RuffledBricks

God, everyone really hates that walk to the Off Licence around here, don't they? For the route you've mentioned, I'd imagine the difference would probably be quite ineffectual given that you withhold the Off License deathwarp life until later. There might be an argument to be made for doing two deathwarps in the MegaTree and then doing the Off Licence normally, but I'd rather have someone confirm that for sure with maths and science rather than having to try and do it manually to find out. Go on then. 😛

Possibly. The other thing to consider is how manageable it is. Although I rather arrogantly stated that the triple jump was "easy" in the other thread, on subsequent attempts I've found the timing requires some getting used to. Plus the point I made previously about the OOAL deathwarp not being that easy to pull off quickly still stands. At any rate, I'll only be fully convinced once I actually see the two strats for the UTM-OOAL section side by side, and my JSW-playing is a bit rusty at the moment, so that's not a video I'll be able to make in a hurry! Doing that means you have to do a slow cycle on the Saw though. The MegaTree section has, to the best of my knowledge, been routed to minimise waiting time on all enemies within the Foot and Trunk rooms.

Further to the above comment (from the topic discussing crem's JSW algorithm), I've just completed 'Out on a Limb' in less than one in-game minute - see the attached RZX recording. In 'real-world' time, it took 21 seconds from entering 'Out on a Limb' up to the moment when Willy dropped down into 'On a Branch over the Drive'. That compares with 28 seconds in my previous attempt - see RZX attached to this post by RuffledBrick: https://jswmm.co.uk/topic/569-jet-set-willy-speedrunning-videos/?do=findComment&comment=12737 (In both cases, Willy still had all his spare lives and the in-game music was playing.) So that's a 25% time saving compared with my previous effort. ** Extrapolating that to RB's videos (as embedded in the post at the link below) - in which Willy had no spare lives and the music wasn't playing (and RB's kamikaze efforts were more efficient than my previous attempt, though obviously not as efficient as the 'triple jump' in my latest video) - I reckon the saving provided by a very efficient kamikaze route through 'Out on a Limb' could be about 11-12 seconds of 'real world' time, compared with the non-sacrificial route. It also looks *much* cooler!! https://jswmm.co.uk/topic/569-jet-set-willy-speedrunning-videos/?do=findComment&comment=12739 Faster Out on a Limb Route with Kamikaze.rzx 91.43 kB · 4 downloads Re: the original discussion, there was never any doubt that deathwarping OOAL was quicker than doing the room normally. The discussion was about whether the OOAL deathwarp actually saved more time in a full run of the game than deathwarping one of the other MegaTree rooms. In order to do the OOAL deathwarp, one would need to do both Under The Megatree and Cuckoo's Nest 'normally' so that you can preserve your last spare life. So whilst you would be saving time on OOAL, you would be adding 9 seconds of time back on whichever of the other two rooms you normally deathwarp (let's say UTM, given that it's ever so slightly more of a timesave than CN), plus a marginally slower game speed for MegaTrunk and Tree Top, given that you are doing those rooms with one life more than you would have been. So to prove that OOAL deathwarp is more beneficial than UTM deathwarp, you would need to factor all of that in.

Have been trying some of these out today. Already posted some of my thoughts on these in the Speedtrum Specrunning Discord, but I'll repeat them here as well. Rather pleasingly, I've been finding several of these to be very replicable. The improved Cold Store deathwarp doesn't take too much work to get the hang of, and the triple jump in OOAL is easy once you've found the right starting position - it also reopens the discussion about whether it's worth utilising a deathwarp in that room, as the second half of the room has now been made longer as a result. Nightmare Room is my favourite of these new ones so far, although the second jump in it is pretty difficult. It's both pixel perfect AND frame perfect as far as I can tell, meaning that the failure threshold is pretty low. However, once you've nailed that jump, the rest of the room is an absolute dream compared to the current strat, so I reckon it's well worth it. Off Licence I'm having a lot of trouble with, as you need to pass Cyan Ball at the earliest opportunity and hit your turning jump onto the conveyor belt pretty precisely to get the Green Radar jump right. Then you also need to mind your item jumps so that you don't miss any as you head right. It's pretty unforgiving. Oh, and I cannot get my head around the Ballroom West one at all. I just can't find any good visual hooks to reproduce it yet. Looking forward to more of these, so cheers for your hard work @crem.

I already got beaten in an MM speedrun race against someone playing the PC version. Why is everyone so eager to see me do Miner Willy races that I'm blatantly going to lose?

Yeah, it's the same with On The Roof. Rope warp doesn't really improve how fast you execute the main bulk of the level. Its main benefit is simply in speeding up the rope. I checked to see if it was possible to do the jump into the ceiling from the left, i.e. jumping onto the rope then immediately going to the top to do the jump, but it doesn't appear to be possible. You can't get to the top of the rope before its cut-off point becomes too low to reach the ceiling.

Did some messing around and turns out the rope warp in The Beach actually is a little bit useful: Looks like I'm gonna have to redo my Any% run now to get that elusive 19:47 time in...

Way ahead of you on this one:

To address your other points: Honestly, I would've agreed with you on this one for a long time. For ages, I did Tool Shed before the Yacht because I assumed the timesave from the lost life would make the overall experience quicker. However, Mick_jo told me his split for that section seemed to be quicker when he did the Tool Shed last, so I did a comparison: And he seems to be right. It seems like that back-and-forth into the Tool Shed if you do it first negates any speed benefits you get from running the Yacht section with one fewer life. So for this last run I decided to revert back to doing the Tool Shed last. If you can explain to me how the rest of the route could be adapted to accommodate this switch in warps AND save time then I'd love to hear more! But logistically I can't see any way of using Offy Warp that wouldn't add more distance to the run overall than what we currently have.

So here's why it's not really worth it. Firstly, looking at this comparison here, the amount of time saved with the OOAL deathwarp is ~8 seconds: By contrast, if you look at deathwarps in either UTM or Cuckoo's Nest, both of those save you closer to ~9 seconds: (The UTM deathwarp is ever so slightly quicker than CN, although in terms of what makes the run easier on a practical basis I definitely prefer the CN one.) They are also earlier on in the route, so you gain slightly more overall benefit from having one life less between Cuckoo's Nest and OOAL. As mentioned before, you only get six deathwarps across the run, so you want to use them where they're going to provide the most benefit. Secondly, getting the OOAL deathwarp as close to an 8 second timesave as it is requires a pretty much pixel-perfect jump onto the leaf below the first item, so that you can then get both the items in one leftward jump. If you don't hit that, two things are likely to happen: 1) You do the leftward jump, miss the first item, and have to go up and collect it again, negating the timesave completely. 2) You switch to doing a vertical jump instead to grab the first item, then do a left jump to get the second item. The addition of a vertical jump would add between 1-2 seconds to the room, making the timesave on the deathwarp less efficient. So not only is it not as good a timesave as UTM or CN, but it also is much harder to implement for not as much gain (other than looking cool). And that's why we don't use it.

Thanks for the compliments Danny, much appreciated. You would get killed from walking right, but it would be from falling too far rather than hitting Yellow Maria. I never bothered doing a comparison of which was faster because quite frankly I think jumping into Maria looks cool and I didn't want anyone to take that away from me. We did look into this, and the OOAL deathwarp seemed like a good idea right up until we discovered you could shortcut in OABOTD by dropping into it from above. Therefore, because we're exiting OOAL via the bottom rather than the right, the deathwarp doesn't actually save you as much time as it would in UTM or Cuckoo's Nest, especially since we now have the quicker way of jumping past the skull. "Any percent."

Yeah, I never managed to find a use for it though, so I don't really tend to mention it out of saltiness.

Also, I managed to finally get a sub-20 min Any% run today. Hallelujah. Still contained one slightly irritating mistake in On A Branch Over The Drive, but the rest of this I'm very proud of.

Yes, as IRF says, losing lives isn't mandatory in Any% or Warpless runs (apart from Conservatory Roof of course). However, you're going to struggle to get a particularly competitive run in those categories without doing so. Partly because of the increased running speed of the game, and partly because some rooms are just quicker to complete by losing lives. The definitions of these categories can be found in the opening post of this thread, but basically: Any% = just complete the game as quickly as you can (excluding cheat codes). Warpless = complete the game without utilising any of the unintentional warps around the map (i.e. Rescue Esmerelda ceiling, Watch Tower ceiling, and rope warp in On The Roof). This doesn't include deathwarps, which are still permitted. Both of these are common categories in speedrunning. Another common category is 100%, but this only really applies to JSW2 as you can complete that game without collecting all of the items, which you can't with JSW.

Yeah, if I understood correctly, this tool was for finding the quickest time for each cavern rather than the highest score (as these aren't necessarily unified in Solar Power Generator). It feels like the trade-off would be the most optimum route that also ended with as little air as possible, so that the countdown time was minimal. EDIT: didn't notice there was a second page on this thread, so this has pretty much already been covered. Whoops.

Okay, so I revisited the Top Landing using the jump that Danny uses over the green balls in The Bathroom and found some very interesting results: It appears that if you are doing an Any% (or Warpless) run, which requires losing all your lives bar one before the end of the game then doing the Top Landing item last is ever so slightly faster due to the increased game speed. However... If you are doing a Max Lives run then because you lose just one life the game speed is such that it's actually slightly faster to do the Top Landing item first. Either way the time difference is very minor, so if you have a preferred order of doing it then it doesn't matter *that* much (less than a second difference either way). But speedrunning JSW does come down to applying as many small time saves across the run as you can, so depending on what category you're doing it's an interesting variation to take into account.

That's good to know, but I do think the main fun of the mod is working within the new issues that the RNG throws up rather than just trying to patch anything remotely dangerous out. If nothing else, it leads to moments like this: https://clips.twitch.tv/DifficultEnjoyableArmadilloANELE--d9OOI0-BOZvobV0 I was being slightly tongue-in-cheek. I think we were more speculating over whether the animation of the Chandeliers alternated between starting frames or not.

Well I initially thought I was done with speedrunning JSW a few months ago when I recorded my last Warpless run, but as I mentioned earlier in the thread we had a new member of the community join recently who spotted a few things we'd missed, and that's helped rejuvenate interest in it as of late. Sometimes you just need new people to stir things up a bit. The one thing I still never really fully got my head around about speedrunning JSW was how best to optimise deathwarps in the game, as it's a really elaborate balance between the time you save by ditching lives ASAP and the time you save by shortcutting specific rooms. I feel like the route I've got at the moment is a decent speculative one for handling this quandry, but I'm sure a more scientific approach could probably find better parts of the run in which the lives could be ditched. I don't know if he is aware. I watched Kim Justice's documentary about Smith on YouTube and it seems like he doesn't have a huge amount of fondness for JSW these days, given his rather turbulent history with the game. I believe he's still proud of MM though, and it was briefly floated that we should try to get him involved on the commentary for the MM race at ESA the other month, but it was ultimately concluded that his commentary probably wouldn't be PG enough. 😄

So I played this on stream for just over an hour and a half today. It was a good lark, although I'm definitely a long way off being able to get a full run in on this version! It's amazing how something as simple as adding RNG to the game can completely re-shape how it plays. Here's a few initial observations: Nightmare Room is much harder as I expected. The opportunities to shortcut across the middle of the room are significantly truncated by the randomised cycles. Conservatory Roof is now a boss stage. The rope randomisation is really effective. So much so that I've had to change the order in which I go to Swimming Pool now because it's too risky compared to my normal route. Under The Drive has gone from the 'pixel perfect jump' room to the 'pray that you can even get anywhere near that pixel' room. 😅 We did wonder during the stream whether the Chandeliers' cycles had been randomised too... Thanks again for doing this @Norman Sword, it's ended up being as fun as I expected it to be.

Okay, I've looked into this further and the RTA of Danny's RZX run actually looks pretty realistic. What you need to bear in mind is the game is 8.6% faster with the music off. I'm not sure if my calculations here are entirely accurate, but if my Any% PB had been played with the music on, it would have been somewhere around 22:15 in RTA - almost a whole two minutes slower. Also, the difference in speed between running with all lives and running with one life left is 2.9%. So each time a death warp is implemented, it will gradually get towards this percentage until it is reached at Cuckoo's Nest. This happens at around 12:14 in my Any% PB, meaning that effectively 4/10 of the run is being played over 2% faster. Another thing to note is that my Max Lives speedrunning PB - again with the music off - is 22:19: https://www.speedrun.com/jet_set_willy#Max_Lives So this is a much more comparable run to measure Danny's time against, given that it similarly has no deaths apart from Conservatory Roof. It also isn't as optimised as his run. If I'd had the music on for this run, it appears it would have come in at over 24 minutes. So actually Danny's RTA looks pretty much on point.

Interesting, Spectaculator is one of the accepted emulators for running JSW. I use Fuse (another accepted emulator), so both should be running at the same pace. I'll ask the Speedtrum Specrunning community (a Discord server dedicated to discussing the speedrunning of ZX Spectrum games) to see if anyone might know where the slower speed is coming from. Or if you're on Discord, I could give you the server link so that you could do so yourself?

You only get six spares, because you have to use one life on the Conservatory Roof. Ooh, very good shout, thank you!

Wonderful, thanks for doing this Norman. Will try it out on my Twitch stream later today.

I have thought about trying this. However, there's a few things that one would need to bear in mind. Firstly, it would be about measuring the speed improvements you would get from losing your six spare lives right near the beginning vs. using deathwarps in the six most beneficial rooms in the game (currently understood to be Chapel, Nightmare Room, Cold Store, Tool Shed, Off Licence and either Cuckoo's Nest or Under The Megatree). Because even though having no lives does make the game run faster overall, it may not be enough to offset shortcutting some of the longer dead-end rooms. Secondly, figuring out the quickest way to lose those six lives would be significant, as for optimisation it would need to be a death that you could quickly implement six times in a row that's convenient to the speedrun route. Currently I think the yellow monk in First Landing would be best for that if you just walked back in six times from The Chapel, as it's the first enemy in the initial rooms of the game that spawns very near to a door. Yellow Maria in Nightmare Room has a similarly useful position, but that would be slightly off-track from the current route. In answer to your first question, yes. Because although the score does largely match up with how fast you've played the game in MM, there are of course two caverns where this diverges: 1) The first Kong Beast level, because as you state, going out of your way to dunk the Kong adds a notable portion of time to the completion time. 2) Solar Power Generator, because of the air beam. Technically in this one you'd want to end the level with as little air as possible, so that the run down of the air counter is shorter (yes, I know this is a miniscule time save, but every little counts!). In terms of life losses, we looked into this briefly for MM but never really figured out a satisfying conclusion to this one, and it might be because you have several fewer lives than in JSW, so the difference is less pronounced. Also, finding a convenient place to lose the spare lives quickly is key and I didn't really manage to find many good ones. The spider at the left of The Menagerie is the first really nearby one, and I found trying to jump into that really awkward. Beyond that though, there's not really much you can do in MM to optimise it, which is why I find it less interesting than JSW for speedrunning purposes.

Cheers @jetsetdanny. So yes, JSW speedrunning is measured by RTA (Real Time Attack) rather than IGT (In-Game Time), given that the latter is quite imprecise - the in-game clock only shows minutes, not seconds - and that many games on SRC (speedrun.com) will take RTA into account even if there is an in-game clock. Also, there are several variants in JSW gameplay that affect the RTA - switching the music off and losing lives both incrementally speed the game up over the course of the run. And, as we only discovered a few days ago (after my 20:24 run), playing the game on 128K makes it about 1.34% faster than on 48K, so this is now being used in runs given that it should save approx 20 seconds in a completed run (and therefore achieve sub-20 mins if everything else goes right). There's been a few grumbles here and there about this, but in my view it's no different to running Mega Drive-era Sonic The Hedgehog games on NTSC rather than PAL for a speed increase, which is widely accepted in that speedrunning community. I watched your Max Lives RZX run that you linked and it seems like a good 95%+ of those strats are in my route already, so it looks like it's just a case of execution. But to be honest, just the fact that I've shown that it's possible to reproduce the vast majority of that without rollback means that I'll be pretty happy with whatever my PB (personal best) ends up being, even if there are little movement mistakes here or there. In terms of running the emulator faster as @IRFsuggested (albeit slightly tongue-in-cheek if I read it correctly), this isn't something that's allowed in speedrun.com rules, and we did have to have a discussion at one point about which Spectrum emulators were permitted, given that not all of them replicate the Spectrum's speed accurately. I'm pretty sure the main reason Danny's run is significantly slower in RTA is because he has the music on. So I did record footage of both scenarios and put it together to show a comparison. This can be seen in one of my JSW speedrun tutorial videos here: https://youtu.be/-shVsGf5-F8?t=1730 The rationale was that because the distance is pretty similar and you lose a little bit of time on the green balls in The Bathroom if you do those first then it comes out slightly quicker (plus you are 7 lives down in the Any% route at this point, so you want to take advantage of the increased RTA speed by doing as much of the mansion in that state as possible). However, your RZX video shows that it is possible (if precise) to do a quicker jump over the balls, so I might need to reconsider. Another reason I liked doing the Top Landing item last was because if you mess up a run early on (e.g. Main Stairway) then it's a quicker reset. This one is definitely a timesave: https://youtu.be/-shVsGf5-F8?t=1032 The reason being that the warp resets the cycle of the rope, which actually pushes it further ahead by half a second, so you can get up to the top right ever so slightly quicker.