New route: (Foot power updated Jul 29, 2018)

1: Go up to floor 33 2: Walk on glass for 8 seconds. (Lose 4 Foot boxes plus ~240/256 sub-units) 3: Take stairs 11 times. 4: Arrive on floor 32 at 39 seconds on lock two, hear the elevator 5: Go to floor 31, shoot a bullet to lure out Heinrich faster. (hope he's in the second room on the bottom), grab the first aid, get the detonators. 6: Take stairs to floor 35 7: Kill roof key crook (hope he's in the room on the right without checking the door.) 8: Grab the C4 near the roof door. 9: Go to roof, place C4, run to the top center.

Important: Do not hold the A or B button during the following cutscenes, you will lose about a quarter second while it loads the cutscene: -- John checks his pistol to find 15 bullets in the clip. -- John uses the First Aid Kit -- Ending victory.

Notes:

• It is probably a few frames faster to keep the pistol instead of grabbing the machine gun if you can manage low ammo, but it is very minimal.
• Grabbing the first aid appears to be just slightly faster than not grabbing it.

A mediocre TAS of this was able to get 1:52 from power-on.

I think I have better luck with RNG when I alternate 33 and 32 instead of 32 and 31, but this could be nonsense. I still don't understand how the enemy spawns in this game work. This is something worth looking into with the debugger.

More thorough discussion:

This route change does 2 things from the current route: 1: Don't go to floor 35 early. 2: Walk on glass on floor 33.

The most important time point in the run is being on the 32nd floor at around 39 seconds remaining on lock two. All current top 5 runs arrive at this time point currently. If you are a little late it's okay. If you leave to the 31st floor early, Heinrich will be in a bad spot, coming up from the elevator.

If you have the radio, this time point is where Hans says "Heinrich check the 31st floor.", which triggers an elevator with Heinrich whether or not you have the radio. By being on floor 32 when the elevator starts, when you go to floor 31 Heinrich will be in a semi-random spot. It seems as though if the elevator starts while you're on the 31st floor, Heinrich will be by the elevator which is very slow. (Using the elevator is slower than the stairs.)

Note that there is also a way to accidentally cancel the Heinrich event by triggering two events on one staircase. Going from 40 seconds down past lock two will trigger two events, and only the second event occurs. Heinrich never shows up with the detonators, or at least not for quite a while, I can't recall.

Approximate Game Time consumed per staircase at given foot power increment lost: 0: 15 seconds 1: 19 seconds 2: 22 seconds 3: 27 seconds 4: 31 seconds 5: 35 seconds

Walking a staircase cycle takes around 188 frames (3 seconds) for 1 cycle (slightly more or less depending on foot power.)

Need to drain about 375 seconds of game time, which is 25 cycles at foot 0 20 cycles at foot 1 17 cycles at foot 2 (3 cycles is 9 seconds) 13 cycles at foot 3 (4 cycles is 12 seconds) 12 cycles at foot 4 (1 cycle is 3 seconds) 10 cycles at foot 5

Walking on glass loses 8-11 foot power per 3 frames, or about 90 frames roughly to lose 1 foot power. FeetUnit = 0x0797 Feet = 0x0798 --8 feet bad, 0 feet good

I think optimal Heinrich spot is right next to stairs, and you pick up C4 in the locked room next to the roof stairs. Am I wrong?

I wonder how precise your proposed route is. I tested totally trashing my feet and had bad results.

One thing I recommend you consider is whether it's worth it to get foot bandages (presumably on floor 31 but I think there's some on 34 as well) in order to increase your movement speed

"I think optimal Heinrich spot is right next to stairs, and you pick up C4 in the locked room next to the roof stairs."

That might be true. Is it possible to make Heinrich spawn there at that time in this route? (Spawns are really weird to me still.)

If you don't have to enter the floor 31 bandage room, it's slower to go in there in the 13 stairs route. If you try to trash down such that you need 11 stairs, it's probably faster to get the bandages. It may end up faster if Heinrich is it that specific room. I didn't test enough to know if that spawn is possible at that time or not.

This is ridiculous... the new WR is so obviously unoptimized, but it looks like it just has better routing with the foot health strat

We really need to improve this, it's a disgrace

I mean it's somewhat suboptimal, "disgrace" is a pretty strong word. Floor 35 early is still slower than the route I posted. I'm editing the route for better Heinrich positioning. The route should sub 2 with a solid run.

Note: I think I have better luck on the bottom floor when I alternate 33 and 32 instead of 32 and 31, but this could be nonsense.

EDIT: 1:53.75 mediocre TAS timed from power-on

I did a bunch of TAS attempts with the varying foot power routes, utilizing essentially the same level of mediocre optimization in each. I subtracted out a couple errors, typically under 40 frames to come up with these final estimated values: (These are from power-on which adds about 3.3 seconds to console timing.)

A: 3 + 150/256, 13 stairs, Don't Grab Foot Power - 6825 frames B: 3 + 150/256, 13 stairs, Grab Foot Power - 6920 frames C: 4 + 240/256, 11 stairs, Don't Grab Foot Power - 6752 frames. D : 4 + 240/256, 11 stairs, Grab Foot Power - 6733 frames E: 7 + 0/256, 9 stairs, Grab Foot Power - 7005 frames

Route D appears fastest non tool-assisted. Route C may or may not come out slightly ahead when rigorously optimizing movement in a tool-assisted setting.

I've also added a note to the first post about not holding A/B during certain cutscenes.

I like the work you're doing here, it looks like you're approaching optimization of all variables for the roof explosion route

BTW TASVideos.org best die hard time is 2:12, I'd encourage you to polish yours and submit there

I just submitted a time I can be relatively proud of (sub 2)

I think the optimal strategy is to slightly under-damage your feet and rely on bullets (RTA) or running damage (TAS or RTA, can do it on stairs to inflict a little foot damage) to get the last little bit of damage

I farmed good Heinrich spawns + floor 35 spawns + roof spawns and eventually got one where everything lined up nicely (although I don't know what the variables are for pseudoRNG)

u did it

Getting shot doesn't decrease foot power. Damage boosting can be useful though.

Well done to you kirkq, the route is much improved because of your work

Do you know the delay from power-on to difficulty select? I'd like to be able to compare runs vs your test TAS times apples-to-apples

It's 201 or 202 frames. (3.36 seconds)

This is the first TAS I've made and I was inspired to do it after putting up a time on the beginner any% category a few days ago.

I would recommend people running this RTA to skip the medkit (it saved about 1/3 of a second between getting it and not). I'd guess its probably faster if you can get the door to shut on you and launch you through the room, but that is a pretty complicated to setup so I'd recommend sticking with this clean and streamlined approach.

With this I was able to get the beginner any% time down to 1:43:250 (gg at 6,418 frames).

I wanted to investigate Heimrich to see if we could improve that aspect since he is the major bottleneck for the whole run so I mapped out quite a bit about him and included it in the ram watch file for anyone interested.

I figured out the roof door has 64 hp and both the machine gun and pistol do two damage to it. Punching and hitting it with the axe both do no damage, and c4 also registered zero damage on it (despite having blown the entire 35th floor up...quite a feat!). This means you optimally want to get to the roof door with exactly 33 ammo (15 pistol and 18 machine gun) so you can shoot the door to 0 hp and then have one round left to shoot it open as this lets you skip the cut scene about how many rounds are left in your pistol when going to the roof. I didn't investigate why it has 64hp and bullets do 2 dmg to it vs 32hp and bullets do one but thought it was interesting.

I'm late on posting this but might put more work into it next diecember.

Files and video of the run are all on my google drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VREaVnFn5UwKPpOkV5235tD61Ix4zpmn?usp=sharing