What is the Tilde (~) prefix?

When a hotkey with tilde fires, its key's native function will not be blocked when you press that hotkey. If at least one variant of that keyboard hotkey has the tilde modifier, that hotkey always uses the keyboard hook.

IAmACrow was worried whether adding Tilde (~) to an AHK mapping is considered illegimate. My thoughts on it:

Additionally to the Left+Right hypothetical example, another disallowed usage would be to avoid pressing CTRL+Y to enable Double Shot with:

~Down::x

or

~Up::x

(X is the default binding for Shoot.)

Previously discussed here:

Please correct me if I missed something!

Might just be something very stupid to turn into a proper category, but I wanted the game to have something that involves warps, but isn't limited to skipping everything that is normally interesting. The basic idea is to go through every world, warp, and then anything goes. I'm not really sure yet if I hadn't overlooked something that could trivialize that logic through some Teleporter Room manipulation, though.

What this is based on is a menu glitch danadji brought to my attention. You basically warp to the second half of every world and beat the game that way. It's supposed to be like 5m faster than the regular any%, and cuts out numerous difficult platforming sections of the standard any% No WW, while retaining the same boss fights as the non-warped version of the category. The extreme method for abusing warps is to go straight into the boss-rush room, unlock Solgryn, and beat the game in mere minutes, which makes up for a very boring speedrun where you only fight the final boss. Additionally, warps can be made even more powerful if you manually copy savefiles, but doing so is both complex and difficult to route, so the intent of this category is to restrict savefile manipulation to just in-game actions.

As we'd had some drama before regarding introducing new categories, I'm fully expecting this not to be added (nor should it be) unless people want to run it. It has a lot of memorization annoyances with key-mapping, so I'm guessing people won't be at all excited to run this, but if anyone does: this is the thread to put submissions into.

I've managed to come up with a few ways to make this mission more consistent for speedruns (Hard difficulty) - based on liangjiale123's video. I imagine it can still be improved, but it's good enough for the time being.

I'd actually also love to know if the bilibili vid from the other thread was done on Hard, but I'm assuming it wasn't? Their Groundspike Graveyard Devastator seems to deal waay too much damage for it to be on Hard - if someone could clarify, that would be awesome.

Hey, Cvea, just as we discussed this over Discord, I want to again clarify that the speedrun should be RTA-timed. This is so you can't tab out of the game for X seconds/minutes/hours and then submit as a single segment speedrun.

• How we've been retiming thus far — by subtracting loading screens, including the frozen frames that say "loading". This is fine. Please do just that. Re-timing should be easy to understand for me or any future mods.
• What not to subtract — any cutscene frames or anything other than the loading screens and the frames that say "loading" upon pressing F8.
• If the game freezes during the loading screen (Odalisque) — end the cut on the frame in the image (the first frame when it's known the game has frozen): Image
• If the game crashes — relaunching the game is timed, the loading screens are subtracted as above.
• If a runner pauses the timer and tabs out — [like in PpilaStruna's "53:53"] don't trust LiveSplit, time manually. See: Video

When to start timing:

• Pressing the checkmark starts a new game. Timing starts on the next frame (skipping the FMVs is user input). See: Image

When to end timing:

• The first frame of the ending cutscene where user input can no longer prevent viewing credits (like by pausing with Escape). See: Image

Video on how to re-time when Odalisque freezes: Video

Thanks.

One of those things most people don't give a crap about that are interesting.

Edit: Forgot Megaman, but Gastly doesn't seem to save time there.

I like to go for this skip when behind, and considering this game's moderation antics, there needs to be some kind of a mention in the rules that it is allowed.

Because the rules also redundantly say that

Save Hovering/Double Shot is allowed.

(Why wouldn't basic mechanics or glitches be allowed by default?)

I suggest to change that into

Save Hovering/Double Shot/Pause Buffering are allowed.

Reasoning: shooting through collision, including the Red Ball skip, is a natural byproduct of pause buffering.

Related thread: https://www.speedrun.com/iwbtboshy/forums/3al9e — The post on the bottom of page 1 shows clips of Anso successfully saving through a wall.

Video of the skip:

Anything at least marginally useful is welcome.

Faster character switch: F3 -> Click -> F5 -> Esc

Perhaps the setup could be improved, but the general idea is that shooting every frame is pretty effective at keeping it from splitting. This permutation is probably pretty close to if not optimal, which is surprisingly fast.

PROS:

• Seems to be much more consistent and predictable on average.

• Optimal pause buffered vs pauseless is only ~3s slower. See: 2nd vid below.

• Can still go for the "lottery ticket" with the same setup.

• More feasible in runs than a really good pauseless-Fire.

CONS:

• Slightly obtuse visual cue if more shots are required.

• The usual pitfalls of pause buffering (stuck screen, finger-breaking binds).

• Obvious drawbacks of choosing the slower strat.

A quick side note to Anso: I'll remind you it was you who started pause buffering bosses in runs. And here's proof of that:

imgur.com/WwTDt7q.mp4

imgur.com/LqhV40I.mp4

Verging on infeasible with negligible time-save due to how long it takes to clip bullets. This is mostly to document the strat, and also to show that you can save the game through a wall with just reloading rapidly and shooting.

This seemed like the inevitable thing to confirm after Megaman. It may not end up being the "fastest MissingNo ever", but so far, I think the advantages from the RNG mitigation are evident, and you aren't forced to close the fight in this manner. Some more testing definitely needs to be done.

In comparison, it took BBF 41s to kill MissingNo in the WR, so mediocre RNG becomes quite good RNG from just defaulting to pause buffering.

So, I've found that regular pause buffering enables this, which would turn W3 into a bit of a mess for RTA, as well as improve the TAS in W8. My experience has been: close to the wall - pretty consistent. Farther away from the wall - varying degrees of inconsistency, but just enough to make the skip in W3 viable. The one at the beginning of W3 - atrociously inconsistent.

I think it needs to be made clear whether this is a grey area and if it counts as FPS manipulation, and how reproducible it is across systems.

Seems like a good enough approach and a simplified set-up. Unless there's some other way to tell when the head is going to kill you. Disregard the mashing, as it's probably needlessly distracting for no added benefit.

Perhaps 300ms reaction time is too inhuman, but looks like BBF's prediction was spot on.

Also, what's worth noting is BBF in his 42:51 performs this skip in about 13.3s, which is only a little over a second slower to this already ridiculous human theory estimate. And the way these pause buffers work, going for a 1 frame might result in 0 or 2 frames.

It takes Anso 24s to do the same skip in the world record - without retries. To be able to do it in 13s, which is on par with doing it perfectly using the save - in a run no less - is difficult to wrap my mind around.

So, I know that this would be a pretty remarkable kill, but it seems pause buffering is actually better than killing Megaman normally. This isn't against the rules, right? Given that pause buffering is allowed everywhere else.

I'd love some of the runners and/or mods thoughts on this. Kind of makes me question whether consecutive pause buffers should be allowed on bosses, but considering the ruleset for the past runs, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't be.

Less RNG and stuff. Can we add this as a category? @MilkToast

This feature is included by default in the GOG, ScummVM version. Also, see video description for run-pertinent information.

Just wanted to put this out there before I forget. Fun to look at, but not much came of it.

I'm still devastated. The only reason I can think of why it happened is due to pre-buffering F7 before the vent shooting up into the air cutscene triggers. I did some timing, and it appears this run would've been about 24 minutes faster than the current record without the Gas Grenade re-route, so the sub 2 should be ripe for the taking. Stew was very slow, but I didn't get caught by the Cygnus Alpha guard. Some hiccups also happened amounting to perhaps 30s to a minute.

I'm happy with the amount of time saves I've managed to come up with for a run with so few inputs, but this was a godawful experience. What an absolutely shitty way to get your run killed.

Been working on doing a run of this lately, and the Pairs have been by far the most precarious, aside from the obvious The Stew.

Mind revealing what you did to nail all of the pairs in your run? @MilkToast

Not sure what to think about this. You just press Left Alt + Space for the window menu to pop up, which reduces the FPS to around 30. With keybindings that don't mess with the Windows shortcuts, you could play as normal with clear advantages, and toggle it easily. You could even do crazy stuff like in the vid below under good circumstances. Thoughts?

I've been wondering what the basic rules for this category should be, and what seems the most logical is to require spawning Doskias' ship and entering it from Shell 2. Any thoughts on this?