JSW64: Manic Miner

[IRF]

10 hours ago, IRF said:

In the case of The Vat, it is possible to drop down to the bottom and jump leftwards over the yellow kangaroo whilst it is moving rightwards near the bottom right corner, without having to follow it to the portal and wait for it to turn around before jumping over it.

Actually, Danny nearly achieved the above feat in The Vat in both of his recordings. With a more efficient route down through the field of crumblies, Willy could have skipped the penultimate, standing jump at the bottom right corner of the cavern - instead doing a leftwards jump to clear the yellow kangaroo almost* as soon as Willy reached the floor underneath the vat (*after a few steps to the left to avoid hitting his head on an overhead Fire cell) - it's very tight, but possible.

EDIT: In actual fact, now that I think about it, because of the tricky location of the portal in the Processing Plant (which forces Willy to enter it in animation frame R3 - the PP portal being otherwise impossible to reach), it's simply impossible to enter The Vat with the same animation frame to match The Vat's initial cavern dataset from Matthew's original game (i.e. with Willy starting The Vat in animation frame R0).

There are other similar examples as well. The Vat's own portal can only be entered by walking into it from the right, meaning that, even though the game engine/data automatically turns Willy around to face the right way, he will never commence the first Kong Beast cavern in the correct frame of animation (R0) (unless you teleport him into there).

In other caverns, you would need to enact a convoluted sequence of moves at the end of one cavern to get Willy positioned correctly at the start of the next. e.g. Jumping over the FLASHing portal and then turning around to walk back into it (the first Kong cavern, The Endorian Forest).

Or in the case of The Final Barrier, if you want to carry on playing post-Swordfish, the conveyor action means that the usual route forces Willy to jump up into the portal in animation frame R3, so after reappearing in the Central Cavern he'll be three steps ahead of normal. You can avoid that by walking under the portal for a second time, jumping off the conveyor onto the crumbly platform (if you retained some of it previously) and then jumping back onto the conveyor, walking up stream and then jumping up leftwards into the portal. However, that mean navigating past the blinking eye guardian twice more, so you may waste quite a bit of time/air supply in the process.

The implication of all of the above is that you cannot actually play a faithfully replicated game of Manic Miner in JSW64:MM!

Edited October 1, 2023 by IRF

[IRF]

10 hours ago, IRF said:

even though the game engine/data automatically turns Willy around to face the right way

It turns out I was wrong about that. Willy's facing direction upon entry to a new cavern, as well as his frame of animation, remains as it was when he entered the portal in the previous cavern. (I must have not noticed before, because if you 'hit the ground running' in a cavern, Willy can be turned around to face the direction you are making him walk before he is first drawn in the cavern.)

This discrepancy could potentially incur a further time penalty, if Willy enters a cavern facing the wrong way for an optimal performance, because it takes one time frame (one unit of air) to turn him around.

Or conversely, it could be of benefit in some of the caverns, where Willy started off 'in the naughty corner' - facing a brick wall, the wrong way to make progress - in Matthew's original MM data. In this game, you can make sure that in those caverns, he starts off facing the 'right' way to set off on his mission.  Indeed, in the case of Skylab Landing Bay, you don't even need to consciously try to achieve this - Willy will always have been facing leftwards as he entered the preceding portal (because of the layout of Ore Refinery), thus guaranteeing that he will always be facing left as he enters the Skylab cavern.

****

I've also just noticed that the 'Willy can move leftwards into a wall block at head height' bug from the JSW game engine is present in JSW64:MM. So that might have other implications for the game play, which means that my earlier statement: "you cannot actually play a faithfully replicated game of Manic Miner in JSW64:MM" is even more definitely the case!

EDIT: in fact, both of JetSetDanny's YouTube runs through The Vat were two time frames quicker thanks to that bug. (Meaning that he scored two more 'points' each time than he should have - notwithstanding that success in this variant of the game isn't actually measured in 'points'!) When jumping over the yellow kangaroo at the end of The Vat, at the point where Willy was descending but still one character row above the ground, his head entered the corner wall block near the portal, allowing him to advance forwards one step (compared with, say, the exact same jump in DigitalDuck's YouTube walkthrough of original MM), and then Willy's entering a wall in Danny's version also meant that he was ejected straight down to ground level - descending by a whole character row in a single time frame - compared with the normal MM behaviour (as per DD's video) where Willy should at that point be two increments of vertical descent away from landing at the end of the jump.

Edited October 1, 2023 by IRF

[IRF]

Danny, your entry at JSWCentral.org for JSW64: Manic Miner includes the following:

"The game contains only the rooms from the original MM and plays almost exactly like the original. A visible difference is e.g. the ability to jump over the horizontal guardian at the floor level in "Amoebatrons' Revenge" the first time it comes Willy's way after entering the room."

However, on the basis of this topic's discussion, that isn't necessarily always the case.  If the player was up against the right-hand wall of The Warehouse when they entered that cavern's portal - especially if they were facing that wall at the time they made the vertical jump into the portal - then they would NOT be able to perform that early jump and get ahead in Amoebatron's Revenge!  Without going into too much detail in your entry, perhaps it would be more accurate if it was worded something along the lines of this?:

"The game contains only the rooms from the original MM and plays almost exactly like the original. A visible difference is e.g. the ability, in some circumstances, to jump over the horizontal guardian at the floor level in "Amoebatrons' Revenge" the first time it comes Willy's way after entering the room."

(I'll let the references to 'rooms' instead of 'caverns' slip!)

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks, Ian, this is the kind of feedback for JSW Central I greatly appreciate! (and receive rarely) 👍.

I have corrected the entry on JSW Central for "JSW64: Manic Miner" according to your suggestion (adding "in some circumstances"). On second thoughts, I also modified the end of this sentence to read: "the first time it comes Willy's way after the player entered the room" (instead of "after entering the room"), because I believe that "after entering the room" would actually refer to the guardian rather than to Willy ("the first time it comes Willy's way after entering the room" = "the first time it comes Willy's way after it entered the room", "it" referring to the guardian). I'm not 100% sure my feeling is correct here but I hope the modified version is OK.

As for "caverns" having to be used when referring to MM games and "rooms" when referring to JSW games, I don't perceive this as a definite rule. "Rooms" are generic for me, suitable for both games. "Caverns" are more MM-specific, I wouldn't use them for a JSW game unless the room in question actually depicted (or was called) a cavern. That's just my personal feeling about it 🙂 .

 

[IRF]

Good point about who entered the room. Though I guess you could have said "... after he entered the room [or cavern]". The player isn't really entering the room themself, just guiding Willy into and through there! 

To me, the distinction between rooms and caverns is that the latter have a portal for egress.

[jetsetdanny]

On 2/9/2024 at 9:57 PM, IRF said:

To me, the distinction between rooms and caverns is that the latter have a portal for egress.

This distinction would be crystal-clear between the original "MM" and the original "JSW", but later games - like the ones based on the JSW64 game engine or Norman Sword's "Manic Jet Set Willy" blur it IMO. In the original "MM" the (activated) portal was the only way to leave the room, and in the original "JSW" there were no portals. However, in the later games you can have a room with a portal that takes you elsewhere, but you can also leave this room by "normal" means, going into one or more of the adjacent rooms. In this scenario the portals merely work as teleporters, to get you elsewhere instantaneously. I think it's questionable whether a room should be called a cavern only because it has such a portal.

[DigitalDuck]

For me the difference is that in Manic Miner, you're not free to exit at any time - you must collect all items and then head to the portal, and after heading to the portal you can't return (unless you complete a full loop of the game). In Jet Set Willy, you can (almost) always exit a room without collecting any items, and return later should you wish to.

I could define a "room" as one screen of the game, such that both Solar Power Generator and Emergency Generator are rooms; but to make a distinction, Solar Power Generator can also be considered a "level", whereas nobody would consider Emergency Generator as a level, for the reasons above. In that sense, a cavern is a room that is also a level.

 

... is Deserted Isle a cavern?

[IRF]

On 2/9/2024 at 8:57 PM, IRF said:

To me, the distinction between rooms and caverns is that the latter have a portal for egress.

I suppose I should have said (and I think it's what I meant) that a cavern's only means of exit is via a portal.

22 hours ago, DigitalDuck said:

Solar Power Generator can also be considered a "level", whereas nobody would consider Emergency Generator as a level

In the JSW context, "level" could be considered as a reference to which floor of the mansion each room is on. (Battlements on the top level; Wine Cellar on the bottom level.)

Edit: With apologies to the Watchtower and the Entrance to Hades!

Edited February 20 by IRF

[jetsetdanny]

On 2/19/2024 at 12:07 PM, DigitalDuck said:

In that sense, a cavern is a room that is also a level.

That's a nice-sounding definition, although I think it might lead to using the words "cavern" and "level" interchangeably and always referring to MM games, as there are no such levels in JSW.

However, it won't always work, I believe, for the following reason: In JSW64 and other advanced game engines you can have a MM-like room which Willy enters and can only leave via a portal after collecting all items in that room. However, such a room may be not a part of any longer sequence (like having to go through all of the original MM rooms before returning to the main, JSW-like part of the game map), it may be there on its own, as a kind of "detour" among JSW-like rooms. In this case, it would still be a cavern as per Ian's definition, but I don't think anyone would call it a 'level' (it would be a 'room' and a 'cavern', but not a 'level'! 😜).

[IRF]

Isn't 'level' more of a reference to the degree of difficulty (in e.g. Manic Mixup, once you've completed all the caverns the first time through, the difficulty moves up a level and you go through them all the second time)?