Jet Set Willy speedrunning videos

[RuffledBricks]

15 hours ago, Spider said:

Only problem no "rollback" with it , and its -much- more difficult than the ZX version!

Why is the BBC version more difficult than the Spectrum? I looked it up on YouTube just now and didn't get much of a sense of it other than it seems to run faster.

[Spider]

1 hour ago, RuffledBricks said:

Why is the BBC version more difficult than the Spectrum? I looked it up on YouTube just now and didn't get much of a sense of it other than it seems to run faster.

It feels slower. 🙂 The later caverns (some of them) are wildly different for instance there's Meteor Storm and Final Barrier is almost impossible and totally different layout. It just seems to play harder somehow, as though the collision detection is a bit 'meaner' hehe.

It does flicker badly 😞 which is a great shame as the JSW engine on the same platform does not and plays lovely!

[RuffledBricks]

4 hours ago, Spider said:

It feels slower. 🙂 The later caverns (some of them) are wildly different for instance there's Meteor Storm and Final Barrier is almost impossible and totally different layout. It just seems to play harder somehow, as though the collision detection is a bit 'meaner' hehe.

It does flicker badly 😞 which is a great shame as the JSW engine on the same platform does not and plays lovely!

Ah, sorry, didn't realise you were referring to MM rather than JSW.

And yeah, just had a look and those last couple of levels are very different. I'm guessing they had issues replicating the beam in Solar Power Generator and the image of the surface in Final Barrier?  Or did they just decide the original last levels weren't challenging enough?

 

 

[Spider]

 

2 hours ago, RuffledBricks said:

I'm guessing they had issues replicating the beam in Solar Power Generator and the image of the surface in Final Barrier?  Or did they just decide the original last levels weren't challenging enough?

I'd not like to say, although I suspect a bit of both!

The JSW room "Nomen Luni" is subtly renamed (only in the Acorn version) "Nomem Luni" 😉 possibly as a reference to a tight squeeze in memory perhaps aka "noMEM" as bear in mind depending on video mode there's precious little memory left. There's a separate discussion about the full vs cut-down versions of JSW2 for this platform too, JSW1 not effected. I can go into detail on that at some point as it is a source of confusion even now.

EDIT... There are topics (or should be) in the JSW and MM forum area's with a selection of screenshots from these games. The topics are old however and do need updating anyway at some point.

Edited January 24, 2021 by Spider

[RuffledBricks]

Today I managed to get the Any% world record down to 20:24:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/931996825

There are several new timesaves in this, mostly found by another runner called Mick_jo, with a few from myself as well. These include:

• Doing Main Stairway without nipping into Ballroom West to reset the cycle
• Running under the Jelly in Tree Root on the first cycle
• Slightly faster execution of the Out On A Limb shortcut by doing a vertical jump over the Bird
• Smooth stair clip at the bottom of Foot Of Megatree
• Entirely wait-free execution of East Wall Base
• On The Roof ceiling warp (actually quite an old strat now, but I hadn't discovered this before my previous Any% run)
• Timing trick in Ballroom East to ensure you can run under the three Skulls without pausing
• New jump timing in Ballroom West to avoid having to return through the table to collect the last item

Sadly, I had an enormous brainfart in Forgotten Abbey due to a new strat not being quite bedded in properly, so I lost a fair chunk of the saved time on that. Will try it again next week to try and shave that off.

I'm intrigued to know if sub-20 mins is possible, so if anyone's spotted anything I've missed optimisation-wise, please do let me know.

 

 

[jetsetdanny]

RuffledBricks, I would like to spend more time following your "work" on JSW and watching your videos, but time is sparse, unfortunately.

I meant to comment on it more in detail, "properly" (according to my standards), but I can't do it right now. So I'll just comment as much - or as little - as and when possible.

Your speedruns are most impressive, taking into account that you are doing it without the possibility of repeating your movements in case of problems 👍.

For years now I have been RZX-recording efficient walkthroughs of MM and JSW games made using Rollback. Most of them are hosted on RZX Archive, and some that are not hosted on RZX Archive (because someone else has submitted their recording first) can be found on my website JSW Central.

Of course, making RZX recordings using the Rollback feature is a lot easier than playing the game live, without the possibility of correcting your errors. Infinitely easier, I believe.

As for the original "JSW", my personal best when using Rollback is finishing the game at 7:58 am in-game time without losing any lives, and at 7:56 am in-game time when losing lives in order to speed up the completion process.

I always use in-game time to determine completion time, so your timing - real-world minutes - seems like temperature expressed in degrees Fahrenheit to me 😄. However, when I now look at my YouTube video of my completion of "JSW" without losing lives, I can see that I started the game at 1:14 into the video and reached the toilet at 24:25. That would make my completion time (Rollback-assisted, of course) 23:11. And that's without any unnecessary loss of life, so it can still be improved by losing lives. However, I am not sure how that time compares to your time - taking into consideration the frame rate of the video, etc. It can't be the same time, I believe, since your in-game completion time at 20:24 was 7:57 am, and my in-game completion time at 23:11 was 7:58 am. Evidently, our real world clocks were not running at the same speed 😀.

You lost 12 second in the Forgotten Abbey, so your completion time could have been  20:12. I think that going under 20 minutes might be possible, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it.

I did not see any major possibilities for improvement in your video, apart from the beginning and end - is it really faster to collect the "Top Landing" item last? I always do it right after the Bathroom, it seems quicker to me, but I've never tried timing it.

You can watch my video to see if I did anything more efficiently than you did. Also, if you have a look at my recording hosted on RZX Archive (it should be there within the ZIP archive), it's the one where I lose lives to speed up the completion. You could have a look to see if I lose lives in the same places as you do - perhaps if I chose different rooms to lose lives (I don't recall off the top of my head what I did, it's an old recording), it might give you some ideas for improvement 🙂.

[jetsetdanny]

On second thoughts: 

If my RZX-recording hosted on RZX Archive shows JSW completed at 7:56 am in-game time and you completed the game with an in-game time of 7:57 am, certainly there is some room for improvement. And it might very well allow you to go sub-20.

Admittedly, you completed the game just a couple of seconds after the in-game clock turned to 7:57, so you were very close to 7:56. However, I created that recording at a time when my personal (Rollback-assisted) completion time of JSW without any unnecessary loss of life was 7:59 am. I've brought it down to 7:58 since, but I have not tried to improve my with-lives-lost 7:56 am recording. So I would not rule out that repeating the route taken and movements executed in my 7:56 with-lives-lost recording, but with the optimisations I must have applied in my later no-lives-lost 7:58 recording, one could go as low as 7:55 with lives lost. Plus there may be some optimisations that you apply that I have missed (like the On The Roof ceiling warp, although I am not 100% sure that it really saves time).

That would mean to me that you could *certainly* go sub-20 on your time scale provided you executed perfectly, while playing live, all of the movements that I was able to execute thanks to dozens (or even hundreds) of Rollback instances.

So there's a challenge for you... 🤪

[IRF]

5 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

Evidently, our real world clocks were not running at the same speed 

I doubt that your Youtube videos are running at different speeds, so it must have been the case that your emulators (or Danny's emulator versus RB's real Spectrum?) were running at slightly different speeds.  Which suggests that the best way to speed up 'real world' completion times is to run the emulator faster. 🤪 

But more seriously, the most consistent way of judging the completion times is to go by the time on the status bar clock display.  (I would add - you could pause the game just before Willy reaches the toilet, and PEEK at the value of the internal 'game tick' counter at #85CB, if you ever had a 'photo finish' situation e.g. two people claim a completion time of 7:56am and you want to establish who had in fact got there first.)

[RuffledBricks]

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. 

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I did not see any major possibilities for improvement in your video, apart from the beginning and end - is it really faster to collect the "Top Landing" item last? I always do it right after the Bathroom, it seems quicker to me, but I've never tried timing it.

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.

 

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Plus there may be some optimisations that you apply that I have missed (like the On The Roof ceiling warp, although I am not 100% sure that it really saves time).

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.

 

Edited March 3, 2021 by RuffledBricks

[IRF]

Speedrunning seems to be a fundamentally different cultural way to play JSW, involving a different mindset, compared with what I'm accustomed to!  But getting into the spirit, would it not be an interesting tactic to deliberately sacrifice all of Willy's lives (bar his last one) at the very start of the game?  So that the game doesn't have to process drawing any remaining lives on the status bar from that point onwards.  (Of course, you'd need to be sure not to get killed again after that point!)

Thinking about Manic Miner, different aspects may be in play.  Do you still go by the Real World timings, given that the final score is a more precise reflection of how quickly you completed all the caverns (based on air supply which saps in more discrete doses, compared with the minutes occasionally ticking over in JSW)?

Actually, I've just thought of something else - do you deliberately NOT collect the bonus points for making King fall off his perch when you're speedrunning MM?  Not just because it could be considered an unnecessary diversion if reaching the Final Barrier as quickly as possible is your only concern, but also because collecting the bonus points for dislodging Kong actually brings forward the point where you win a bonus life - which has the inadvertent consequence of slowing down the game sooner (due to the program having to draw an extra life earlier)?