That a hell of sub 1:19. Good job!
thx guys^^
SDA Forum
I was wondering what the real time difference between the 3 last WR, outside something like glimp skip or trolling cutscene, to be close to pure execution comparaison.
I take the Meta's run, 1:19:23 , the crawek 1:19:08 run, and the crawek 1:18:44.
I time each act, for act2 I substract the time the blimp skip take (entering the screen and entering the next screen), for act3 I substract the time the two trolling cutscene take (just the begining for the dog one).
1 is meta's run, 2 is 1:19:08, 3 is 1:18:44
Act1 (when boy raise the axe)
1 : 10:50 (flowers end at 28:5)
2 : 10:51 (flowers end at 26:5)
3 : 10:50 (flowers end at 26:3)
Act2 (when boy enter the basket)
1 : 46:58 -> act duration : 36:08 -- duration without blimp skip : 35:17
2 : 46:39 -> act duration : 35:45 -- duration without blimp skip : 35:14
3 : 46:21 -> act duration : 35:31 -- duration without blimp skip : 34:58
Act3 (when rocket countdown is at 0)
1 : 1:14:30 -> act duration : 27:32 -- without trolling cutscene : 27:22
2 : 1:14:20 -> act duration : 27:41 -- without trolling cutscene : 27:34
3 : 1:14:01 -> act duration : 27:40 -- without trolling cutscene : 27:21
Act4
1 : 1:19:23 -> act duration : 04:53 -- final fight duration : 03:24
2 : 1:19:08 -> act duration : 04:48 -- final fight duration : 03:26
3 : 1:18:44 -> act duration : 04:43 -- final fight duration : 03:24
So the interesting things :
Act1 is the same for the 3 runs
Act2 is really better overall in the sub 1:19 (with or without the blimp skip)
Act3 is bad in the 1:19:08, the trolling king cost 5-6 sec
Act4 the really fun part is the final fight is nearly the same, so better navigation or saturn skip in the sub 1:19
I can upload my spreadsheet somewhere.
Trolling cutscene cost 5-6 sec each.
I take the Meta's run, 1:19:23 , the crawek 1:19:08 run, and the crawek 1:18:44.
I time each act, for act2 I substract the time the blimp skip take (entering the screen and entering the next screen), for act3 I substract the time the two trolling cutscene take (just the begining for the dog one).
1 is meta's run, 2 is 1:19:08, 3 is 1:18:44
Act1 (when boy raise the axe)
1 : 10:50 (flowers end at 28:5)
2 : 10:51 (flowers end at 26:5)
3 : 10:50 (flowers end at 26:3)
Act2 (when boy enter the basket)
1 : 46:58 -> act duration : 36:08 -- duration without blimp skip : 35:17
2 : 46:39 -> act duration : 35:45 -- duration without blimp skip : 35:14
3 : 46:21 -> act duration : 35:31 -- duration without blimp skip : 34:58
Act3 (when rocket countdown is at 0)
1 : 1:14:30 -> act duration : 27:32 -- without trolling cutscene : 27:22
2 : 1:14:20 -> act duration : 27:41 -- without trolling cutscene : 27:34
3 : 1:14:01 -> act duration : 27:40 -- without trolling cutscene : 27:21
Act4
1 : 1:19:23 -> act duration : 04:53 -- final fight duration : 03:24
2 : 1:19:08 -> act duration : 04:48 -- final fight duration : 03:26
3 : 1:18:44 -> act duration : 04:43 -- final fight duration : 03:24
So the interesting things :
Act1 is the same for the 3 runs
Act2 is really better overall in the sub 1:19 (with or without the blimp skip)
Act3 is bad in the 1:19:08, the trolling king cost 5-6 sec
Act4 the really fun part is the final fight is nearly the same, so better navigation or saturn skip in the sub 1:19
I can upload my spreadsheet somewhere.
Trolling cutscene cost 5-6 sec each.
Speed > Safety
I agree with Skarsnik in that mostly the recent WR runs are consistent with each other and relatively within the bounds of being the "same" run with different RNG. This leads me into what follows, which is where I think the runs should go in the future.
------ From my notes: keep in mind this is my opinion but it's backed up by quite a bit of factual data.
Option 1 - No Defend + Invincibility
- Revert back to 16 Hardball initially for consistency reasons. Decrease this amount as desired as times reduce more and more.
- Do not get defend, at all, don't even consider it.
- Try and go for Plague + Confound before hitting 6 screen transitions.
-- I greatly dislike this option due to us still wanting to waste time with the Invincibility Glitch. It is far from being "required" for the current route.
Option 2 - No Defend + No Invincibility Glitch
- Revert back to 16 Hardball initially for consistency reasons. Decrease this amount as desired as times reduce more and more.
- Do not get defend, at all, don't even consider it.
- Buy 1 extra wings (this is technically already in the route) and pick up 1 in mids
- Only get Atlas Glitch at the oasis in the desert (gain more time here from no extra screen transitions).
- Wing usage locations: Maze OR Gomi's Tower (I would go with Tower personally), Carltron (required), 2x Ruins Route (required)
Between these two options, you're already ahead of any WR run by over 20 seconds. They do make the runs more difficult to complete, but we're not looking at who can complete the most runs... we're looking for the fastest possible completion time. These 2 options are your "next step" towards doing so. For people who may think completing the game without invincibility is an issue, Metasigma used to do it ALL THE TIME prior to Atlas Glitch and Infinite Barrier. The number of times he was hit was around 12-15 on average (depending on the route at the time). This equates to around an 18-22s loss. As you can see, the super old school route (which was much more dangerous in terms of damage since it relied upon Crush.....) breaks even with the current WR route in terms of safety if you didn't have defend. In my opinion, Defend, like Speed, is a crutch that we need to let go of so we can start running at full speed again.
Regarding Carltron... There's a lot of stuff here that can be improved across everyone that runs this game but it's not exactly the easiest thing to explain so I'm going to leave it alone for now and hope that once I'm to that part of the TAS I can put something together to display the things I think the runners should try to do. To put it bluntly, stop killing things in corners and try to kill stuff on the sides or middle of the room.
That's all for now, there's a LOT more in my notes, but they're mostly nit-picking and nobody really cares to listen to all that nonsense.
------ From my notes: keep in mind this is my opinion but it's backed up by quite a bit of factual data.
Option 1 - No Defend + Invincibility
- Revert back to 16 Hardball initially for consistency reasons. Decrease this amount as desired as times reduce more and more.
- Do not get defend, at all, don't even consider it.
- Try and go for Plague + Confound before hitting 6 screen transitions.
-- I greatly dislike this option due to us still wanting to waste time with the Invincibility Glitch. It is far from being "required" for the current route.
Option 2 - No Defend + No Invincibility Glitch
- Revert back to 16 Hardball initially for consistency reasons. Decrease this amount as desired as times reduce more and more.
- Do not get defend, at all, don't even consider it.
- Buy 1 extra wings (this is technically already in the route) and pick up 1 in mids
- Only get Atlas Glitch at the oasis in the desert (gain more time here from no extra screen transitions).
- Wing usage locations: Maze OR Gomi's Tower (I would go with Tower personally), Carltron (required), 2x Ruins Route (required)
Between these two options, you're already ahead of any WR run by over 20 seconds. They do make the runs more difficult to complete, but we're not looking at who can complete the most runs... we're looking for the fastest possible completion time. These 2 options are your "next step" towards doing so. For people who may think completing the game without invincibility is an issue, Metasigma used to do it ALL THE TIME prior to Atlas Glitch and Infinite Barrier. The number of times he was hit was around 12-15 on average (depending on the route at the time). This equates to around an 18-22s loss. As you can see, the super old school route (which was much more dangerous in terms of damage since it relied upon Crush.....) breaks even with the current WR route in terms of safety if you didn't have defend. In my opinion, Defend, like Speed, is a crutch that we need to let go of so we can start running at full speed again.
Regarding Carltron... There's a lot of stuff here that can be improved across everyone that runs this game but it's not exactly the easiest thing to explain so I'm going to leave it alone for now and hope that once I'm to that part of the TAS I can put something together to display the things I think the runners should try to do. To put it bluntly, stop killing things in corners and try to kill stuff on the sides or middle of the room.
That's all for now, there's a LOT more in my notes, but they're mostly nit-picking and nobody really cares to listen to all that nonsense.
Speed > Safety
skipping defend is basically automatically saving 20 seconds off anything you do. Getting hit is what will cost you time after skipping it. Getting hit basically 7-10 times is "wasting" all the time you save from not getting defend.
That's what I'm saying. Sting doesn't work out no matter what you use unless it's a TAS or you're feeling incredibly lucky. But yeah, you can skip the Blimp scenes if you just Atlas Glitch off the oasis spiders instead of the mad monk/rogue enemies at Eastern Beach, but you shouldn't because you need Crush... This saves time in screen transitions as well as some menu'ing time though. If there were a way to obtain Crush w/o witnessing the Blimp scenes then we'd have some pretty amazing time saves there as well. As far as I know, this isn't possible. Our only other option would be to somehow kill Aquagoth with just Call Beads or utilize Sting, which comes with a costly conversation time with Horace. Horace's talking is the only reason Sting isn't in the route. Find a way to bypass Horace's talking and you just saved over a minute potentially on the current route.
Essentially our entire focus now will be shifted from just blasting through everything to just trying to avoid getting hit. Considering there's only 4 major places in the game that can cause issues, this isn't as big of a deal as people seem to think. Especially since it's already been done before by basically anyone that ran the game before Atlas Glitch/Infinite Barrier. This same situation happened with Speed a while back, everyone thought it was basically a required thing because of our ability to hit things to save time... it wasn't. Defend will be phased out eventually, removing it saves time no matter what route you use.
That's what I'm saying. Sting doesn't work out no matter what you use unless it's a TAS or you're feeling incredibly lucky. But yeah, you can skip the Blimp scenes if you just Atlas Glitch off the oasis spiders instead of the mad monk/rogue enemies at Eastern Beach, but you shouldn't because you need Crush... This saves time in screen transitions as well as some menu'ing time though. If there were a way to obtain Crush w/o witnessing the Blimp scenes then we'd have some pretty amazing time saves there as well. As far as I know, this isn't possible. Our only other option would be to somehow kill Aquagoth with just Call Beads or utilize Sting, which comes with a costly conversation time with Horace. Horace's talking is the only reason Sting isn't in the route. Find a way to bypass Horace's talking and you just saved over a minute potentially on the current route.
Essentially our entire focus now will be shifted from just blasting through everything to just trying to avoid getting hit. Considering there's only 4 major places in the game that can cause issues, this isn't as big of a deal as people seem to think. Especially since it's already been done before by basically anyone that ran the game before Atlas Glitch/Infinite Barrier. This same situation happened with Speed a while back, everyone thought it was basically a required thing because of our ability to hit things to save time... it wasn't. Defend will be phased out eventually, removing it saves time no matter what route you use.
Evermore Extrodinare ᕦ(° Д°)ᕤ
Should also be noted that when Panda says 12 to 15 times he means outside of the 15 minutes because I got hammered that many times just doing the 15 minutes lol. Also really it was only 12 to 15 times I got hit? Could have sworn it was more than that...oh well. Also we'll save more than 20 seconds because we're not doing any screen transitions as well. So really the max potential just on those two things (Assuming we literally never get hit and drop defend) is around 25 seconds I believe (Defend + not having to go down to die to the mad monk/brutes causing 2 screen transitions). Also get ready for more Foot Knight BS because if you use wings on that screen while you're invul...he has a tendency to be an ASSHOLE. (Literally the WORST boss outside of Raptors in the final boss rush)
I agree though that using wings on Gomi's Tower would be better. Of course you're gonna get ganked by sniffs in the maze so be ready for all that tom foolery.
I agree though that using wings on Gomi's Tower would be better. Of course you're gonna get ganked by sniffs in the maze so be ready for all that tom foolery.
Evermore Extrodinare ᕦ(° Д°)ᕤ
Very true
Also I forget how many wings you can buy and still buy the 1 pixie dust you need in Nobilla, as well as your atlas ammy and 30 rice. I'm thinking that if we can make it happen we should try for 1 pixie and 5 wings but it's been so long since I've done it I haven't a clue what the money situation would be on it.
Also I forget how many wings you can buy and still buy the 1 pixie dust you need in Nobilla, as well as your atlas ammy and 30 rice. I'm thinking that if we can make it happen we should try for 1 pixie and 5 wings but it's been so long since I've done it I haven't a clue what the money situation would be on it.
Speed > Safety
it's already in the route. 3 wings + 1 pixie + 1 atlas ammy + 30 rice. You would need to pick up the 4th in mids down that hallway with the 4 snake statues to use on maze/tower. The 5th wing is, in my eyes, more trouble than it's worth. This being said, I should figure out which areas can drop wings and note them in the guide so that people know the check every monster drop there for the extra invincibility. The 5th wing could also be obtained by killing one of the mad monks on your way to nobilia, though this is obviously going to cost more time than you'd save with the wings, which is why it's not in the guide. Another option would be to buy it later, but that involves screen transitions. Yet another option is to pick up the other wings from the pot in the upper portion of mids, this is our candidate for the 5th wing pickup but it's again, not worth it's time to obtain when compared to the time it could potentially save, however, this one is much closer than the others and is reasonable for "beginners" on this route to pick up.
I think that covers all the possibilities that don't disqualify themselves immediately for various reasons. If there was a vendor that didn't require screen transitions somewhere it might be worth looking into, but I have the feeling anything like that will be either too late or too far out of the way.
edit: oh and I think we'd actually end up saving much more than 25 seconds, especially once people dial back down to the lower hard ball counts and start implementing Big Bug Maze Skip and other fun things that nobody wants to think about right now. BBMSkip requires a fairly precise setup to do reliably (~60% of the time, that's pretty reliable for this game... lol) so I'm looking for a better method to use before implementing it into a route. I also think utilizing my Thraxx strategy with 10 hard ball route is something people looking to push act 1 past normal limits should start learning, it is still fairly difficult to accomplish, but gained ~20% more consistency from the Thraxx strategy, putting it around ~37% now when paired with a few other changes to the route that aren't in the guide at the moment.
There's also something to be said for enemy manipulations, and as much as I'd love to write up a lovely guide/wall of text about which enemy can and should be manipulated as well as how to do the manipulation, it's honestly something you just have to watch and learn from the TAS, previous WR runs, and other sources. Most of the enemies (except 3) in Act 1 can be completely manipulated out of the way in real-time, the 3 that I haven't personally figured out are the 4th flower in eastern forest, the maggot in middle-right path of bugmuck heading to big bug, and the maggot that annoys people doing the BBMSkip. Act 2 manipulations are something people will basically be required to understand to get the most out of that act, especially in ruins and mids. I'm actually working on figuring out a proper way to illustrate/demonstrate these specific manipulations. Acts 3 and 4 I'm not 100% sure about yet because I simply haven't gotten there on the TAS (at pig race right now) so everyone is on their own currently in that regard.
Throwing all that nonsense together, i honestly wouldn't be surprised to see sub 18 here in ~2-3 weeks if people hit the new stuff hard enough and did some proper testing on their own. The TAS does 90% of the relevant manipulations, go watch it on youtube... pay close attention to where the player is in relation to where the monsters are once they're on screen, there's only a couple that are probably not so obvious. If that doesn't help, just watch the VOD's on my stream channel (theangrypanda1) which blatantly state where I believe the manipulations are at.
I think that covers all the possibilities that don't disqualify themselves immediately for various reasons. If there was a vendor that didn't require screen transitions somewhere it might be worth looking into, but I have the feeling anything like that will be either too late or too far out of the way.
edit: oh and I think we'd actually end up saving much more than 25 seconds, especially once people dial back down to the lower hard ball counts and start implementing Big Bug Maze Skip and other fun things that nobody wants to think about right now. BBMSkip requires a fairly precise setup to do reliably (~60% of the time, that's pretty reliable for this game... lol) so I'm looking for a better method to use before implementing it into a route. I also think utilizing my Thraxx strategy with 10 hard ball route is something people looking to push act 1 past normal limits should start learning, it is still fairly difficult to accomplish, but gained ~20% more consistency from the Thraxx strategy, putting it around ~37% now when paired with a few other changes to the route that aren't in the guide at the moment.
There's also something to be said for enemy manipulations, and as much as I'd love to write up a lovely guide/wall of text about which enemy can and should be manipulated as well as how to do the manipulation, it's honestly something you just have to watch and learn from the TAS, previous WR runs, and other sources. Most of the enemies (except 3) in Act 1 can be completely manipulated out of the way in real-time, the 3 that I haven't personally figured out are the 4th flower in eastern forest, the maggot in middle-right path of bugmuck heading to big bug, and the maggot that annoys people doing the BBMSkip. Act 2 manipulations are something people will basically be required to understand to get the most out of that act, especially in ruins and mids. I'm actually working on figuring out a proper way to illustrate/demonstrate these specific manipulations. Acts 3 and 4 I'm not 100% sure about yet because I simply haven't gotten there on the TAS (at pig race right now) so everyone is on their own currently in that regard.
Throwing all that nonsense together, i honestly wouldn't be surprised to see sub 18 here in ~2-3 weeks if people hit the new stuff hard enough and did some proper testing on their own. The TAS does 90% of the relevant manipulations, go watch it on youtube... pay close attention to where the player is in relation to where the monsters are once they're on screen, there's only a couple that are probably not so obvious. If that doesn't help, just watch the VOD's on my stream channel (theangrypanda1) which blatantly state where I believe the manipulations are at.
Speed > Safety
So, not really an update on anything pertaining to the actual game, but whatever. Would people like to have a "History of SoE" document that describes how the game has progressed (Meta, I'd need lots of help from you on this part) and all the nifty little tricks/exploits/glitches/whatever as well? Is there any real interest in this at all? If you do want something like this, or if you don't, please PM me with details on why/why not if you wouldn't mind.
best speedrun ever
http://www.twitch.tv/calebhart42/c/2916378
http://www.twitch.tv/calebhart42/c/2916378
Speed > Safety
So the route test TAS is past dark forest now, here's a few tidbits of information we might be able to use in the future.
-It is DEFINITELY better to wings in maze, my earlier assumption that this wouldn't be an issue was based on me overestimating the amount of enemies we could manipulate. There happens to be potentially 5 in real-time that will get in your way opposed to the 3 (i think?) at Gomi's, not including bosses.
-Footknight cannot pass through the dog during the fight, you can use this to your advantage by knocking him into the dog and spamming B rapidly to quick kill him. Difficulty = Very High
-As soon as the music plays for killing footknight and the camera shifts up to reveal the staircase, start holding left and sprint. This gives you the fastest possible time to enter the staircase. Have people been doing this? It's kind of an obvious thing.
-Underneath the maze gets a little interesting:
--Each enemy here will have a "tell" you can read as soon as they spawn, these are the results excluding enemies that cannot be dodged just by running around them.
#1 - They floating high in the air -- Run under them
#2 - They float middle level in the air -- Attack them
#3 - They float low to the ground -- Attack them
#4 - They are going to make "contact" at one of the stairway corners -- Lead them upwards, dash down left and around. This can be applied to all but 2 of the enemies here if your health is critical.
#5 - If you don't see the enemy before getting within a couple character lengths of the pillar before the energy core -- Stop, move to the middle of the area, go right then roll your thumb to down right as you approach the pillar, this spawns him in the middle-high location and you will run under him unharmed.
#6 - Anything not specifically mentioned is avoidable or falls into the first 3 classifications.
-Dark Forest navigation is one of the only things any player can do just as quickly as the TAS.
-Dopples are invincible until 6 frames before they land, this explains some of the "bad hit box" issues we've encountered before, simply put... we attacked too fast, the animation of attacking plays through and the "damaging" component of that attack is "lost." This allows enough time before we can attack again for the dopples to get away.
-It is definitely worth it to equip the spear again. The last item you used should be call beads, so you'll need to press up once to get to the weapons menu. Holy Y after the "you got crusader sword" text appears otherwise the game doesn't seem to read the input occasionally for 1st frame menu input.
-Timberdrake's fastest potential kill is to walk above him then knock him downwards. Difficulty = Very Easy with invincibility, Medium without it.
Other stuff:
---Sprinting Methods (finally figured out?)
for this i'm going to assume perfect sprints are 100% consistent just for comparison's sake, do keep in mind that real-time tests will have a variance and this is where it comes from since it's impossible to get 100% consistent at PSprinting.
Perfect Sprint Sequences for the TAS
boy
1) hold sprint until 0% energy
2) aa[()aaa()aaa()aaa]
Notes: You will not be able to replicate this, the () are 1 frame releases of the A button and the [...] is the repeated pattern. The two A's in front of it are part of turning to 0% energy, so it only has 2.
dog
1) hold sprint until 0% energy
2) aaa[()aaaa()aaaa()aaaa]
Notes: While this does seem "quicker" the dog movement during the walking animation is massively slower for most dogs (act 4 is the exception here) compared to the boy's walking animation. This causes a weird balancing effect for Act 2 and Act 3 dogs that actually make it the exact (literally) same speed as the boy in regards to running.
Assume that one boy sequence (inside the [...]'s) with a non-spear weapon is 1 unit. This is our control.
Ranked Speed for Sprinting Speed:
-Act 1 Dog, Act 4 Dog (comparing these two to see which is quicker is pointless) are the fastest of all the potential characters
-Boy with a Spear weapon
-Boy with any other weapon, Act 2 Dog, Act 3 Dog
-Zombie Boy
Regarding methods of sprinting, it's more directional than anything:
if vertical movement, diagonal perfect sprints are best
if horizontal movement, perfect sprints are best (diagonal won't matter)
This is caused by the fact that the horizontal movement animation/sprite/whatever covers more distance that the vertical movement. So if you move with the horizontal animation, you gain distance over time compared to straight-line vertical movement. Unfortunately, this means that no matter what you do, horizontal movement is an absolute max value that cannot be exceeded under normal conditions. The sewers and flowing water do have an effect, but it's effect is a flat addition to the "speed value" you have in those areas. To my knowledge you cannot retain this feature in any way.
-It is DEFINITELY better to wings in maze, my earlier assumption that this wouldn't be an issue was based on me overestimating the amount of enemies we could manipulate. There happens to be potentially 5 in real-time that will get in your way opposed to the 3 (i think?) at Gomi's, not including bosses.
-Footknight cannot pass through the dog during the fight, you can use this to your advantage by knocking him into the dog and spamming B rapidly to quick kill him. Difficulty = Very High
-As soon as the music plays for killing footknight and the camera shifts up to reveal the staircase, start holding left and sprint. This gives you the fastest possible time to enter the staircase. Have people been doing this? It's kind of an obvious thing.
-Underneath the maze gets a little interesting:
--Each enemy here will have a "tell" you can read as soon as they spawn, these are the results excluding enemies that cannot be dodged just by running around them.
#1 - They floating high in the air -- Run under them
#2 - They float middle level in the air -- Attack them
#3 - They float low to the ground -- Attack them
#4 - They are going to make "contact" at one of the stairway corners -- Lead them upwards, dash down left and around. This can be applied to all but 2 of the enemies here if your health is critical.
#5 - If you don't see the enemy before getting within a couple character lengths of the pillar before the energy core -- Stop, move to the middle of the area, go right then roll your thumb to down right as you approach the pillar, this spawns him in the middle-high location and you will run under him unharmed.
#6 - Anything not specifically mentioned is avoidable or falls into the first 3 classifications.
-Dark Forest navigation is one of the only things any player can do just as quickly as the TAS.
-Dopples are invincible until 6 frames before they land, this explains some of the "bad hit box" issues we've encountered before, simply put... we attacked too fast, the animation of attacking plays through and the "damaging" component of that attack is "lost." This allows enough time before we can attack again for the dopples to get away.
-It is definitely worth it to equip the spear again. The last item you used should be call beads, so you'll need to press up once to get to the weapons menu. Holy Y after the "you got crusader sword" text appears otherwise the game doesn't seem to read the input occasionally for 1st frame menu input.
-Timberdrake's fastest potential kill is to walk above him then knock him downwards. Difficulty = Very Easy with invincibility, Medium without it.
Other stuff:
---Sprinting Methods (finally figured out?)
for this i'm going to assume perfect sprints are 100% consistent just for comparison's sake, do keep in mind that real-time tests will have a variance and this is where it comes from since it's impossible to get 100% consistent at PSprinting.
Perfect Sprint Sequences for the TAS
boy
1) hold sprint until 0% energy
2) aa[()aaa()aaa()aaa]
Notes: You will not be able to replicate this, the () are 1 frame releases of the A button and the [...] is the repeated pattern. The two A's in front of it are part of turning to 0% energy, so it only has 2.
dog
1) hold sprint until 0% energy
2) aaa[()aaaa()aaaa()aaaa]
Notes: While this does seem "quicker" the dog movement during the walking animation is massively slower for most dogs (act 4 is the exception here) compared to the boy's walking animation. This causes a weird balancing effect for Act 2 and Act 3 dogs that actually make it the exact (literally) same speed as the boy in regards to running.
Assume that one boy sequence (inside the [...]'s) with a non-spear weapon is 1 unit. This is our control.
Ranked Speed for Sprinting Speed:
-Act 1 Dog, Act 4 Dog (comparing these two to see which is quicker is pointless) are the fastest of all the potential characters
-Boy with a Spear weapon
-Boy with any other weapon, Act 2 Dog, Act 3 Dog
-Zombie Boy
Regarding methods of sprinting, it's more directional than anything:
if vertical movement, diagonal perfect sprints are best
if horizontal movement, perfect sprints are best (diagonal won't matter)
This is caused by the fact that the horizontal movement animation/sprite/whatever covers more distance that the vertical movement. So if you move with the horizontal animation, you gain distance over time compared to straight-line vertical movement. Unfortunately, this means that no matter what you do, horizontal movement is an absolute max value that cannot be exceeded under normal conditions. The sewers and flowing water do have an effect, but it's effect is a flat addition to the "speed value" you have in those areas. To my knowledge you cannot retain this feature in any way.
Speed > Safety
I'm not sure if you guys can pull anything from it for real-time runs, but here's the improvements list so far for the v1.6 TAS: http://pastebin.com/vBQ20dHu
I think it's very much worth mentioning that looking for a way to skip Horace's conversation text (the one you get if you fall in a pit) will go a long way to pushing this time further down. Skipping this text makes Sting faster by quite a fair amount since we'd no longer use defend (~20s), see the conversation(s) with Blimp (this breaks even with screen transitions on Horace Camp stuff and ingredient buying transitions later), dog scene won't happen (excess transitions), and menu cancels with Sting are sooooo much quicker than crush (7x4x on Aqua, 6x5x on Verm). There's other, less important things in real-time that are important in the TAS, but that's neither here nor there for us at the moment. MY point is that if we get a lot of people to look for a skip, we'll at least know we gave it a good shot.
I think it's very much worth mentioning that looking for a way to skip Horace's conversation text (the one you get if you fall in a pit) will go a long way to pushing this time further down. Skipping this text makes Sting faster by quite a fair amount since we'd no longer use defend (~20s), see the conversation(s) with Blimp (this breaks even with screen transitions on Horace Camp stuff and ingredient buying transitions later), dog scene won't happen (excess transitions), and menu cancels with Sting are sooooo much quicker than crush (7x4x on Aqua, 6x5x on Verm). There's other, less important things in real-time that are important in the TAS, but that's neither here nor there for us at the moment. MY point is that if we get a lot of people to look for a skip, we'll at least know we gave it a good shot.
best time Snes is lemonsx 1h19min1xs
http://www.twitch.tv/lemonsx
next lemonsx goals is 1h17min00 or better
Awesome^^
http://www.twitch.tv/lemonsx
next lemonsx goals is 1h17min00 or better
Awesome^^
Speed > Safety
Alright, so time for good things that are basically horrible things for your sanity...
First off, the Saturn Skip is quite literally a fancy screen transition character switch instead of a camera clip. It is a frame perfect trick done by pressing B and then select. The method that Meta and I came up with, as well as the holding method that Hugh uses, are both still very much capable and useful to accomplish this trick. So this basically means you've all been doing frame perfect tricks (yes plural...) since forever, which means you all should also start looking into trying more complicated things like what's in the TAS that are frame perfect such as the character switch screen transitions in certain areas. These save minor amounts of time but are worth attempting regardless. Other frame perfect tricks include camera scroll bypassing in pyramids, the dog portion of Blimp Skip, and potentially numerous other things that have yet to be tested that are based off something that I'm about to go over further into the post.
Secondly, we have a new torture device it seems, Lamb Skip (Horace Conversation Skip). Basically Lamb tested my theory of leaving the area as you hit a cutscene trigger (again, frame perfect) and guess what, it works... cuz like any other crazy theory i have only the one's that make your lives miserable work. Anyways, the method to do the trick is pretty easy, get the dog into the trigger area either through leashing or whatever method you wish to use really, just make sure when you press select the dog is going to leave the area. Then you can simply line yourself up at the bottom of the fire pit, walk right, tap up and hit select immediately afterwards to skip horace's nonsense. The best part? Vendor shows up after so Sting is technically an option for Defend-less routes now. This leads into some interesting concepts for further increasing the amount of total ridiculousness in this game such as potentially skipping raptors using this method and employing the inn skip WITHOUT dieing, how crazy would that be? Yeah... shit will rapidly hit the fan if you're even remotely familiar with routing this game knowing this works.
Finally, I'm going to do one more guide that involves all these new things because I'm not even going to begin pretending a person can randomly pick this up and just know how to do all these things. This guide will potentially remove the others so if the guides disappear, sorry, I'm just trying to make stuff easier for newer people and veterans while being more efficient in presentation. I'll also be routing out a 100% TAS route, but won't likely begin progressing into it any time in the very near future. I also plan to create and incorporate a VERY detailed FAQ into said guide because I'm simply becoming incapable of keeping up with all the information myself involved with this game and this has been needed for a while so the streamers of this game can post it in their channel description for new viewers and beginning runners to see. This being said, the new route I'm going to make is NOT for people who want to play safe, it is a World Record route and as such, does not and will not include anything people see as "safe" in this game. Safety costs time, there's 2 exceptions to this, both of which only cost 6 frames. I'm not saying that you're not good at this game if you run this new route I'm making, but I am saying that if someone completes a run on it, they're going to set a standard you cannot surpass using the current routes.
Now then, regarding some other info, here's an updated sprint speed comparison:
-Act 4 dog
-Act 1 dog
-Boy with Spear
-Act 2 dog, Boy with other weapons (some may be faster than others, it's not worth testing honestly)
-Act 3 dog
This means that using the act 3 dog is detrimental (and i mean REALLY REALLY REALLY bad) to your runs and you should never do it. The only excuse to do so is in 100% or when the dog is closer to the exit than the boy can run to in a reasonable time. This also means that you should be going for optimal switches in Act 2 with the boy and dog where possible since they're the same speed prior to the boy acquiring the spear in ruins. Speaking of ruins, there's a few cute little tricks in there you can do to save time, but they require special setups that aren't commonly around, this will be covered on my stream at some point but not any time soon. I'll post these reactive situations when I have a better way to explain them aside from text, because I think the wall of text is growing substantially large at this point.
Assuming Sting becomes a thing, you will only need 2 beads vs Verm so you can 4x7x (Sting4Flare7) on Aqua, which helps with the amount of Sting we'll need overall. In fact, Sting in and of itself is an extremely complex route, much more than crush could ever hope to be. Again, this will be covered in the future guide.
So in light of all of this nonsense, the test TAS is finished to I can now test any place along the normal route properly and intend to do much more testing in the near future for various things. Expect drastic time drops if some of these things work how I think they will. Unfortunately, just about all of them will involve setups and at least 4 would be run killers. This means that a god tier submission would probably take well into the thousands of attempts. I consider this a damn good thing.
That's all for now...
edit: TL;DR is read the damn post so I don't have to explain stuff repeatedly, thank you. <3
First off, the Saturn Skip is quite literally a fancy screen transition character switch instead of a camera clip. It is a frame perfect trick done by pressing B and then select. The method that Meta and I came up with, as well as the holding method that Hugh uses, are both still very much capable and useful to accomplish this trick. So this basically means you've all been doing frame perfect tricks (yes plural...) since forever, which means you all should also start looking into trying more complicated things like what's in the TAS that are frame perfect such as the character switch screen transitions in certain areas. These save minor amounts of time but are worth attempting regardless. Other frame perfect tricks include camera scroll bypassing in pyramids, the dog portion of Blimp Skip, and potentially numerous other things that have yet to be tested that are based off something that I'm about to go over further into the post.
Secondly, we have a new torture device it seems, Lamb Skip (Horace Conversation Skip). Basically Lamb tested my theory of leaving the area as you hit a cutscene trigger (again, frame perfect) and guess what, it works... cuz like any other crazy theory i have only the one's that make your lives miserable work. Anyways, the method to do the trick is pretty easy, get the dog into the trigger area either through leashing or whatever method you wish to use really, just make sure when you press select the dog is going to leave the area. Then you can simply line yourself up at the bottom of the fire pit, walk right, tap up and hit select immediately afterwards to skip horace's nonsense. The best part? Vendor shows up after so Sting is technically an option for Defend-less routes now. This leads into some interesting concepts for further increasing the amount of total ridiculousness in this game such as potentially skipping raptors using this method and employing the inn skip WITHOUT dieing, how crazy would that be? Yeah... shit will rapidly hit the fan if you're even remotely familiar with routing this game knowing this works.
Finally, I'm going to do one more guide that involves all these new things because I'm not even going to begin pretending a person can randomly pick this up and just know how to do all these things. This guide will potentially remove the others so if the guides disappear, sorry, I'm just trying to make stuff easier for newer people and veterans while being more efficient in presentation. I'll also be routing out a 100% TAS route, but won't likely begin progressing into it any time in the very near future. I also plan to create and incorporate a VERY detailed FAQ into said guide because I'm simply becoming incapable of keeping up with all the information myself involved with this game and this has been needed for a while so the streamers of this game can post it in their channel description for new viewers and beginning runners to see. This being said, the new route I'm going to make is NOT for people who want to play safe, it is a World Record route and as such, does not and will not include anything people see as "safe" in this game. Safety costs time, there's 2 exceptions to this, both of which only cost 6 frames. I'm not saying that you're not good at this game if you run this new route I'm making, but I am saying that if someone completes a run on it, they're going to set a standard you cannot surpass using the current routes.
Now then, regarding some other info, here's an updated sprint speed comparison:
-Act 4 dog
-Act 1 dog
-Boy with Spear
-Act 2 dog, Boy with other weapons (some may be faster than others, it's not worth testing honestly)
-Act 3 dog
This means that using the act 3 dog is detrimental (and i mean REALLY REALLY REALLY bad) to your runs and you should never do it. The only excuse to do so is in 100% or when the dog is closer to the exit than the boy can run to in a reasonable time. This also means that you should be going for optimal switches in Act 2 with the boy and dog where possible since they're the same speed prior to the boy acquiring the spear in ruins. Speaking of ruins, there's a few cute little tricks in there you can do to save time, but they require special setups that aren't commonly around, this will be covered on my stream at some point but not any time soon. I'll post these reactive situations when I have a better way to explain them aside from text, because I think the wall of text is growing substantially large at this point.
Assuming Sting becomes a thing, you will only need 2 beads vs Verm so you can 4x7x (Sting4Flare7) on Aqua, which helps with the amount of Sting we'll need overall. In fact, Sting in and of itself is an extremely complex route, much more than crush could ever hope to be. Again, this will be covered in the future guide.
So in light of all of this nonsense, the test TAS is finished to I can now test any place along the normal route properly and intend to do much more testing in the near future for various things. Expect drastic time drops if some of these things work how I think they will. Unfortunately, just about all of them will involve setups and at least 4 would be run killers. This means that a god tier submission would probably take well into the thousands of attempts. I consider this a damn good thing.
That's all for now...
edit: TL;DR is read the damn post so I don't have to explain stuff repeatedly, thank you. <3