 2015-06-06 08:43:30 pm
It's worth noting that the enemies change position faster each time you break the screen thing.

I used a variant of the safe version while messing with a 'no%' run, which I'll post a video of later. It may have more damage uptime than that video with only slightly increased risk. (2 attacking:1 hanging, compared to 1 attack:1hang.) The safe strat also doesn't require the address bomb, but the execution is a lot higher / the laser drones are much more dangerous.

Also useful is the fact that you can bump the screen without taking damage, but still get the benefits of hit invulnerability.



The first video is def. how I handled my normal runs. It'd probably work on hard reliably as well with more careful timing.
Edit history:
Synophis: 2015-06-07 06:07:51 am
Ok, here's the valid any% WR for the current patch:


Up until the final room of the game, there were only really minor mistakes. Then I messed up the last room and needed to save and heal before entering the final boss. The last fight also didn't go as quickly because the health drops didn't go as planned. I'm pretty sure a sub 38 is doable with good execution.
Nice, I do hope this will be on your youtube channel soon. I subbed so I should see it when it arrives.
Good videos, synophis.  The first video was roughly what I had figured out.  Too bad the strategy tends to be a bit slow, since with some slightly bad positioning, you either have to wait to avoid taking excessive damage, or clear out the bottom row if the drones aren't perfectly manipulated.  At first, I detoured to pick up the Distortion Field, which was a little better than the Kilver - it seemed to have this strange effect when fighting the final boss in that you "float" a little bit when jumping up to damage him, and can nearly stay in mid air the entire time, descending slowly and dashing upwards to attack the core.  Of course, it works fine with Kilver with practice.  One thing to note, drones from a previous phase can carry over to the next phase if you don't defeat them, but they will adopt the timing of the next phase as soon as the core becomes vulnerable again.
I wonder if Happ would de-randomize the HP drops on Athetos for speedruns ...
Wait, are the boss health drops still using the rng seed, instead of the special static one for speedruns?
So apparently Tom Happ will not be patching the save warping or the new boss skips (grapple clip). https://twitter.com/CoolJosh3k/status/608384368319545344