These are some minor timesavers I've found myself back when I did my run of the game. Some of them are present in that run, some aren't. Just mentioning these because I saw the now current fastest times don't seem to make use of them, and there's really no reason not to.
The first one is the route through the desert. After grabbing the boot, the oasis straight left should be used instead of the one straight down. Doing so pushes the amount of screens you can survive without drinking to the limit, but the oasis straight left of the boot is also one screen closer to the bandits' camp. This is important, because using that one means you don't need to drink from the jug at the bandits' camp, which is a lengthier animation anyway.
The route through the forest to reach the witch's house the fastest should be: right, left, up. Ideally, the witch will initially appear right in front of her house (I think it's RNG, though). Having her appear there makes it so her spell doesn't travel very far to hit you (at least when approaching from the bottom), and it's also a short distance to walk to hand her the lamp. However, if she should appear on the screen to the right of the forest entrance, it's faster to ignore her and walk left (since she'll be too far off the optimal path), and hand her the lamp on the screen below her house. And if she should initially appear just below her house, it's fine to hand her the lamp right away, just that timewise it's not the ideal scenario.
The last one is something I just recently found, but when Cassima saves you from the catacombs, it's faster by like ~8s (ScummVM timing, if that should differ from DosBox) to lose her right away by going down twice, then memorizing the path she would take. Just to clarify, the path is: down, down, up, left, right, up, right, up, right, left, right, left, up, left, up, right, door.
Anyone have anything else they want to add?
I found the Forest one a while ago, I just haven't tried running the game with it yet. Found out that if your computer overheats too much, the screen transitions slow down so that has been giving me trouble.
The Cassima one is actually pretty cool. Nice Find.
The Desert one is somewhat confusing, but I think I understand.
One thing I do want to Add is getting captured by the Blue Rat. After giving Cassima the Family Necklace thing. You head right and past the Piano Hall. It's actually better to get caught in that Hall. You can stand where the middle of the Hall is and he can appear after about 3-5 seconds. Sometimes he can appear instantly and crash right into you when you're just heading right to go past, though that is EXTREMELY RARE. It happen to me once during an already failed run and that's the only time it has ever happened to me.
Actually another thing to add is knowing when you got the fast RNG for when Mordak appears so you can grab his wand. If you capture the Blue Rat in the Room after the Piano Hall and Capture the Mannanon Cat in the same room as where Mordak Appears, Mordak will appear as fast as possible. That's 1 Minute and 30 seconds AFTER you Read the Magic Book.
I have never captured the Blue Rat in the Piano Hall though so that could change RNG to be faster. So the Blue Rat and Mannanon Cat Captures determine how fast Mordak Appears.
Well looks like I beat your time by 70 seconds but how did I do it? I used dosbox and you used scummvm obviously is why and also I got lucky with the dungeon escape being faster than yours
That's Vyse's time you beat by 70 seconds, not mine; you beat mine by 6:20, but indeed, that's largely due to emulator differences. Anyway, I'm not for certain, but I think Vyse plays on DosBox as well (I'm probably the only one to use ScummVM).
No offense to Vyse, but I felt his run would've been fairly easy to beat, and your time proves that. Although, I'm still of the opinion there's a decent amount of time still to save (I don't know how much, I'll guess around 30 seconds or so). Nice to see these timesavers incorporated into a run, at least!
Congrats on the time. Your time save was due to your screen transitions. They are super fast. Your Dosbox cycle was set to Max or 10,000 right? I know my transitions are slow due to overheating computer, but your transitions were faster then Pawdugan's, which I though was fast as possible.
Also I do use Dosbox.
Edit: After watching the first 5 minutes of your run, I noticed the whole game is running faster.
Out of curiosity what are your specs? I only have a core 2 duo but I may be running less background applications
I'm not going to bother with specs, just know I use a Windows 7 laptop. Besides I need to wait a day or 2 for a charger so I can use my laptop. I might not bother doing runs of KQ for a while anyway. I can see the game being smoother if I just record it and don't stream, but I don't want to do that.
Congrats on the updated record everyone! Love to see more names on the board (just hope I'll have a shot at regaining the title someday).
Just some notes that were pinging around in my head for the different versions of the game (disk version, french, etc). I remember experimenting with the french version (which is identical I think to the disk version) and thought it would be immeasurably faster as you could skip the old-man-fixing-up-cedric cutscene and appear right at Mordack's Island.
Trouble was slow transitions and longer animations, plus the threat of copy protection in 5-6 spots. If you could somehow memorize the copy protection or do it quickly enough, I'm still curious if that would be enough to offset the other slowdowns. My tried seemed to say everything broke even more or less.
Same thing with ScummVM. Things were overall slower going, but you didn't have to futz around with the Heap Error skip at the wand machine. Looks like DOSBox is the way to go overall, but love to see more experimenting.
I think I may give 100% a try some day, doesn't seems like much more time would be needed to accomplish it.
Mmm, I can't imagine trying to memorize all the copyright symbols, sounds like quite a headache. Speaking of, my experiences with the copyright protection indicate that it's at minimum guaranteed to happen when patching the boat (at least this is the case if it hasn't happened earlier), but do you know if it's something that could potentially be encountered multiple times during a playthrough, or is it a one-time only thing? I know there's other spots it can occur, but I forget where offhand.
Regarding 100%, did you read the rest of the other topic about the reason for your missing points in your current run? If not, it's basically that you need to use the stick on the dog, and the boot with the cat.
Anyway, good luck to everyone trying to reduce the time further! For my part, I'll probably not bother, or continue using ScummVM despite it being slower. I know DOSBox has the save and restart workaround for that stupid heap error, but I just don't like the idea of that being a necessity to finish a run.
I'm using a new Laptop now, so I got to reinstall my KQ Games, but @pawdugan just reminded me of something.
When I was doing some runs a while back, I got something similar to the old-man-fixing-up-cedric cutscene skip you said you got in the French Version. Once I got into the old man's house and it transitions to a close up of the old man and king graham, I was able to skip all dialog at that point. Only got this 1 time.
I'm wondering if you mash too fast/time your mash, the game can't read the normal data file and it looks for another that's similar, which in this case was the French Version. Sounds crazy, but I'm wondering if that's why. That might also be the case for all the other skips that randomly happen.
Hmm, interesting. I wonder if this game works under Hourglass or some other TAS emulator...? If so, we should try and reproduce these skips with frame advance, see if it really is just mashing at a certain time, or something else.
It's been the same result with skippies the harpie's speech too. Never been able to pin down the trigger. Could only imagine what a TAS could turn up. Maybe we'll finally understand the timing/cycles of Mordack showing up for sleep and when/where the blue guard will appear.
