Hydrophobia: Prophecy

Sansuriel

Edit history:

Sansuriel: 2014-02-20 12:26:46 pm

2014-02-20 12:13:55 pm

Scurred of water

With the new skip, after you break the glass there is a small window of opportunity to make the clip before water levels off in the room. If you miss it you will be stuck waiting.

I found the problem I was having with doors is that you cannot clip through while your gun is out.

I guess that routing Act 3 will be next, I'm not looking forward to this one because of all the malthus and sketchy jumps.

Caelint

Edit history:

Caelint: 2014-02-20 12:26:12 pm

2014-02-20 12:25:05 pm

Now that you mention it every time I had troubles clipping it was after a fight. How did I miss that. That's definitely good to know.

Regarding fights, you should seriously consider running the game on hard once the routing is done. The number of fights are getting very low already, and speedruns should always go for the hardest possible difficulty, if there is not a good reason to run the game on lower ones (if gel jump doesn't work on hard, then it's okay to run on easy for example, as hard will be a different category). Not to mention your run will be much harder to beat, running on lower difficulty always has the risk of someone making a higher one. If you are dedicated enough to secure you place on SDA, definitely go for hard.

And don't forget other small things, like fastest method of movement, rolling, jumping etc, still needs testing. This is a must before serious attempts.

Sansuriel

2014-02-20 12:34:19 pm

Scurred of water

Easy is just best for testing. Before all the movement is figured out, finding the shortest path through the game is priority. The little things come later.

I've done serious speedrunning before, so I know I'll stick with it to put in the time. I'm not planning to try and submit something that will get beaten in a few months.

Caelint

Edit history:

Caelint: 2014-02-25 04:46:15 pm

Caelint: 2014-02-20 02:53:33 pm

Caelint: 2014-02-20 02:53:04 pm

2014-02-20 01:20:45 pm

So I started looking for things in act3, and that's the first skip I found. You can skip the second 'shut down the electricity' room, the one where the door is on the surface. By going the way I show on the video, you can avoid the deathwall trigger that makes you shut down the electricity, and you can just clip through the door, skipping the whole room full of enemies. You'll thank me later, that room would've been a nightmare on hard. Tongue

Caelint

2014-02-26 07:28:04 am

Other minor skips I found:

1) Gel jump, pretty obvious, only need a reliable spot, maybe one where only 1 gel is enough.
2) Same as the previous video, you have to mash space to jump out of the water and stand up, not sure if you can survive that route on hard without killing tho.
3) Quick way to the door after hacking
4) Skipping the lifting of the blocking object. That spot is very consistent for me.
5) Skip the box moving 'puzzle' by clipping through, consistent as well, all you have to do is clip and go forward.

Act 3 is very linear, so I think that's it for now.

You should record that boss glitch you mentioned, maybe we can find out what's happening and make it consistent.

Sansuriel

2014-07-07 03:02:17 pm

Scurred of water

Sorry for disappearing for 4 months, things came up.

Act 3 is routed now.

The 2nd generator room is bad, and I died once. You get the idea though.

I did get one cycle of the boss glitch, still have no idea how it works though. It happens more often if you kill the adds quickly.

The last thing I need to do is find small optimizations before starting runs. I found a few so far.
1) In Act 1 when heading to the captain, the death warp is slightly faster than waiting for the fire jet.
2) In Act 1 when saving the captain, clipping through the glass and opening the door instead of using site scan is a few seconds faster.
3) In Act 2, the door trick when skipping the CCTV module takes ~16 seconds, waiting for the module takes ~15. So the trick isn't useful.

I'm going to be testing movement tonight and routing for hard in the next few days. Then all I need to do is find out which enemies don't need to be killed.

Caelint

2014-08-09 07:33:19 am

Hey, I'm glad you're still working on it, the route looks solid to me.

The only question remaining is the difficulty. I know I said before that you should aim for running on hard, but seeing more and more of these tricks, and the possibilities of avoiding entire rooms of enemies and just go for the skips, makes it more than viable to run the game on easy. There is no way someone would beat a perfect easy run on hard, it's just not possible. The fights in the game are just annoying and gives no value to a run, there is not much skill involved in it other than good aiming and the goal of speedrun is not entertainment anyway. The randomness of the final boss glitch doesn't help either.

For me, an easy run is justified by many of the rooms you can't skip without fighting on hard, saving minutes of annoying combat sequences. We're talking about minutes in a half hour run, if easy makes it that much faster you should aim for that. It's a speedrun, if easy is 10% faster, then it's better than hard. It's up to you in the end, but if you feel like you're going to burn out from running on hard, consider running easy and save those annoying minutes and your sanity, because let's face it, the game is a bad and annoying shooter.

Hey, I'm glad you're still working on it, the route looks solid to me.

The only question remaining is the difficulty. I know I said before that you should aim for running on hard, but seeing more and more of these tricks, and the possibilities of avoiding entire rooms of enemies and just go for the skips, makes it more than viable to run the game on easy. There is no way someone would beat a perfect easy run on hard, it's just not possible. The fights in the game are just annoying and gives no value to a run, there is not much skill involved in it other than good aiming and the goal of speedrun is not entertainment anyway. The randomness of the final boss glitch doesn't help either.

For me, an easy run is justified by many of the rooms you can't skip without fighting on hard, saving minutes of annoying combat sequences. We're talking about minutes in a half hour run, if easy makes it that much faster you should aim for that. It's a speedrun, if easy is 10% faster, then it's better than hard. It's up to you in the end, but if you feel like you're going to burn out from running on hard, consider running easy and save those annoying minutes and your sanity, because let's face it, the game is a bad and annoying shooter.

Sansuriel

2015-02-22 06:55:19 am

Scurred of water

I've been playing this game on and off for a year now and I can tell you that it's all luck. There is no way to be really good at this game, you just try not to be too terrible. The whole game is the final boss. You either get the skip or you don't, it's completely fucking random. You run the game and on the off chance the game doesn't trap you in a wall, or the gel jump throws you the wrong way, or the camera locks, or you death wall, or fucks you over some other way, it's completely up to the final boss whether it was a run or not. The final boss will act normally most the time, if you're lucky it'll half loop and you skip a cycle, and if your really fucking lucky you can skip 2. Sometimes, and this is my favorite, THE BOSS WILL JUST LOCK UP and you can't complete the game. I've lost just about all my best runs to that. There isn't a huge amount of timesave left in hydrophobia, the theoretical best time(sum of my best) is ~18:50. You'd have to be fucking JESUS to get that though. You need certain skips that are doable only around ~3-5% of the time. Most of Hydrophobia consists of doing alright through the game and PRAYING the SARA cooperates. This game is so glitchy and dynamic that you can't count on anything being in the same place twice. Also, don't count on even being able to finish a run. I might still run this game after I've calmed down. Fuck.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVxeCkgjpqg

HoboWithaShotgun

2015-02-22 01:07:23 pm

Wake up and be awesome

Quote:

I've been playing this game on and off for a year now and I can tell you that it's all luck. There is no way to be really good at this game, you just try not to be too terrible. The whole game is the final boss. You either get the skip or you don't, it's completely fucking random.

This, THIS SO MUCH

I feel your pain dude, I run the console version of the game, and let me tell you, it's a living hell. It consists of some of the same skips (door breaching for example), and while it might look like a somewhat easy run IT'S FUCKING NOT. I think it's safe to say that 90% of my runs end within the first minute, so seeing a run like this with all those door breaches is insane. Amazing work dude

Sansuriel

2015-02-22 02:15:26 pm

Scurred of water

Console is like 5 minutes right? IIRC they left the elevator at the start active, LOL. What's the WR right now?

Door breaches on PC are 100% consistent with practice at least. The main problem is the big skips have the randomness on PC. Softlocks everywhere. Most of the movement I use is just to minimize the chance of getting stuck in a wall.

HoboWithaShotgun

2015-02-22 02:33:11 pm

Wake up and be awesome

WR is 4:55 by me (wasn't recording, so the fastest recorded run is 4:57 by MilsTailsProwerFox)

That's cool, still freaking impressive to see