IRF

There is something which I meant to say yesterday in relation to the 'MM: creme de la creme' entry on JSWCentral - but I forgot - and which also applies here [EDIT: and indeed in relation to the original Manic Miner, and possibly other games using the MM engine]: I don't see the purpose of giving separate Highest Documented Score for: - Reaching the Swordfish; - Re-entry to the Central Cavern [or equivalent] after completing all the caverns once. The former just seems to truncate consideration of the final cavern before the additional points have been added to account for how quickly the player completed that final cavern. To what purpose? I can see the argument for giving distinct times in JSW for reaching the onset of the various game modes (all items collected/reaching the bed/reaching the toilet], because the player has some agency in between those stages - and in some modified games, pausing Willy in mid-toilet-run is necessary to dodge guardians, etc. [EDIT: Although in the JSWCentral entry for original Jet Set Willy, you don't appear to give that level of detail for Best Documented Completion Time!] However, the player in Manic Miner has absolutely no agency to change things once they have entered the portal in The Final Barrier - the end sequence of the game simply plays out - the Swordfish appears*, and then the remaining air is counted down, and then Willy reappears in the Central Cavern. So it seems, in my humble opinion, to be an arbitrary and unnecessary distinction to make! *EDIT: Actually, it isn't always even the case that the Swordfish appears - if the Cheat Boot has been enabled, then the Swordfish effect is skipped! Suppose I were to load up the original Manic Miner, activate Cheat Mode (using '6031769'), but not actually use the teleportation feature subsequently, and then make a recording of my completing all 20 caverns with a better final score than what is currently listed on JSWCentral - how would you update the site to account for that higher final score?

I have a copy of 0.4beta dated 3rd June 2020. However, there were several other beta versions after that and before 1.0, which I believe was the first 'official release' (gamma?) version. And then there were a few more changes after that, right up until v1.5 which was created on 2/12/20 to fix a typo in one of the room names - as far as I am aware, that is the version which became the current 'finished article' (would that be an 'omega release'??) A few additional caverns were added to the game at some point between v1.0 and v1.5. Furthermore, following feedback in the 'Playing around' thread, some other changes were implemented to improve the gameplay, including amongst other things: - The 'Additional Bonus Points for Lives Remaining' feature was added, to stop players from 'artificially inflating' their end score by losing several lives in the Kong caverns after repeatedly flipping Kong; - Using the 'H/K' and 'J/L' keys to rotate the torch beam anticlockwise/clockwise in 'Lantern'/'Torch' modes; - I had noticed that in the 'Torch' mode, some of the caverns (the equivalents of Cold Room, Return of Kong) required Willy to make a 'drop of faith' to reach the flashing portal from the top of the cavern - you couldn't see where the horizontal guardians that guard the portals were before you started the drop, which I thought was a bit unfair - so Norman increased the vertical range of the torch beam to account for that. However, this is probably all too much detail for the entry on JSWCentral!

I also compared the Skylab bitmaps in the 'Sprites' menu of JSWED - all eight frames of animation - in case there was a difference in the distribution of the pixels of debris (which wouldn't show up in most screenshots of the game, where the Skylabs tend to be shown descending and therefore are all in their first animation frames). But they were identical between BB and SP.

I don't believe there is any difference between the BB and SP versions of 'Skylab Landing Bay'? The only rooms with a difference, as far as I am aware, are The Warehouse, Amoebatron's Revenge, and Processing Plant (where the only difference is the bitmaps for one type of Fire cell and for the item shape - neither of which are based on pixel collisions so there definitely won't need to be a different route/movement key datastream for that cavern). EDIT: I just compared the raw cavern data for the two versions, with original game files for MM-BB and MM-SP both opened up via JSWED's hex editor. They are identical (all 1024 bytes).

I wasn't sure where to put this, but this seemed like as good a place as any... I encountered a headless Willy just now - see attached screenshot. No POKES or code changes were involved! Willy managed to walk away safely though - and his head came back!

NOTES TO SELF, for future reference: I've just investigated the above, and my reading of the code was slightly wrong - it is possible to reduce the initial air supply in such a way that a pixel-perfect, quickest-possible cavern completion leaves Willy with precisely ZERO units of air left, but he can enter the portal before being killed in the last time-frame (i.e. just after the last gasp of air has expired), with ZERO points being accrued for remaining air left. DONE EDIT: However, four caverns would need 'special treatment' (i.e. a Cavern Setup Patch to insert a CPL instruction after #8D1F in the 'Move the HGs' routine; then that would need to be NOPped out for all other caverns) to deal with a combination of Slow guardians and the original initial air supply value being reduced in the modified file by an odd number of increments), namely: Telephones, Return of Kong, Warehouse and Solar Power. (N.B. That's for the BB version; for the SP version only Telephones, Return of Kong and Solar Power would need the CPL instruction to be patched in, because The Warehouse would have one less unit of air in a 'perfect performance required' version of MM-SP.) [One example of the impact of those two factors is that the pattern of the solar beam changes because the slow HG isn't in sync with the other guardians in the same way. Another example is that Willy has to wait one extra time-frame for the slow 'rolling rock' in the second Kong cavern to move out of the way.] DONE ---- EDIT: The Endorian Forest has a new high score thanks to DigitalDuck, and this means that the above patch needs to be applied for that cavern too (since it has a slow guardian) - ALSO DONE The 'Nine Lives in the Light' bug would also need to be fixed, to stop Willy's air supply from being replenished by the solar beam when the air has dropped down to the last character on the status bar. DONE Slow down screen colour-cycling after entry to portal - to give the player a chance to 'breathe' before embarking on the next cavern! DONE (Changed #90A3 from '04' to '10') Also consider having zero spare lives (to prevent possibility of inflated score by repeatedly collecting the same item via different lives, and making Kong out-of-bounds (i.e. not enough time to flip the switch and escape to the portal). DONE Finally, might have to fix the visual glitch which occurs when a value of #00 for Offset #2BD in the cavern definition (especially if it turns out that that is a value that occurs, once the initial air supply levels for each cavern has been adjusted). DONE P.S. Could skip the 'Game Over' sequence, if it proves to be too annoyingly repetitive. (You can't abandon it once it starts going!) DONE P.P.S. New name for the modified game - DONE - and an associated change to the title screen/scrolly? - TO DO

Well, if you listen to the link above from 10 seconds onwards, and listen to the .tap from 27 seconds onwards, they are identical. It could be that the .tap is an amalgam of another tune as well, I am just trying to work that part out. Yes, you're right about that part. However, I wonder if it's a medley of different tunes? The first bit is very familiar, but doesn't seem to be part of the Washington Post March. Andy, just posted an embedded video in the previous post to this, which starts off with the same familiar tune as the tune-tap he previously uploaded. Hopefully someone else might recognise the start of the tune? @Richard Hallas perhaps?

Danny, here are a few suggested tweaks in bold: ("Item" could lead to confusion with the game's collectable items!) (I'm not bothered about not getting a credit here; most of the work has been done by crem, his algorithm, and Norman Sword.)

Not really, no. 🤨

Furthermore, I've noticed another five or six missing or truncated posts in that thread alone (other than the ones I mentioned above, and the ones that Andy listed.) Probably too many to mention them all, but this one in particular might be worth rescuing if possible, as it seems to be the one in which Fabian might give a detailed explanation about his new game? (i.e. the background to the game, etc): I dread to think how many more posts might have been affected across the whole website...

And this one is severely truncated - I suspect that Danny made lengthy comments about all the rooms in Fabian's game, but all you can see is the beginning of a section titled 'General Comments': http://jswmm.co.uk/topic/532-jet-set-jason-in-rodd/?do=findComment&comment=11773

This post appears to have a missing part too - it looks like Danny was responding to a quote by himself three days earlier, but all that is left is the original quote:

I wonder whether - for the sake of completeness, and if it doesn't require much effort (and if the data would fit into the game file) - it might be worth inserting the alternate sprites into 'Amoebatrons' Revenge' [and I suppose the different Fire cell/item bitmaps in 'Processing Plant'] for the Software Projects version of the automatic MM? Even though, as far as crem's algorithm can tell, those aspects have no bearing on the maximum achievable score.

Thanks, Andy! However, as you point out, Danny's post dated 15th March 2020 contains a quote from an earlier post in the thread. But that quote doesn't appear in any of the earlier posts in the thread! Which suggests that something is still missing! 😮

Just to be pedantic, I tried the same jump in the BB version of The Warehouse, and that route/jump is possible, but only if you wait for one time-frame (to allow the bulkier 'thresher' guardian) before jumping. And that one frame's delay means that you can only match the best score achievable in BB via the other route.

I've just skimmed through the thread concerning 'Jet Set Jason in Roddenwald' (in the 'Remakes' section). Judging by the number of missing/broken posts in that short(ish) thread, this may be a bigger problem than previously thought! (If that thread is typical of the whole website - hopefully not!?) However, any public (non-Contributor) post/thread prior to January 2020 should be available via the Wayback Machine? So that provides a kind of solution for much of the site's content.

Did we ever get the answer to this puzzle? Was it just the fact that 'embedded Willies' was what you were drawing our attention to? Or was there some other significance/meaning to them? Incidentally, I noticed that a lot of the posts in this thread have fallen foul of the 'missing text' problem that the site has experienced since being moved over to the new format.

Thanks, Andy!

If the info can't be retrieved from archive then it might be available from JSWCentral?

Fair enough, I just thought the tweak I suggested would assist with the clinical analysis to further the aim of improving the maximum MM score, which is the primary purpose of this thread. 🙂 (Actually, crem's primary purpose when he started this thread was to find the fastest MM completion time, which isn't quite the same thing - e.g. avoid killing Kong speeds up the completion but doesn't maximise the score - but in the context of the solar cavern it seems to amount to the same thing, and time spent processing 'air saps' slows down the game at an infinitesimal level!) But in any case, your version (red beam from first contact with Willy under termination) inspired me to create an adjusted version which does what I want it to do (beam red only when in contact with Willy), so everyone's happy! 🙂

I think it'll be a case of us reporting as and when we come across a post that looks truncated in the time ahead. Starting with the following one, which is quite important as it's the head of a topic so a lot of essential information about the file in question appears to be missing (and is also missing from the associated Download page accessed by clicking the 'View File' button): Although if a post is truncated at the end of a sentence or paragraph, it might not always be obvious that anything is missing!

Furthermore, I would humbly point out that the subtlety of where exactly the light beam is causing Willy harm is lost if it is rendered in red from the first point of contact with Willy and then stays red all the way until the beam terminates.

On reflection, the above aspect is potentially confusing, because of the coincidence of the solar beam detecting white INK - causing the air to sap - and the fact that the solar beam is drawn with white INK. (Even though the former - Willy's sprite - is non-BRIGHT white, whereas the beam's INK attribute is BRIGHT white.) A further modification (screenshot attached) helps to provide clarity. This time, the solar beam's INK setting is cyan - the rationale being that Willy is 'blue in the face, gasping for air'! - which applies whether the beam is sapping (red PAPER) or not (yellow PAPER - so it temporarily and harmlessly colours the guardians' INK cyan as well). Note that Willy's INK was still coloured non-BRIGHT yellow 'behind the scenes' by the adjacent guardian (before the solar beam's INK overwrote it in the same frame, this time with BRIGHT cyan) - this went unseen, but you can tell by the fact that his front foot (which falls beyond the reach of the beam as it is deflected away) also falls under the guardian's shadow, and so his front foot is visibly rendered with yellow INK in the screenshot.

The attached screenshot - based on a modified file in which only those characters of the solar beam that are currently sapping Willy's air supply get highlighted in red PAPER - demonstrates that in some circumstances, there can be separate, discrete elements of the beam sapping Willy's air. The intermediate character does not affect the air supply because it falls under the shadow of the adjacent guardian, which changed the INK attribute in the cell holding part of Willy's sprite to non-white (before the Main Loop drew the beam in this frame), therefore that character of the beam is drawn with the regular yellow PAPER/white INK attribute. N.B. It's all a bit academic, as Willy pixel-collided with the guardian and died shortly after the screenshot was taken! 😮😆

And then Norman Sword took the basic concept, refined it, and implemented it in some of the modes of play in Manic Panic.