Jet Set Willy speedrunning videos

[RuffledBricks]

Quote

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!)

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.

Quote

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)?

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.

[IRF]

1 hour ago, RuffledBricks said:

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).

You get seven spare lives in JSW, so you could implement a 'deathwarp' in all seven of those rooms (leaving no dancing Willies on the status bar to slow down the game towards the end).  Though I guess you want to keep one spare in case of 'accidents'!

1 hour ago, RuffledBricks said:

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.

Jumping up from near the top of the ramp in First Landing into Top Landing is a good way to expire several lives in quick succession (with the advancing Swiss Army Knife), though you have to be careful with the positioning so that you can escape with a vertical jump once you're down to your last life (if you're too close to the Swiss Army Knife when you pop up into Top Landing then you're in an inescapable Infinite Death Scenario!)

[RuffledBricks]

Quote

You get seven spare lives in JSW, so you could implement a 'deathwarp' in all seven of those rooms (leaving no dancing Willies on the status bar to slow down the game towards the end).  Though I guess you want to keep one spare in case of 'accidents'!

You only get six spares, because you have to use one life on the Conservatory Roof.

 

Quote

Jumping up from near the top of the ramp in First Landing into Top Landing is a good way to expire several lives in quick succession (with the advancing Swiss Army Knife), though you have to be careful with the positioning so that you can escape with a vertical jump once you're down to your last life (if you're too close to the Swiss Army Knife when you pop up into Top Landing then you're in an inescapable Infinite Death Scenario!)

Ooh, very good shout, thank you!

[IRF]

I've got so used to playing with the Conservatory Roof bug fixed (so that you don't have to lose a life to collect any of the items) that I'd forgotten about that feature of the original game!

[jetsetdanny]

Guys, thank you for your replies and all the info therein.

I feel the time difference I described cannot be due to playing with the music on. It's too big for this, I would think.

I make my YouTube videos by recording, from the screen, RZX recordings being played back in Spectaculator. I chose to do it at 24 frames per second. If I did at the NTSC speed of 29.97 frames per second instead, wouldn't the resulting video be shorter, i.e. it would show a quicker completion time if you look at the video's length?

[RuffledBricks]

12 minutes ago, jetsetdanny said:

I feel the time difference I described cannot be due to playing with the music on. It's too big for this, I would think.

I make my YouTube videos by recording, from the screen, RZX recordings being played back in Spectaculator. I chose to do it at 24 frames per second. If I did at the NTSC speed of 29.97 frames per second instead, wouldn't the resulting video be shorter, i.e. it would show a quicker completion time if you look at the video's length?

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?

Edited March 3, 2021 by RuffledBricks

[crem]

24 minutes ago, jetsetdanny said:

Guys, thank you for your replies and all the info therein.

I feel the time difference I described cannot be due to playing with the music on. It's too big for this, I would think.

I make my YouTube videos by recording, from the screen, RZX recordings being played back in Spectaculator. I chose to do it at 24 frames per second. If I did at the NTSC speed of 29.97 frames per second instead, wouldn't the resulting video be shorter, i.e. it would show a quicker completion time if you look at the video's length?

The game frame rate and video frame rate have no relation to each other (for games that rely on CPU interrupt frequency there may be differences, but JSW disables interrupts).

The actual game framerate would be somewhere between 9 or 13 fps depending on number of moving objects in a screen, number of lives left, whether the music is on, etc. There's also a difference between ZX Spectrum 48 and later variants as they have slightly different CPU clock speed (3.5MHz for Spectrum 48, almost 3.55MHz for Spectrum 128).

If you record video of the JSW and watch it frame by frame, you'll notice when you go from a frame to the next one, most of the time the image doesn't change. (E.g. if you record at 30fps, and game is ~10fps, only every 3rd frame would show the change).

[IRF]

2 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

I feel the time difference I described cannot be due to playing with the music on. It's too big for this, I would think.

A combination of the music being off in RB's video (and on in your recording), with the fact that RB played some of the game with fewer remaining lives, could add up to explain the difference?

[RuffledBricks]

1 hour ago, IRF said:

A combination of the music being off in RB's video (and on in your recording), with the fact that RB played some of the game with fewer remaining lives, could add up to explain the difference?

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.

 

 

 

Edited March 3, 2021 by RuffledBricks

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks again, everyone, for all of your comments! 👍 To answer RuffledBricks's question - no, I'm not on Discord.

I guess that the time difference has been explained satisfactorily. I did not realise turning the music off made such a difference, plus indeed the initial comparison was of a with-lives walkthrough with a life-lost walkthrough, so there must have been a difference.

I find it amazing how deeply members of the speedrunning community go into detail about how to improve the results, and at the level of perfection RuffledBricks and others must have when playing the game. It's another kind of (wonderful) craziness, a bit like we do here sometimes when we discuss some extremely tiny details of game projects, or pore over the code to find a one-byte saving, and things like that.

The intriguing thing is where the optimisation of walkthroughs will stop. I think that we are now very close to perfect routes and executions both in JSW and MM, possible improvements are minimal, and in many rooms simply not possible any more.

Is Matthew Smith aware of the existence of the speedrunning community and your achievements? I think it should thrill him to know how much time people spend on his two games and how much effort they put into activities related to them - now almost 40 years after he created them...