Hey, sort of new to the scene, though I've watched ND speedruns for the past 10 years. I noticed there's a save trick in the most recent runs, does anyone have an explanation for that? (how it works/how to do it)
Thanks! :)
The crux of the new route is to reach Simone's room earlier, and when she is not there. There's an event flag SM_Available that determines whether Simone is in the Women's Dressing Room or not. After talking to Brady in the dressing room, leaving the basement, looking at the doors/curtains leading to the backstage, a certain unavoidable spot in the secret passage and IIRC looking at the Women's Dressing Room door, will trigger the "SM_Available" event flag.
Two core parts of the game engine are scenes and frames. A scene is more or less a particular area of the game, and each scene has its own scene number. There are thousands of scenes in the game. Certain scenes (usually ones where you can circle around in) can have multiple frames. Each part of the circle is its own frame number. They are called frames, because these are stored in video files.
You might have noticed that when you talk to Joseph or Simone, after the conversation, you will be in the same position of the circle as you started in. This is because, when you enter the conversation, the game stores the current scene number and frame number in memory, and then, when the conversation ends, it takes that scene number and frame number from memory to determine where it should place you after the conversation.
The last important thing to know is that there's a bit of a delay from when you hit the menu button to when the main menu actually appears. This allows you to save during a conversation.
Now, we can put all these pieces together to explain how the save trick works. During the 4th Nick conversation, we hit the menu button and then immediately click on Nick. We now go ahead and save the game, while in the Nick conversation. We then load a save file from earlier in Brady's room. We go through the secret passage, which does make Simone show up, but it's okay, since we still have the other save file at Nick that still has the SM_Available event flag as false.
In Simone's room, we hit the menu button and click on Simone. This stores the scene number of the Women's Dressing Room into memory. Then we reload the Nick save file (since we are already in the conversation, the game doesn't update the scene number back to the area of the lobby next to Nick). When we finish the game, the game takes the scene number and frame number out of memory, which puts us into the Women's Dressing Room. After the conversation with Simone, and the SM_Available event flag being false, we can then proceed to get the bobby pin much earlier than intended.
This all saves around 2 minutes.
