SMS levels

[petaQ]

Hey, I was recommended to come here, just thought I'd pop my head in as I'm speedrunning SMS in Fun and Tricky right now. I'm aware of the glitches/techniques posted here and elsewhere but since you guys have lots of experience it's possible you may see small things in my runs that can be improved on. I haven't optimised everything yet but here's my latest huge time save in a level

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyTxWxYcvF0

I managed an unintentional use of the slide glitch in Go For It but I can't pull it off regularly right now, if anyone has any tips on how to achieve that I'd be most grateful!

[petaQ]

Lemmingology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXxMEMrckkE&feature=youtu.be

Any suggestions for a reliable way to get fourth lemming into the home quicker? My only thought is to use the one who dies but it might be hard with the crossing traffic of the other three.

[petaQ]

(Moderators, I feel like it's smoothest if I post stuff all in this thread to avoid gunking the board up, please feel free to edit or advise if you prefer a different method)

Lemming Drops: https://youtu.be/iyVhwCd-JQs

[Nessy]

Welcome to the forums petaQ

Not a huge expert on Lemmings speedrunning but after taking a look at your videos you seem to have some pretty solid stuff already. Not sure how to do that sliding glitch consistently yet but for "Lemmingology" I'm wondering if the third lemming can become a blocker immediately after falling from the hatch in order to bunch up the three lemmings in there closer together to avoid a slight delay in waiting for them to walk all the way to left and right again of that first platform (also might allow to spam the climber skill on them and not have to worry about one of them facing the left in the meantime). The lemming that dies might need to be given an extra builder to turn him around but he shouldn't be too far behind the three lemming crowd, and the lemming that builds at the very end can be given a basher as soon as the builder meets with the exit platform in order to shave off a few more frames. It might be enough for a 4:12 at least.

Not sure if this is a good idea so I apologize beforehand if it's a bad strat

[petaQ]

I hear you about 3=Blocker but I'm unsure whether I can get there timebound before 1 falls without pauses With the RR as is the lemmings all fall into a pile. I've found that bashers don't work to stop a lemming being a builder unless he has something directly in front, so I guess it might come down to whether I can reduce the gap between bunch, and final lemming to <1 second, to decide whether to freeze the action with a nuke.

More importantly I discovered yesterday that there's a heck of a lot of lag in animations when the screen is full of lemmings - does anyone here have technical ability/knowledge of what the SMS's limits are before such slowdown occurs? I'll be researching myself but it'd be great to know say, whether 10 lemmings on screen is a cut off point. I just hate the idea that my runs will be full of constant screen-scrolling like a hyperactive toddler

Edit to add: in just fourteen of the Fun levels, lag/slowdown accounted for SEVEN minutes in my WR run...

[petaQ]

We're now timing levels with RTA and it seems that anything above 14 lemmings in-level at once causes slowdown, worsened by keeping a portion on screen, or having flame trap etc animations on screen. With that in mind here's my latest optimisation for Tricky 20: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTrfrh-pi5o

[ccexplore]

I just hate the idea that my runs will be full of constant screen-scrolling like a hyperactive toddler

That may well be unavoidable in some cases.  A while back someone was working on a tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) for Sega Genesis (aka Megadrive) Lemmings.  That game also has a lag phenomenon and worse, it is kind of unpredictable and we never worked out precisely when lags occur, though it tends to occur more often when there are more animated stuff on-screen.  So we often try to reduce lag by scrolling any animation-heavy level parts offscreen.  At one point we talked about how avoiding lag sometimes means some interesting moves may even have to happen entirely offscreen, making the resulting video potentially very confusing to watch.

[petaQ]

Mm, I'd seen Gronklems' work on a couple of levels though I'm sad for him to hear that the lag is erratic. It seems to be much more uniform on SMS and since I'm doing rta speedrunning, I'm spared the need to do superhuman movements. My latest improvement, on Lost Something?, shows evidence that bunching lemmings into a very small space so that they move almost as one, can significantly help matters. I knocked 90 seconds off Sega Three just by judicious early killing. I started posting RTA optimal solutions on my channel, anyone reading is more than welcome to look at these and suggest improvements or just generally enjoy them

[petaQ]

Good news everyone! (What are there, 4 of you? )

My buddy Calindro and I created an SMS lag monitor tool which is going to make it super easy for me to dig into the slowdown the game provides. You can see a short clip of its use here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGrBL1DAGU&feature=youtu.be but I think I've already got a superior display method which is more akin to a seismometer. If anyone is interested I can post the traces of several level playthrough as they stand at some point. If not I'd be happy to stop clogging the forum and just let people come to my playthroughs when they wish

[namida]

Good news everyone! (What are there, 4 of you? )

This is a small forum, but there's a bit more than 4 active members. Maybe closer to around 20.

Me, I've been reading this thread but haven't had anything worthwhile to post in it so far.

[petaQ]

Oh I'm sorry I meant what I said as a joke about how esoteric my thread is

Lag in the SMS game starts whenever you have 11+ lemmings on screen, and ranges from as benign as 1 frame in 9, up to 2 frames in 7. Explosions seem to be a troublemaker too, and the best thing to do is keep 10 or fewer on screen at any one point, though a friend and I are working on understanding this because the byte that counts sprites on screen acts weirdly when lemmings cross each other. Current theory is that it's to do with horizontal positioning - 20 lemmings on screen who are all walking up and down a long bridge cause far less lag, and it's the same if they're on a very undulating piece of terrain.

Anyways, with that in mind I've started tackling the Fun levels, 17 is very interesting because unlike the other versions you have no floaters to take advantage of. I found a super aggressive solution that looks really awesome though: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcGpxjp_kKU

[namida]

I don't know the full details of how it works, but I know that 20 lemmings exceeds the maximum number of sprites SMS can handle at a time, so some of them end up being drawn by actually modifying tile graphics to draw lemmings on to them. It might be the case that the process of doing this causes some of the lag. (Similar stuff happening with terrain is also the reason why destroying / adding too much terrain in a level results in glitches.)

As annoying as it may be for speed runs, I'll take that over the tile-based physics from the NES version any day.

[petaQ]

EDITED: Latest WR down to 41:55, which would be sub 38 if I hadn't bloopered two levels
https://youtu.be/coWvgAwNFps

Apologies, I cannot count under pressure and neither me nor NCH picked up the mistake til just now :'D

[petaQ]

I did a run the other day that failed in level 29 when I was on for a sub 39 minute run I've optimised all the SMS levels and among the standout results is this insane one which shows the importance of lag in avoiding both too many lemmings, and avoiding bombers:

https://youtu.be/qPuDnSn7Bsg

EDITED: Adding in the between-level transitions, the lowest possible completion time is currently 33:21.3, so I can realistically expect to set a time beneath 35 minutes with good execution.

[petaQ]

I broke my Fun WR down to 35:55 with just one death in a small level!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrJKRRLdbb4
I think the swaggiest level is 22, Go For It. That transition between the last builder and the lem reaching the bash area is literally frame perfect, and had I set that straggler lemming as a builder a few frames earlier, the execution would have been perfect.

I've started optimising Tricky Levels again now, and I've already shaved off some huge chunks. Take a look at this beauty:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0wTPTyDhOg