crem

Aaand you were right, it was "Eugene's lair". The next one is quite cute, I'd say:

Two images of the same screen (generated by two people). I think this one should be easy.

This is actually two pictures of the same cavern, generated by two people:

It's "The Cold Room" indeed (which actually is the very first cavern if you count from zero :-P). I thought it should be quite guessable, "room" makes it box-shaped, and "cold" makes that icy texture.

It's "Cold Store" indeed. Note that the the label on top of the store(?) resembles "LCOD", which I believe comes from the fact the the name had the word "cold" in it. There will be several examples of such rooms/caverns which have something resembling text which reomtely resembles the title.

It's not "The Central Cavern", but it has something in common with this JSW room.

Congratulations to everyone who got it (I added the answer to the original message). I think I'll start soon to post several rooms together, otherwise it will take too long to guess them all. But for today, here is the next room:

I've added the answer to the original post, congratulations to everyone who guessed it right. The next one is...

I didn't understand the hints except the ID, but ID is indeed the correct one! For the "Technician Ted 128 - The Megamix" reference, I've just quickly skimmed thourgh a walkthrough and didn't find the similarly named room there. (The only one that looked familiar is "Emergency generator", and the picture above is not that).

The same as this topic, but for JSW. Neural network generated surreal images from the room names, let's guess the room. 🙂 Again, more rooms will be available next week, but here is what I have now: Any ideas? 🙂

I think it spoils too much (which may be fine), maybe just INK/PAPER colors without actual pixels would be good hint enough.

That's indeed the right answer. 🙂 I only have a high resolution of three caverns so far and the rest is low res, will get more highres from Digitalduck next week. The other two of three are harder to guess, so I'd rather post them later when we can already exclude some caverns.

In the ZX Spectrum speedrun Discord chat server, Digitalduck has recentely tested VQGAN, a neural network that can generate surreal images from the text description. He did it for all Manic Miner room names ("Central Cavern", "The Cold room" and so on), and for all JSW room names too. Before I share all other images, who can guess which of the Manic Miner caverns is this? 🙂

Although the algorithm is trying to generate the shortest time without any human limitation, the main motivation for me was to find strats that human speedrunners can use. For non-WRITETYPER Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, it's turning out that everything is doable by humans, so fastest tool assisted speedrun is also possible to repeat for humans, in theory. For WRITETYPER, it's another story. The shortest route requires inhuman play, like switching room 20 times within 2 seconds, that's why I didn't focus much in that variant. In fact, I tried to impose some limitations like "switch room not faster than 3 times per second", "you cannot switch direction and switch a room at the same time", but the result didn't look natural. There were moments where the play was clearly not doable by humans, and vice versa, in some places the delay was too strict. But if there is interest in it, I think I can generate it, I should have the code ready somewhere. (And regarding the JSW non-WRITETYPER routing, it's a very long story, and it probably will take several pages of posts to write it. In short, i took many approaches to find the optimal route, and still couldn't beat humans in most of the speedrun categories. I don't give up yet though, and have more ideas).

The same but when jumping or falling. Note the x axis lower limit change!

This is even more arbitrary. 🙂

Random useless graph. 🙂

Also note that in emulators (at least Fuse) the emulation doesn't happen in real CPU speed. Instead the code runs at full speed in small portions 50 times per second. That means that failed jump key is actually not "unlucky moment to press a key" but rather "unlikely moment for interrupt to happen". Which may (or may not) affect the probability of that effect happen in either way.

I think the semicolon button works exactly the same as if "jump" and "left" were pressed at the same time, it's just that when a person manually presses left+jump simultaneously and Willy doesn't do what was intended, people blame themselves that they were not simultaneous enough. The problem is that in the code keypress checks for left/right (addresses 36624-36651) and for jumps (36720-36745) are quite far from each other. I'd say around 0.5ms far apart, so if the keypress happens during that time of the frame, only jump is recorded but not left/right. With ~12 fps and 0.5ms, that has probability around 1% to happen if the key is pressed at random time. The effect can be reduced a bit (but not sure if it worth it) if "67" keys are used for walk (rather than letters, kempston joystick keys would be even better), and "SHIFT-Z-X-C-V-B-N-M-SS-SPACE" is used for jump (rather than "0" or joystick).

I considered it, but the problem is that routing is not really a travelling salesman problem (it's easy to "reduce" TSP to what is needed for JSW routing, but in opposite direction it's not so): In JSW, "visit" happens on edges rather than vertices. If this along would be a problem, it could be worked around by inserting a fake vertex inside the edge with item collection. There are several edges (in-room routes) that have the same label (collect the same item). In TSP it doesn't matter from which edge you came to a vertex, all outgoing edges still available and have the same cost.

1. I implemented the tweak I mentioned but it didn't help much. I added more fine-grained progress metric for the algorithm than just number of items collected. While it did help a bit, the route it finds are still worse than human-generated ones. I've streamed some of those attempts here: https://www.twitch.tv/mooskagh/videos, mostly in Maxlives and Any% categories. At this point I stop trying to improve this approach and will switch to other ones, which will take some time. 2. For realtime walkthrough, I'll need to regenerate all the routes. I realized that the shortest in-room route in terms of number of frames doesn't necessary mean it's the shortest in real time. This is largely due to sound when jumping, but I think that there may be also a tiny difference whether Willy stays or walks. And in the generated routes, Willy tended to avoid being idle. I considered regenerating the routes anyway. This should take 2 weeks on my computer, but I'm trying to find other places to run it as it's someone inconvenient and also it heats up my room to 25℃.

Thanks for the offer! Currently most of the tasks I run are pretty short (6 hours or so), and I think it will take longer than that to set it up to run on a different computer, especially it the operating system is not Linux. I may want to regenerate all the routes without combining entrances into "portals", as it caused more problems than good so far. If I'll do that, this will take 2 weeks on my computer, and sharing the efforts will help to cut the time.

It indeed happens sometimes that hobby project suddenly starts to feel like a second job. At some moment you realize that you "have to" do something, and that instantly kills all the motivation. That's why I'd like to say that it's very possible that I'll just drop the idea or suddenly pause it for years. Having this option actually makes it less likely to do so. But the JSW route finding project is currently nowhere near feeling like an obligation. I enjoy the process of solving it a lot, and also like the fact that the results turn out to be useful. Actually, the result itself is not that important to me (i.e. I'm not that curious myself what is the fastest way to finish the game, but I like that other people are). I also try to structure it that way that I'm learning something useful for the next projects, so that it doesn't feel like I'm wasting time for pure joy. 🙂