Sweet, I won't be playing until the weekend anyway (if then).

Ah, I see. I'd be on board with that then, for sure.

Not really sure how to move forward from here though. I guess if anyone has input for when to split?

Yeah, I agree this isn't a bad idea. Like Gyoo says it might require some compromises but I'm fine with that.

So here's what it would look like if we went strictly by teleporters as break points.

2D Village -> 3D village -> leaving village -> Waterfall -> Sync zone -> TELEPORT (~8:30)

Nature Hub -> Bell Tower -> Broken Square wall -> Square hole in square wall -> Two square walls -> Nature Hub (not teleport since we take the door) -> Broken arch -> Broken climb -> TELEPORT (3:00 bell tower + 1:45 broken stuff)

Nature Hub -> Forest -> QR Map Chest room (?) -> big throne -> in between zone -> Old Zu Village -> Observatory climb -> Observatory -> Octopus thing -> TELEPORT (5:50)

Old Zu Village -> TELEPORT (what:ever)

Nature Hub -> Lighthouse -> Lighthouse interior -> Water tower ext. -> Water tower int. -> Memory Core -> New Zu Village -> Warp Gate -> Gravity Zone -> End cutscene -> Distorted Villageville (7:30)

Here are some proposed splits:

1. After leaving villageville and entering door to Nature Hub from the Memory Core (5:30)
2. Touch the long-fall door after Bell Tower and broken walls (3:30)
3. Touch teleporter in Sync Room (3:00)
4. Touch teleporter after broken arch and broken tower (2:00)
5. Touch door exiting forest (1:00)
6. Touch door after QR Map Room, Throne, and in-between area (2:00)
7. Teleporter top of the octopus (3:00)
8. Touch door in Memory Core to Old Zu Village, after Lighthouse (3:15)
9. End (4:30)

1, 2, 3, and 4 are pretty well segmented in my mind. If we wanted a very small number of splits we could combine 2-4 as all "Nature Hub" things, but that would probably defeat the purpose. 5 and 6 could be consolidated since 5 (the Forest) is one of the shortest sections. There seems to be a good bit of variation here, so it might be nice to have it as it's own thing though, in addition to also have a clear beginning and end. The end point for 6 is kind of weird, since you just walk through the wooden door, and then you're still in a similar-looking area (all purple). It would be the odd one out for length if we consolidated 6 and 7 though -- and not just for length since there's lots of tough stuff there. 8 is pretty clear. The end is annoying, because it's basically just the gravity room, but whatever. I think it still makes sense to keep it all together even though it's 60% cutscenes.

In terms of timing when to actually hit the split key. I prefer the way I do things (on the flash for teleporters, after the creak for wooden doors), but it's way more reliable to just say, "split as soon as you lose control of Gomez." So, the instant you press UP at either a door or a teleporter.

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One thing we'd have to keep in mind for segmented runs is having the correct number of cube bits and collected cubes before starting that section. Dot dialogue boxes and cube completions take time, period. We'd also have to start timing from before a loading zone, so that's a little weird. (In other words, say you were running the first part of the Nature Hub. You load up the Memory Core and start the timer when you open the door to the Nature Hub, watch the cutscene, and then start moving like 30 seconds later.) That's pretty annoying from my perspective, but I don't really see a better way to do it, and I don't know how any other games do it.

Since last Friday I've been playing around with the CMY Cave to see if it's possible to get an earlier cycle. I'll cut to the chase -- it is.

With optimized movement after collecting the tuning fork anticube, (including one tight upwards corner kick), you can shave off about 12.3 seconds. My time with early cycle was 1:31.9, and with the early early cycle was ~1:19.6. I messed up the split and was slow at the end due to excitement.

It took me about 4 hours of routing and grinding to do a full run of the room, and for a while I didn't think it was possible. It might be a long time before any of us can do early early cycle consistently, but thankfully you can fall back into early cycle very easily, without really losing anything. In other words, it's always worth going for early early cycle.

It's possible that there are further optimizations that could be made EARLIER in the room to make some of the later cycles more agreeable, but I ran into several bottlenecks based on the routing I tried. You can see this at :35, where I basically have 3 seconds to kill.

Overall, really cool skip. Might be too hard in practice, depending on how good your mechanics are.

Argh! So this this just happened again, this time in the Parlor/Monocle Room in Villageville. I picked up the anticube on the main room's ledge and then went through Dot's dialogue. When I went back outside, I couldn't drop down from any ledges. This time though, I could Down+A once to get Gomez on the ledge, but not Down+A a second time to make him fall.

0x0ade, I would agree with you that it had something to do with collecting the anticube, but if you check out 3:05, the only ways that I interact with a block before the glitch happens is: picking it up, walking with it, jumping while holding it, tossing it. I don't stand on a block or drop down from one, and the glitch happens before I even pick up the anti-cube. At 3:20 you see a bamboozled me stand stupidly and try talking to Dot. She wasn't much help.

THIS TIME I tried to to some science, though. How much of this can be applied to the puzzle room situation is questionable, since the exact outcome seemed to be a little different (being able to drop to the ledge; not being able to drop down at all). Here's what I found.

• If I walk up to a corner so that Gomez is waving his arms and press Down, Gomez does NOT hop down onto the ledge.
• Gomez is able to climb up and down on vines as normal, but is unable to drop down from vines by pressing Down+A.
• I went from the Memory Zone to the Nature Zone. I still wasn't able to drop down even after the loading screen.

There are also some things related to jumping from ledges that I'd been curious about. This unexpectedly let me test this a bit. I made a quick video showing the techniques I'm talking about.

• During my glitched run, I tested doing the regular corner kick. Everything behaved as normal, as I expected, since the input is just Back+A (the direction opposite the way Gomez is facing).
• I also tested the upward corner kick, which also behaved as normal. I expected this as well, since the input is just Back+A, releasing Back immediate.

If you look at :35 and :59 in the Youtube vid, you see a thing where Gomez kind of grabs the corner, drops off, then immediately grabs the corner again. I'd seen this happen many times while practicing these jumps, but I never really knew what was going on. The input for a forward corner kick is (I think) Back+release Back+A+Forward. Sometimes doing that, I'm sure I press Down along the way, which should cause Gomez to immediately drop down. But then why is Gomez able to re-grab the ledge? You can test this yourself by putting Gomez on a ledge. Press down and he starts to fall. Try as fast as you can to press anything else to get him to stay on the ledge. So far I haven't found anything that will make him re-grab the ledge this way. Anyway, I was still able to perform the forward corner kick during the glitch, and I don't think I experienced any drops and re-grabs.

So what? Well, if we can figure out exactly how upward corner kicks and forward corner kicks work, that could help with practicing and making them more reliable. These are big time saves during a run, but often not worth it when failure means falling to your death/missing a cycle.

For a while, I thought that the forward corner kick worked by making Gomez fall from the ledge and then jump immediately after. I thought maybe he was jumping off the same invisible thing as when he walks off an edge but can still jump even after leaving the edge a little bit. However, the fact that I could still do a forward corner kick when I couldn't drop from a ledge disproves that. Somehow the forward corner kick doesn't involve dropping from the ledge at all, though the mystery of why that mechanic works is still unexplained in my mind.

On a possibly related note, you can see at 1:24 when I do a forward corner kick that there's a moment where it looks like Gomez is inside the wall based on his silhouette. Could that mean that for a second the game thinks Gomez is holding onto the corner from the other side? In other words, it thinks he's facing left? That would explain why he's able to jump right, but still doesn't explain why an upward corner kick would be possible.

[Edit: After looking at the footage at 1:24 at .25 speed, it looks like his silhouette is just him prepping for the jump, NOT him holding onto the ledge from behind. Similar thing at :17, though at :20 he does the jump in front of the ledge, meaning his silhouette doesn't appear.]

Also, sorry if these have been documented for a long time and just deemed "too risky" for runs. Especially the upward corner kick is not too hard and could probably save 10-15 seconds over the course of a run.

While doing a run this evening I had something very strange happen. After solving the first block puzzle, Gomez was no longer able to drop down onto ledges. I was really surprised, because I'd never seen anything like that happen before. I opened the menu and was still able to go up and down. I play on gamepad, but when I checked with my keyboard the same thing was happening. Here's a video:

When I went back and checked, the most recent time before the puzzle room that I dropped to a ledge was during the Cyan Room climb. So theoretically, the dropping-down mechanic broke either later in the Cyan Room, at the Bell Tower, or while I was in the puzzle room. The problem persisted even when I left the puzzle room. Obviously it was a run killer.

Have any of you seen anything like this before?

I should have done more testing before mildly-frustrated quitting (how does this work on vines/ladders? What about if you walk up to a corner ledge and force Gomez to drop onto the corner?), but when I reloaded the save, everything was back to normal.

When taking the teleporter and grabbing a cube, it seems that that lets you move Gomez around when the game is supposed to be doing something else. I wonder how limited Gomez's movement is during that state.

Like, what can we interact with when he's supposed to be being teleported? Can you open doors? Can you take other teleporters? (I remember Wivaiien tried this during his experiment stream Sunday, but I don't remember the result.) Anything that would cancel cutscenes from having to play all the way out would save a lot of time during like cinematic introductions to areas or taking teleporters. If we could find some way to regain control of Gomez while cutscenes are playing, that would be huge.

After seeing all the evidence, I think I agree with most everyone that 1. Duping with almost no limitation is no longer Fez, and 2. It would be silly to make a separate category (outside of a "novelty" category). Congrats to Wivaiien for breaking the game so hard.

On a separate note, grabbing a cube while entering a teleporter might still be promising for other glitches.

Out of curiosity, what was it that led to the past decision to ban duping?

I know I'm just a newcomer here, so I don't expect my opinion to have a lot of weight, but here are my thoughts:

The Fez speedrunning community gets to decide what to do, right? Even if it is a "dupe," it could be decided that duping is legal. I agree with Gyoo that using the same code multiple times = duping. But is that really a bad thing?

In our opinion, what does it take to do a Fez any% run? Does that necessarily involve getting 32 cubes? Let's say for example that someone found a way to clip through the door to the Stargate, and could finish the game with 16 cubes. Would that be legal? Let's say we discover that Wivaiien's teleport weirdness let us teleport to Zu City. Would that be legal? In my opinion, just because something isn't intended by the code doesn't mean it should be illegal for the any% run. If that were the case, then long jumping to the first chest before getting the Fez should be illegal, right? That clearly isn't intended, but it's allowed because there's currently no rule against it.

The cube duping in this case seems contained: you obtain a "bonus" cube when you complete some other action (opening a chest). It's not as if someone is manipulating game code to spawn 30 cubes right from the start. It's different from the non-clockless run as well, because it doesn't rely on anything outside of the game itself. Running Fez any% with this new technique would certainly change the route, and would certainly make the route shorter, by the order of minutes. It also changes priorities for the route: rooms with chests become much more valuable, but at the end of the day the goal is still 32 cubes as fast as possible.

I also think it's very much in the spirit of the game. Gomez produces anticubes, which come from an alternate dimension, out of thin air. I don't think a few more magic cubes is unreasonable.

That being said, if people are adamant that duping shouldn't be in the run, it would just distinguish between any% glitched and any% glitchless. We would still have to decide if the pre-fez long jump, etc. count as glitches though.

Hi guys, that's me. This is my first experience with speedrunning, so I have a lot to learn, but I hope we can find more ways to shave off seconds or even minutes from Fez.

Wivaiien and I have chatted about a few things, and I showed him some of the jump maneuvers I attempted in my run.