Manic Jet Set Willy.

[IRF]

Well done, Danny!

I would guess that the remaining discrepancy may possibly be due to Willy being cell-row-aligned versus not cell-row-aligned (i.e. At a certain stage of his jump) at the moment when the beam first hits him during that pass through the beam. (Or conversely during the final instant when he passes through it?) Meaning that in one recording, there is a single time-frame when his air is sapped by 8 units (2*4) but in the other recording his air is sapped by 12 units.

This is where my suggestion for Norman's colour-changing solar beam only to have its PAPER colour change for those cells actually occupied by Willy - with it reverting back to yellow once it has finished passing through his sprite - would come in handy. 

[IRF]

In the process of investigating Danny's recordings of 'Manic Jet Set Willy', I have just noticed that the animation of the MM guardians transposed into Jet Set Willy does not faithfully replicate their behaviour in their original Manic Miner setting.  EDIT: In fact, the motion of the JSW horizontal guardians isn't faithful to the original either (see below).

If you study the vertical guardians in the Solar Power Generator, they only animate (i.e. change frame of animation) every other time-frame, whereas in original MM they animate every time-frame.  (In JSW you can have slow-animating or fast-animating vertical guardians; it seems that Norman Sword set the MM VG's to have the slow setting).  You can see this even more clearly in the Final Barrier, where the winking eye winks more slowly than it does in original MM.

There may be some instances of vertical guardians where this difference in animation speed makes manoeuvres around VGs more difficult (or alternatively more easy) - especially if such guardians change significantly in size during the course of their animation cycle (I'm thinking of the first Amoebatrons cavern, for example, where they pulsate inwards and outwards).  But that isn't likely to be the case with the Solar verticals, which remain the same size and circular in shape (with just the inner pixel pattern within the circles changing as the discs rotate).

Perhaps of even more significance: I noticed that the horizontal guardians (both fast and slow) within the Solar Power Generator miss out two frames of animation as they transition at the rightmost extent of their range from moving rightwards to moving leftwards.  Visually, the effect can be seen as if the guardians are 'bouncing' off the right-hand wall of the cavern.

Curiously, this doesn't happen at the other end of the horizontal guardians' range (when they switch from moving leftwards to moving rightwards).  I have also observed this effect within both the Final Barrier and the Central Cavern (the latter having an eight-frame horizontal guardian, so it doesn't just affect the four-frame MM HGs).  EDIT: In fact, it also affects the regular horizontal guardians in the Jet Set Willy rooms.  Observe the yellow monk at the bottom-right of First Landing.  When he turns from moving left to moving right, his nose is at its shortest extent (as is the case in original JSW).  But as he turns from moving right to moving left, his nose is at its longest extent.  Or see the rabbit in Ballroom West.  When it stops pirouetting at the right-hand end of the table, it does a big, sudden bounce forward as it turns round to go leftwards.  (That's a good example as the edge of the table shows you exactly the extent of its range.)

This difference in the motion of the horizontal guardians (which may be caused by an error in the part of the code which handles the guardians as they change from moving right to moving left?) is likely to have a potentially significant effect on the gameplay.  In fact, it explains why, when I was looking for Danny's reported 'sudden flash' of the solar beam horizontally across the top of the conveyor in an original MM game file (the file only being modified to deplete the initial air supply in the solar cavern by a single unit, to try and replicate what Danny was experiencing in his recording of 'Manic Jet Set Willy'), it didn't happen in quite the same way.  (Changing the initial air supply from an 'odd' to an 'even' amount of units did change the way that the Slow HG interacted with the solar beam, but not in quite the same way because the timings are all different due to the missing animation frames of all the HGs.  So the 'sudden flash' wasn't as sudden - it didn't last for just a single time-frame as Danny encountered.)

**

Danny, in light of the above observations, I wonder if you found when you were playing 'Manic Jet Set Willy', that jumping over/under/past certain guardians (particularly horizontal ones) was either more easy or more difficult than anticipated, based on your 'usual' routines/routes in the regular games?

I'm thinking maybe something along the lines of the horizontal guardians in The Forgotten Abbey, or The Endorian Forest, or The Cold Store, not being in sync in the same way as they usually are?

****

Incidentally, another aesthetic change is that the conveyors in 'Manic Jet Set Willy' seem to animate by one pixel at a time rather than two pixels - which causes Willy's/Maria's bed to look rather messy!  Also, the 'Forgotten Abbey' is now less forgotten, as the 'secret entrance' is more obvious due to the visible animation of the conveyor in The Wine Cellar.

 

Edited March 16, 2022 by IRF

[IRF]

On 12/24/2021 at 3:05 PM, Spider said:

I am not 100% that the Cold Room timings in that are 100% accurate with the original as I could not do my usual right / jump / left / jump / jump without colliding with the top nasty. In theory and speed its possible do this but its a minor (no pun) concern.

The only other thing I noted, and if memory serves the BBC Micro version also does this, if you jump into the flashing Portal at the same time a nasty guardian is in there, you lose a life. In the original as you know if you fall into this from Cold Room, you'll survive.

Both of those things could be explained by the erratic behaviour of horizontal guardians as they change from moving rightwards to moving leftwards, as I outlined in my previous post in this topic. e.g. If Willy falls into the flashing portal when the penguin is in there, if the timing is right then the penguin may have partially* moved back out again faster than usual by the time Willy has dropped in there? (*Partially, as in sufficiently far for Willy not to clip it with his back foot as he's falling whilst the front of his sprite is pressed up against the wall.)

[IRF]

9 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

As a point of interest, after touching the solar beam for the first time, I lost 560,100 pts in my original recording, and 550,000 points in this one. So I actually did better this time around. However, after touching the solar beam for the second time, my loss this time was 720,000 pts, while the first time around it was only 710,000 pts.

The net result was the same in both walkthroughs then (not counting the additional 100 points I 'gained' when touching the ray for the first time, which actually kind of offset the 'loss' I suffered at the end of "Amoebatrons' Revenge", when I waited for the ' infinitesimally short delay' before jumping into the portal).

This means that I could probably still improve the final result if I managed to lose 'only' 710,000 pts instead of 720,000 pts the second time I touched the solar beam. I tried it 30 times or more and couldn't get it done, though. I'm not sure why, or rather, how I managed to do it the first time around.

By my calculations, having done screenshots of both recordings (your 'old slow' recording and your 'new slow' one), you lost 560k points during the first jump through the beam in both recordings, and you lost 720k points during the second jump through the beam in both cases.  (It is perhaps possible to miscalculate if you freeze the game using the emulator's pause button, and if in doing so you capture the game 'mid-calculation'?  I used 'Stop Playback' just after Willy had commenced each jump, and then used the in-game pause button so that the freeze point fell at the same point in each pass through the main loop, so that the update of the score tallies should have been consistent.)

This is also exactly the number of points I would have expected you to have lost based on the number of characters of the solar beam that Willy occupies during each time-frame of his jump through it.

N.B. The discrepancy of 100 point which you mentioned is, I believe, due to the in-game clock having ticked over to the next minute in one of the cases.  (You lose 100 points every time a minute is added to the on-screen clock.)

In summary, I don't believe you could have reduced the amount of points lost to the solar beam any further than you already have managed to do. 🙂

[Spider]

1 hour ago, IRF said:

Both of those things could be explained by the erratic behaviour of horizontal guardians as they change from moving rightwards to moving leftwards, as I outlined in my previous post in this topic. e.g. If Willy falls into the flashing portal when the penguin is in there, if the timing is right then the penguin may have partially* moved back out again faster than usual by the time Willy has dropped in there? (*Partially, as in sufficiently far for Willy not to clip it with his back foot as he's falling whilst the front of his sprite is pressed up against the wall.)

Thanks. 🙂 Makes sense now.

Although you aimed a question at Danny, I did struggle with Cuckoo's Nest a bit too , see this post , possibly the rolling boulder animation or just my lack of skill! But regular game I tried and I was OK, sort of.

[IRF]

18 minutes ago, Spider said:

Although you aimed a question at Danny, I did struggle with Cuckoo's Nest a bit too , see this post , possibly the rolling boulder animation or just my lack of skill! But regular game I tried and I was OK, sort of.

Sorry yes, I should have aimed the question more widely.

It makes sense what you're saying, in light of what I've discovered.  Basically, if you're approaching a horizontal guardian from the left (like the saw in Cuckoo's Nest), whilst it's moving away from you but about to turn around, then when it turns around to come towards you it does suddenly leap forward by two animation steps faster than usual - making it harder to evade.

I've just done a couple of screenshots from the Abandoned Uranium Workings, one from original Manic Miner and the other from Manic Jet Set Willy.  In both cases, I've captured the last moment when the two seals are moving towards each other - in the next time-frame after the one I've captured, the red seal has turned away from the green seal to avoid colliding with it.  You can see that in the case of Manic JSW (bottom image), the two seals get much closer together than they did in the original MM (top image).  If the game was set up in such a way that the two seals normally have a near-miss, then with the new game engine they probably would have collided (killing Willy in the process!)

Edited March 16, 2022 by IRF

[IRF]

Actually, that red seal seems to have the rightmost extent of its bounds go further right by one character as well, which brings it even closer to the green seal.

I thought the dataset for the caverns was identical, but it seems not in this instance?  The green seal also goes one more character to the left in MJSW than it does in original MM.

The two seals, at the closest point of their approach, get six frames of animation closer to each other in MJSW than they do in original MM (four frames because of the range of the seals being wider by one character, and two frames because of the 'turnaround bug' I've discovered).

Edited March 16, 2022 by IRF

[Spider]

Thanks @IRF , oh its fine I knew it was aimed sort of at everyone but sort of "targeted" (for want of a better word) at Danny but I wanted to chime in with my findings too. 😄 , I see what you're saying now.

Thanks for the pictures, it does explain well, as they say "a picture speaks a thousand words"

I had assumed the data was 'as is' but I guess it was changed for a reason, compression perhaps. Lets not forget Norman got "two into one" here, a remarkable feat. 🙂

[jetsetdanny]

10 hours ago, IRF said:

Danny, in light of the above observations, I wonder if you found when you were playing 'Manic Jet Set Willy', that jumping over/under/past certain guardians (particularly horizontal ones) was either more easy or more difficult than anticipated, based on your 'usual' routines/routes in the regular games?

I'm thinking maybe something along the lines of the horizontal guardians in The Forgotten Abbey, or The Endorian Forest, or The Cold Store, not being in sync in the same way as they usually are?

Thanks for your analysis, Ian, detailed as always 👍

Yes, there were various moments in the game where the guardian movements did not seem to be identical with the original, and hence I could not repeat exactly the same manoeuvres as in the original games.

I did not report it because I assumed the game was not necessarily supposed to be identical to the original ones in every aspect. As Andy said above, it's a remarkable feat anyway 🙂 .

I never analysed the guardian animation as precisely as you did. I can just say that in some places there are differences which are even more visible, so to speak. In "MM", in "Attack of the Mutant Telephones" there is something about outmanouvring the slow-motion green horizontal guardian that is different (and it affects the subsequent moves). In "The Endorian Forest" you cannot jump over the ground-level red horizontal guardian while the yellow guardian is still coming at you, you can only do it a moment later, with the yellow one already moving to the right. There are some other differences in MM, I believe, I didn't try to keep track of them.

And in "JSW" there is one thing you can do that you cannot do in the original: you can clear the two lowermost items on the left with a jump from the rope straight away, while in the original you need to swing on the rope back and forth before you can jump successfully. The difference saves you a few seconds. I believe "The Forgotten Abbey" is slightly different, too, at the ground level.

[jetsetdanny]

8 hours ago, IRF said:

By my calculations, having done screenshots of both recordings (your 'old slow' recording and your 'new slow' one), you lost 560k points during the first jump through the beam in both recordings, and you lost 720k points during the second jump through the beam in both cases.  (It is perhaps possible to miscalculate if you freeze the game using the emulator's pause button, and if in doing so you capture the game 'mid-calculation'?  I used 'Stop Playback' just after Willy had commenced each jump, and then used the in-game pause button so that the freeze point fell at the same point in each pass through the main loop, so that the update of the score tallies should have been consistent.)

This is also exactly the number of points I would have expected you to have lost based on the number of characters of the solar beam that Willy occupies during each time-frame of his jump through it.

N.B. The discrepancy of 100 point which you mentioned is, I believe, due to the in-game clock having ticked over to the next minute in one of the cases.  (You lose 100 points every time a minute is added to the on-screen clock.)

In summary, I don't believe you could have reduced the amount of points lost to the solar beam any further than you already have managed to do. 🙂

I must have miscalculated then, thanks for the correction.

It's actually reassuring that my performance was the same in both cases 🙂 . And no wonder I wasn't able to bring the loss down to 710k points when passing through the beam for the second time - it's simply impossible LOL.