RuffledBricks

Here's a link to the Twitch VOD, timecoded for Duck's run:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1278784174?t=07h42m20s

Grand, I knew it was someone around these parts who made it. I'll do my best to impart all the relevant info on commentary!

10 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

"Manic Jet Set Willy" is not "a significant enough remix" from the speedrunning perspective, according to RuffledBricks, which is fair enough. I would only add that it is "significant enough" from the technical perspective, as it proves that it is possible to cram both JSW and MM into one 48K game.

Everything's a matter of perspective 😉 .

Not from "the speedrunning perspective", just from "the RuffledBricks perspective". I don't speak for all of speedrunning. 😅 And I did acknowledge that it was clearly a technically impressive game (perhaps not in those words, but "I can see a lot of love and care has gone into it"). As I stated, it was more just having overdone the Willy games at this point and wanting to do other things that's meant I'm less interested in this kind of challenge right now. 

Speedrunning the Miner Willy games is pretty knackering, just FYI. There's no RNG, so it's the same thing over and over again. We don't use rollback or savestates so one mistake can mean resetting the entire run. And most notably, there just aren't enough people doing it or even watching it to keep it that competitive. It's really hard to maintain enthusiasm for speedrunning a game as close to perfection as possible when there's barely even a couple of other active runners on the leaderboard.

On 12/31/2021 at 3:23 PM, JianYang said:

That's quite impressive.

I wonder if by casually mentioning @RuffledBricks I can summon him and maybe get him to make a speedrun through this version.

 

Sorry, not been in here much recently, so I completely missed this ping.

Afraid I'm going to have to dash your hopes though, as this is not a run I'm particularly interested in doing any time soon. No shade on this version, to be clear - I can see a lot of love and care has gone into it - but I've basically experienced a large amount of Willy burnout by this point, and apart from trying to get my WRs back (I lost them due to +2A being faster than 128K, it turns out!), it would take something particularly off the beaten track to draw me back to it.

Had this version been what my imagination conjured up when I first saw the description - JSW with the MM rooms seamlessly interspersed into the open world layout of the mansion - then I would definitely have been up for at least giving it a go. However, this game is fundamentally just JSW followed by MM, which isn't really a significant enough remix to make me want to speedrun it. Thank you very much for thinking of me though.

Bumping this thread coz fellow speedrunner DigitalDuck is going to be running the 2015 Bugfix edition of JSW for UKSG's Winter Marathon 2022 tomorrow evening at approx 20:50, and I'll be providing commentary for his run. The marathon will be broadcast on ESA's Twitch channel here if anyone's interested:

https://www.twitch.tv/esamarathon

Full schedule can be viewed here:

https://oengus.io/en-GB/marathon/UKSGwi22/schedule

No Miner Willy runs from myself I'm afraid, although if you're a fan of Spectrum platformers in general I'll be running Pyjamarama right before Duck's run.

Yeah, but the official name of the original game it's modelled on is Geoguessr (without the e).

So either Monkeon added the e to avoid copyright infringement, or he messed up big time.

I did wonder if someone had already made a post about it, but the search function didn't come up with anything for "Geoguessr".

Someone called Monkeon took Jet Set Willy and turned it into a Geoguessr game:

https://www.monkeon.co.uk/jetsetwillygeoguesser/

Won't prove particularly taxing for anyone around these parts, but I thought it was fun. Fun enough to try and speedrun it, anyhow:
 

Thank you very much.

The last two runs I did were fine. Cartography Room came in at 3:40, and I scraped through A Day In The Life with one life to spare (an improvement on my UKSG Summer run in which I actually Game Overed on the last screen).

All three days of the marathon can be viewed as VODs here:
https://www.twitch.tv/uksg_marathon/videos

One thing to be aware of is that there were significant tech issues for the first half of Day 1, so you will find noticeable audio and visual problems for the first four or five runs or the marathon. Everything else was largely fine.

19 minutes ago, Spider said:

I was not able to watch. 😞 Sorry.

I did try to have a look at the twich link earlier (on a phone) but it just made the browser lock up. The other link showed me the 'players' as such but what were the results ? 🙂

Well, I can only speak for my own runs, so I will:

Manic Miner - ended up resetting the run twice within the first three levels due to an unexpected attack of stage fright. Third attempt went well. Came in at 19 mins altogether.

Jet Set Willy Any% - game overed twice. Messed up Cold Store completely due to another attack of nerves, and missed the second item in Tree Root that pretty much forced a reset. Fortunately, I had some save states prepared, so we got it done. Came in at just under 26 mins altogether.

Jet Set Willy WRITETYPER race - nailed it first time. Came in at 2:34 and won the race.

Yazzie - went very well (11 mins), but this is a comfort zone speedrun for me, so I knew I would be safe with this one.

So yeah, it's been a mixed bag for me so far performance-wise. Tonight I've got JSW2+'s Cartography Room Item run and A Day In The Life (the Clive Sinclair simulator), so hopefully I'll be able to end on a high with those.

1 hour ago, MtM said:

I can imagine the stress of a speedrun is terrible!

It's fine on my own streams when I can just reset if they don't go the way I want them to. But when you're in a marathon and (kinda) need to nail it first time...

14 hours ago, MtM said:

I think this should be in the Olympics 😉

If this was the Olympics then I'd definitely be dropping out for mental health reasons after my MM run yesterday!

Part 2 is tonight (6pm), and features the long-awaited [citation needed] WRITETYPER race between me and DigitalDuck. 

Just a reminder that this kicks off tonight at 6pm BST. 😲

Hi all. Slight bit of self-promo here, but UK Speedrunner Gathering have decided to host an entirely ZX Spectrum themed speedrun mini-marathon. It'll be from Aug 6th-8th (from 6pm BST each night), and will feature the entire original Miner Willy series being ran in various forms, including a few runs from myself. Full schedule is below:

https://horaro.org/uksgmini/zx21

The whole marathon will be streamed from UKSG's Twitch channel here:

https://www.twitch.tv/uksg_marathon

I believe it's the first time ever that an entirely Spectrum-based speedrun event has been held, so please do drop in if you're free. Personally, it's the most risk of high stakes Game Overs I've ever had in one marathon, so I'm just hoping I can complete all my runs with a modicum of dignity. 😅

1 hour ago, IRF said:

RB, I've just noticed a comment you made in one of your videos (the sub-20minute one), where you said "The semi-colon button failed".

Am I right in my interpretation that you use the semi-colon button (on a PC running a Spectrum emulator) as a shortcut key for "Left+Jump" buttons being pressed simultaneously, in order to perform a leftwards jump (an example of the use would be to avoid risking walking off a precipice, as can happen if you press the separate Jump button too late)?

Yes, that's right. Weirdly they were the first jumps I discovered when I started playing JSW on stream last year and I actually didn't even realise you could vertical jump without turning on the spot until someone in chat helpfully pointed that out!

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But that it doesn't work in all circumstances (in this case it caused a vertical jump instead), so it isn't entirely reliable for that purpose?

So it is normally reliable (over 99% I'd say). However, in the week prior to that stream mick_jo had been discussing how he found those jump buttons occasionally didn't seem to work when running the game in 128K on Fuse, and then all of a sudden I started experiencing similar (albeit very sporadic) issues. So I think it might be more emulator-related than anything bigger.

4 minutes ago, IRF said:

I won't disagree with that.  On the other hand, I think the time saving you would gain by perfecting the 'stair clip' is probably at least as much, if not more than, the 2 second difference that you've just established between the 'Offy First'/'MegaTree first' routes!

It is, but for my own sanity, it's one of those 'take or leave' strats for me. Nice to have it in a run if you can get it - and I do certainly try going for it in a full run - but just not consistent enough to really be like "Well, it's this strat or the run's dead."

Just now, IRF said:

One final word on the relative timings for Off Licence first versus MegaTree first - I think the difference* would be even more marginal if you were comparing the two routes being conducted with only two spare lives remaining at the start of each run.

(*By which I mean the absolute difference in seconds - i.e. Off Licence first would be the same percentage faster, but both runs would be shorter anyway, if you see what I mean?)

Absolutely, but that isn't an argument for doing it the other way round. At best, it suggests that it doesn't matter that much if you're doing a casual speedrun and you prefer to do MegaTree first. But it's still not going to be as optimum as the currently favoured route.

10 minutes ago, IRF said:

I've just tried out the jump/fall-through-the ramp-and-over-the-saw in one jump manoeuvre in 'Foot of MegaTree', and it's actually quite easy to pull off.  You just have to make sure that Willy is in his 'feet wide apart' stance next to the base of the ramp, at the point when he begins the jump.

I'm glad you find it easy. I really struggle a lot with that one. The biggest issue is I tend to turn left too early and end up not jumping through the stairs at all, which is a real pain to fix. That's why if I'm going to fail it, I try to fail it by turning too late, as then you can just default to the 'follow the saw' timing I used in the videos.

Also, the timing's really tight. It's not a position that you can take your time over setting up. You have to literally hit it the moment you get to the bottom of the stairs if you want to jump over the Saw AND not get killed by the last Flying Rodent. So there's a lot of ways in which it can go wrong.

2 minutes ago, IRF said:

Nice investigative work, RB!

By the way, when you say 'stair clip', are you referring to jumping through the ramp in 'Foot of MegaTree' without landing on it?  i.e. getting the start position of the jump right so that Willy doesn't land on a ramp cell with his back foot, so that he jumps and falls through the ramp in a single manoeuvre - which in this case allows him to get ahead of the saw so he doesn't have to wait for it to move ahead and then jump over it later?

That's right. So if you got stair clip into the Offy First route then the difference in time would be even more pronounced.

So I tried out @IRF's suggestion on stream this evening - I did almost two hours of playing around with different routes for the MegaTree/Off Licence section and, owing to my somewhat rusty playing, I didn't manage to get a full comparison of every single scenario I wanted. I did, however, get a good comparison of the main contention discussed in this thread: whether Off Licence should come before or after the MegaTree in an optimum OL/OOAL deathwarp route.

I timed the route via RTA on 128K Spectrum (Fuse emulator), starting from entering At The Foot Of The MegaTree and ending upon entering The Drive. Both I started with eight lives. The results were as follows:

MegaTree before Off Licence - 3:51

Off Licence before MegaTree - 3:49 (and this was WITHOUT stair clip, just FYI)

There were obviously minor variations here and there in the execution of each room, but nothing that I believe would have affected the final conclusion: Off Licence before MegaTree is, for whatever reason, faster.

I'm still not convinced. And to be honest, I don't think I will be until I see it in action. And I don't have a lot of time for recording a comparison at the moment, especially not for a section of the game that long.

3 minutes ago, IRF said:

You may well be right in general to be sceptical about the potential time saving from a 'MegaTree then Off Licence' route.

However, I've just checked, and after walking into Foot of MegaTree from the bottom-right (as if returning back from the Offy), Willy only has to wait for 7 time-frames before he can walk directly behind the saw, and then do a sideways (leftwards) jump over the saw to exit to The Drive.

7 frames is less than the time it takes to collect the Bathroom tap at the start of the game...

You have to factor in the Saw when coming down from the MegaTree as well though.

I understand all that, but losing one life only speeds things up by ~0.4%, and doing the Off Licence after the MegaTree means slower timings on the Saw at the junction of Foot. I'm just not convinced that it would be enough to balance all that out.

I think if @crem's gonna spend that much time and effort on it then he should at least start a Patreon account. 😄

Anyhow, onto stuff that I know definitely will save time in the run, here's a rather pleasing find from @crem's algorithm:
 

Beach rope warp can now do a full 2 seconds worth of time saving. And despite how it looks, it's actually a pretty forgiving strat - seems to have a pretty decent range of timing and positioning that will allow you to pull it off.