Speedrun?

I took a look today at my list of unused stuff in Fantastic Dizzy. I havent made an edit in 2 months now. Seeing how busy Im going to be for some time, have a link to the list.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d4LLZFSbfNglcQ0lBhUCdGXbKHEnvP_sfVVCQ7-y1q4/edit?usp=sharing

Some things are explained but some are just quick notes of some stuff existing.

Will get to it sometimes(especially unused sprites and sound effects), when Im with more free time.

I've just noticed something peculiar in the Red NES versions that I wanted to share - I don't know if this could be useful in a speedrun, but still quite interesting.

There's that spike pit in Yolkfolk Village that you need to cover with a plank to cross... but do you really? This part of the pit is actually solid and can be stood on.

It doesn't seem like you can get there from the left ledge, but jumping from the right Dizzy is clearly hitting it... and rolling off to his death. However, I have once managed to actually jump off of it, making it across the pit! Shame I wasn't recording at the time, as I couldn't replicate it. Now I'm wondering if there's any setup to do it at least somewhat consistently. I'll also add that I was spamming Select button and random intervals, in a vain hope that this would influence Dizzy's rolling animation somethow - I have no idea whether it actually does anything.

There does seem to be a bit of randomness to the rolling.  More than once I have seen a forward jump where Dizzy tips forward for just a moment upon landing, but then he tilts right back and stays on his feet.

Hmmm, now that you mention it, I had it happen a few times, especially when jumping on the barrels on the waterfall. Too bad if it's just random.

@bag-of-magic-food @dizzy9

I'm working on a route for TFAoD Blue speedrun, and I'd love to hear if you have any useful tips that'd help to shed some time. I'm not really familiar with this revision (still haven't beat it without savestates actually).

I tried routing the game from ground up, but it proved to be slower than Thrill_House's record run (53:27), even with savestates. So, I've changed my approach and took his video as a starting point, implementing some of my ideas. So far I was able to take the time down to ~48:30 (with savestates, but no "superhuman" gameplay; sub-50 should be well within reach for a real time speedrun with lots of room for error), and it starts to look pretty decent.

More notable tricks I'm using so far:

• Grand Dizzy dragon egg skip
• Using death warp to save some time when grabbing the underwater rock (just like in Thrill_House's video)
• Falling through Dylan's elevator (really convenient!)
• Falling through floor in Yolkfolk Village (just as Dizzy9 showed recently in the other thread, thanks!)

Useful tricks that I know, but don't use at the moment:

• When riding the minecart, you don't need to have an empty slot for the skull key / spade. With full inventory, you can actually "juggle" items in mid-air down the exit, potentially allowing you to carry one more item from the mine! However, it's very tricky, maybe even pixel perfect - otherwise you won't reach the item from below. At least you can kill yourself and try again, and the second attempt will be significantly easier (unless you completely bork your first try).
• The same trick as above can be applied to the Dizzy Down The Rapids minigame, and in this case it's trivial to execute, although not nearly as helpful.

What would really help:

• Being able to skip the rug in Zaks' Castle, preferably without using the rope. A LOT of pieces would fall into place was this not a necessity.
• Being able to jump over the deadly lake from the right side, using 2 heavy rocks at most. A ~40 second timesave right there. Doesn't seem to be feasible.

Of course both of these are possible in the Red version, but not in Blue...

Any thoughts?

//edit: well, I thought I was making some good progress, but apparently I'm not. Just for comparison's sake, I did a savestated run based on the Trill_House's, and it ended up just a few seconds behind my run. That's so weird, will need some more investigation. I was pretty confident I made a sizeable improvement in the village part alone...

Dunno if this was figured out before, but you can use reversed controls to skip giving the shamrock to the leprechaun. This doesn't seem to be too useful for a speedrun, but interesting nonetheless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUrkxbaQSsg

So the bean can be planted off the ground, eh? Very nice. Didn't one of the Sega versions allow you to be knocked high enough to enter the cloud screen without the beanstalk?  I don't know if it was high enough to actually land on a cloud, though.

I've finally got around to doing actual speedruns of the Blue version. I've managed to beat the record on my first completed attempt: https://www.speedrun.com/the_fantastic_adventures_of_dizzy/run/yv0xg68z

Still, it's far from perfect, although I got really lucky a few times. I'll definitely try to improve on that. Still aiming for a sub-50 time; I'm pretty sure a flawless run would be sub-47, so there's a reasonable room for error.

I was thinking about trying to speedrun Dizzy Blue version again, but there's that one part that really grinds my gears...

Is there any consistent way of making this jump in Keldor Castle (from the platform where Dizzy is standing) to the right? Seems like that even if I make a frame perfect jump, Dizzy will often just roll right off after jumping onto the platform. Probably subpixel values come into play here and mess everything up?

Subpixels are not used in blue version, its a flat one pixel of movement at all tomes(except for the rope?).

Wjen i was young, i figured out coreect placement for this part of the castle. Cant remember it now but i remember it being a bit counter intuitive. 

After much trial and error, I think I might have figured something out.

First, stand in this exact place:

Now jump up, hold the jump button and left - upon landing, Dizzy will jump and land on the leftmost edge of the platform above:

Now pause, hold jump and right, and unpause - Dizzy will jump and land on the platform without rolling off it.

I'm not sure if it's 100% foolproof, but in any case the success rate is dramatically better compared to anything I've tried so far.

I'm not sure why there are different outcomes when jumping immediately after jumping vs. jumping after unpausing. For example, if I try to make the second jump like the first one (ie. jump up then right, instead of pausing and jumping right after unpausing), Dizzy will most of the time roll off. Yet, in both cases the jumps are pixel perfect? What gives?

All of your problems come down to animation.

All animations have a fixed timer lenght of 4 video frames. This is based on a global timer, there is no dedicated timer for this.

So a single animation frame will be displayed for 4 video frames. A 2 frame animation will take 8 video frames to loop around(eg. Idle animation).

Roll State can transition to Idle(and then from idle to other states like Jump up or pickup) only on start of a new/last Animation frame(which, as I mentioned, lasts 4 video frames).

When Dizzy is in Rolling state, unless theres a wall in his way, he will move at a rate of 1px per video frame.

Also, Dizzy can exit Roll state only when he gets to end of Rolling animation. This is when check for Roll ending happens.

So, If Dizzy was to jump while his animation is on last video frame, he will roll as intended.

However, if Dizzy was to jump on video frame no.2, Dizzy will Roll extra 2 video frames(and 2 extra pixels)!

You can counter this. Remember that some animations can only transition on last video frame.

For example pickup animation as well as jumping up animations do. So jumping before jumping to a side and rolling will result in consistent roll distance.

I looked at a pause affecting this but there is nothing.