new any% warp record, guys! and new TAS coming soon!
2 years ago
United States

I normally wouldn't make a forum post about this, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to announce that Challenger has come out of hiding, and will be making a new PoP SNES TAS for the Any% Warp category. I expect it will be somewhere around 8:35 in length.

In anticipation of this new TAS, I've been grinding the category to get a proof of concept for best human strategies. Last night, while working on a demo recording, I made a small mistake, and decided to see how low I could go if I just kept playing the rest of the run. Magic happened!

The new World Record is 8:39.84387 = 31,242 console frames.

Console + TV setup and all cables shown at 12:10, and I say hello at 14:52!

I'll be sure to update you guys when Challenger drops the new TAS!

Edited by the author 2 years ago
toca likes this
United States

by the way mods, is there a way to add milliseconds to the Any% submission? Since I have an official console frame count, I'd like to go ahead and document the time accordingly, as 8 minutes, 39 seconds, 844 milliseconds. I'll wait on submitting the video until I hear from you. thanks.

European Union

Well aren't those some exciting news, congratulations on the new world record! As for your millisecond question: the millisecond field is disabled due to leaderboard aesthetics and consistency; in our opinion this field only makes sense if, e.g., first and second place are tied and precision below a second is necessary in order to display who has the world record.

However you are of course invited to include the exact time in your run description to show and document the precise time / number of console frames!

United States

Hah. Leave it to Challenger to find a completely new route while focusing on the new Any% TAS!

He discovered a new step in the Gate Thief #1 setup to allow this glitched sprite set to gain access to Level 1 immediately, without the need of the time-consuming trick on Level 2. Under normal circumstances, without the trick to manipulate the Prince's sub-pixel position (or something like that), the over-sized squatting Guard sprite gets clipped and killed by the gate at the beginning of Level 1, making it otherwise impossible to access the level. The new step comes in the 4th level 1 segment, where the Prince does 2 standing jumps towards the warp hole, instead of a running jump. The slightly different spacing here does the sub-pixel trick while activating the GT#1 sprite set.

Challenger also found a different approach to the warp hole in Level 5, making it possible for the stubborn GT#1 sprite set to successfully warp to level 16. This time, you have to climb down, facing right, instead of facing left.

Last night, I recorded a demo for the route. Since there were no major mistakes, I decided to go ahead and submit it for the new low time in the Any% category. The "Fat Gate Thief" route is now officially obsoleted. I had projected that the FGT TAS would be somewhere around 8:31.541. However, my initial survey of the new GT#1 route suggests that the GT1 TAS should be pretty close to the 8:20.500 mark. I'm not sure if an 8:19.x will be possible. I think Challenger may need to find a few more tricks to save another half second.

Here's a link to my new video. Check out the YouTube description for more details.

toca likes this
United States

Here's another fun video. This will not be submitted, because it uses a Game Genie Code. This route is interesting because Levels 4, 5, 16, 17, 18, and 19 are all completely DARK / BLIND. This means I spent a full 6 minutes & 20 seconds straight, during a tough speedrun, with zero visibility of the floor, walls, or obstacles, while performing many frame-perfect jumps and glitches.

This route is about 20 seconds faster than the new GT1 route, so this run is 20.06695 seconds faster than the World Record video linked above. I went back through and found about 100 frames worth of small inaccuracies in this video that could be improved. So it looks like I should be able to get an 8:04.9xx if I keep working at it. The human limit for this route should be around 8:04.5, with the TAS limit being pretty close to 7:59.9xx.

United States

FYI, a slightly more optimized version of the "setup" used in the "blind" video above is about a quarter second faster, and gets rid of all video corruption. So basically, I just used the slightly less optimized setup for the purpose of creating the "blind" conditions as a challenge.

The better setup can be used for the current "no gate skip" route. It's about 17 seconds faster than the old one (used in the 11:10 video in the "No Gate Skip" category), so the theoretical best human time for that category could be as low as 10:40, with best play.

However, I feel like the "No Gate Skip" category should be phased out. Gate Skip Vs. No Gate Skip is not the best way to divide the categories, as both produce extremely similar videos with the current optimized Warp-4 + Warp-16 glitches. I think a better way to divide it would be Warp Vs. Warpless, while preserving the "original" category as "Glitchless." I demonstrated what a Warpless GT route would look like in the other thread, where my best individual levels were spliced together to show the game being beaten in 22:59 without skipping any levels. With all this in mind, I don't really feel motivated to make a new "No Gate Skip" video to get a 10:xx. I may do it anyway, just because it should be easy. But I would rather get back to work on the GT1 Warpless 23 minute run. We'll see.

United States

As I suspected, another major discovery has obsoleted these routes. Challenger found a better warp directly from Level 1 to Level 16, without having to go through levels 4-5 first. Now that the route has been simplified, we're looking at something like 6:50.4 for TAS, and 6:53.9 for Humans. The thing is, this will be TONS harder, as the Warp gives us the clunky Guard Sprite, which has very difficult, slow, frame-perfect inputs to skip each gate, with the potential for grievous time losses or death in some cases. I'm looking forward to the challenge this new route presents. It'll be truly amazing if some other people start grinding it with me, and see how low we can push it. It'll probably be quite a while before I can post up a worthy demo or record. But in the meantime, Challenger's work has been coming along nicely, so we may finally see an official TAS before too long, which could demonstrate this new route. (He's already put up a great test video on the TASvideos forum.)

United States

Here's a follow-up to my previous comment. I've just done a decent speedrun for the new route, and submitted it for the Any% leader board. I've got quite a bit of cleaning up to do. This was just a 7:01.0399234. I'll be shooting for a 6:55 or below in the coming weeks. I'd love to see some other people try it!

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