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My guesses...

The second one looks more like a "revenge" scenario 😁

More guesses for D...

Good call, did not think of that one!

Interested to see what image is generated for "We must perform a Quirkafleeg" 🤣

That's an excellent point Crem, regarding the speed of room switching. If automated, the Speccy might be able to handle 100's of teleports per second, at which point it all becomes an "impressive blur lasting mere milliseconds" to complete. Like you mentioned, you could limit the teleports-per-second, and then the challenge would be for a human to reproduce it the quickest, using the data that AI provided. However, at that point, could it still be considered a human achievement?, or just replication of something non-human? The debate could go on forever... 🤖 vs 🙂

Yes! you are totally correct, I was referring to JSW. I had no idea there are separate topics for the automated MM and JSW, until you pointed it out. Thanks for catching that, and replicating the query!

Thanks to Norman and CPL for sharing this valuable information. I think I have enough to "give it a go", but will probably end up with a list of questions 😁 When you think about it, Matthew Smith was a clever bugger, working out all this stuff in the early 80's, in Z80 assembler, considering his age. Using tables to store the rope pattern makes total sense, rather than some complex maths formula. I always assumed it used a Sine wave algorithm to generate the swing. The GMS2 code snippets provided by CPL will be super helpful also. I am also a "hobbyist coder" and would never call myself a proper programmer, so I will excuse your messy code 😄

Thanks again, that's good info. I might give the rope a go later on. I checked in an emulator, and the JSW rope is a lot more "flowing" than I remember (almost like a wind is blowing it as it swings), so I'm not terribly sure on how to reproduce that. Is there a simple breakdown on how the rope pixels are generated, to create that wind-flowing/swinging pattern?

Thanks Norman, that is good to know! Do you know how the displacement works when being on a rope? that's what creates the headaches for me.

Sounds like you are the person to talk to! I would totally implement ropes in my version, if I could wrap my head around it (which is coincidentally also in GMS2!). I think I could "probably" figure out how to make it swing, but I feel like my "Willy platform detection code" would completely break if I tried to make him attach to the rope. I'm not using any physics, so the walk/jump/landing code is written from scratch. I had the hardest time just getting ramps working, since they break the "stick to the nearest horizontal 8 pixel rule". An explanation of how ropes work, especially from a GMS2 perspective, would be amazing!!

Thanks for your input MtM. It's possible Matt saw them in Hunchback and just thought they would be a good fit, and was wanting to add something extra to JSW. According to Wikipedia, Hunchback came out on the arcade in 1983 (time of JSW writing), but was not ported until 1984. Yes, I'm familiar with Turmoil, great game! It's a good example of a swinging rope, from 1984. Lots of games around that time used vertical ropes, and ladders, rather than swinging ropes.

I maybe completely wrong, but I've always felt that ropes & arrows in JSW were an after-thought. Almost like JSW neared completion, then Matt played arcade Hunchback and thought "oh, I like that!", rolled up his sleeves, and headed straight to his TRS-80. Probably some truth in this, since other Hunchback elements were clearly in JSW. Neither ropes or arrows were present in MM, and to me, it feels like they never belonged in the Willy universe. Both these elements also introduced a new level of unpredictability (which could be considered a good thing!). In MM, you could sit back and study the boundaries of sprites, and almost plan a route in advance. With arrows, their shooting frequency, and location, appears random, and with ropes it's counterintuitive to climb, and to dismount with any degree of accuracy. The reason I bring this up, is my new game I'm developing has neither ropes or arrows. I could easily add arrows, but I'm hesitant since I've never been a huge fan. Ropes on the other hand are a tricky beast to code from scratch, or at least to emulate their quirky JSW behaviour. What are your general thoughts of Ropes, Arrows, and is it blasphemous to exclude them in a new JSW game?

That's troll talk 😂 Think of it more as "setting the benchmark, for humans to aspire to".

Just discovered this thread, and the world of speedrunning! I must say that I'm blown away. You guys have done some seriously impressive times. The concept of using AI (thanks to Crem!) to improve on the human times also intrigues me. I have two questions... 1) I noticed on Impossamole's C64 run, that a score of 1940 was achieved on the Central Cavern, rather than the 1724 Speccy record. This appears to exploit a conveyor bug in the C64 version, which allows him to travel in the opposite direction. This may have been discussed before, but I was curious why this is possible, and are there other versions that allow this? 2) I was super impressed by the WRITETYPER run's from RuffledBricks and DigitalDuck. I wondered if any progress had been made on using AI to find the quickest teleport routes for this? It seems like a task well suited for AI, since there are so many possible combinations for the human brain to calculate. That said, I also understand this would be a complex beast to write, and possibly require a supercomputer to process 😁

That makes sense! With many things in life, one has the draw the line somewhere. I appreciate the explanation.