TAS vs THE FLOOR IS LAVA Challenge 

I get this question a lot, so I think it's worth a pinned answer at this point. Speedrunners very often create rules limiting what glitches they take advantage of in runs, either to keep runs interesting or to avoid having to do particularly annoying glitches that would otherwise make runs very un-fun to do. One specific glitch, wall cling storage, has both in-room optimization and overall routing implications. For this run in particular, the micro-optimization for in-room movement using wcs is a big part of the fun of TASing it, as there are a lot of subtle limitations to the tech that require making some interesting decisions. However, for routing, wcs basically allows skipping huge chunks of the game. That makes the run in whole less interesting, as it cuts out a lot of content in the name of speed. The topology ruleset used by speedrunners for wcs is intended to focus on disallowing the route-breaking uses of wcs while still allowing various cases where it's just fun/fast. The exact rules are a bit complicated and are defined in terms of mathematical topology, but the gist of the routing implications is that you can't use wcs to skip getting abilities or creating shades that would otherwise be required for a skip. This means that you still get to have all the interesting routing associated with shades and ability pickups, but, especially relevant for TAS, we can still abuse the hell out of wcs to do all sorts of crazy movement within rooms.

​@@jarlyk Very clear and actually what I expected after some thought. Thanks! For anyone else interested I'll over-explain just in case: I understand the idea is to think two rooms are "topologically near" if you can go from one to the other. This basic idea gives us different notions of proximity based on which glitches we allow to be able to go between rooms. In our case, blue lake and crossroads/salubra's shop are only "topologically near without major glitches" only in the state of the game that has shade in forgotten crossroads. (In a normal play-through you would think of these two rooms as near only once you get claw.) And we want only to go between rooms that are "topologically near without major glitches", not just "topologically near with or without major glitches". However, once we get to the state of the game where the two rooms are "topologically near without major glitches", it doesn't matter in what way we get from one room to the next. This has for example the advantage that a hypothetical run by a human would only care about optimizing in-room time but following this same rout. Relevant: www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Four-faculty-paper-with-an-article-on-hollow-knight-v0-857ry0boxiua1.jpg%3Fs%3Dea39c3568e04d839243a73cd9100c48dbe34d570

@tricanico, Sorta. Here are the actual nmg rules as written for wallcling storage, which is the ruleset I'm following in spirit (TAS violates the full rules by definition just by being tool-assisted.) "Wallcling storage on patches before 1.3, so long as non-WCS NMG movement through the same space with current items and room state is available to the player. If the non-WCS access requires permanent changes: these must be made prior to using WCS. An example would be if the non-WCS access requires breaking a breakable floor. If the non-WCS access requires enemies or objects to be in a certain state: they must be in that state or be able to be put in that state without reentering the room. Same space is defined topologically, meaning that two paths are in the same space if one can be dragged to the other in space without passing through any platforms or barriers." The exact principle here is homotopy equivalence, which is to say that you can plot a curve between two locations and you can drag that curve around, as long as it doesn't pass through something solid. So, the wcs rules are technically about in-room movement, but their larger implications are about routing, since you use in-room movement to perform skips.

@@jarlyk That's a hilariously mathematical definition. Speedrunners are huge nerds. (I say that lovingly as a mathematician, though not a topologist.)

@@jarlykreally cool run! What does the inventory drop do/allow you to do?

Which is worth more, menderbug's life or saving a single grounded frame out of thousands? Clearly, saving the frame. There is nothing more valuable than an individual frame. If saving that frame killed a member of the audience through laughter, that's just another necessary sacrifice.

@@delta3244 "No cost too great" -The Pale King

also menderbug

In the end, that one frame brought me agonizing pain as the total count was 1 off from being zeroed. That 9 felt like it was flaunting its existence lol.

@@lesseridiot2385 that is literally the joke ben made

Lol. I just got there. Also, good job on becoming a member

I heard that, looked down at the comments, and fully knew it was going to be here 😆

You beat me to it lol

"And we use the children, to pogo our way across" Spoken like a true Hollow Knight player

Darth Vader is pleased.

can you explain what "legal" means? within the nmg ruleset?

as far as I'm aware, the rules are that WCS is legal as long as you don't do anything you couldn't do without it. so in this case it's both legal and saves grounded frames/time

@@svool_gsviv9885 honestly a bit annoying to me. "I have the tools to make this video, so I wont" kind of vibe.

@@asdasdasdasd7483 i don’t see what you mean, could you elaborate?

@@svool_gsviv9885 there is no fun in someone saying "I could do it, but I wont". Uf you're doing a no hit run, your dog starts barking, you turn around and an enemy creeps towards you and hits you, you don't get to say "it doesn't count because I could have dodged it easily" What's the fun in him doing something "illegally" just to say "I could do it legally but I wont". Zero sense in that.

7589/250000*

@@EvilCherry3 7589/250000 * 100%

someone has a a lot of free time

Nice

​@@EvilCherry3yaknow you can just edit the comment, right?

yooo blue ya like mlp

blue :D

pog blue

Sup, can’t wait for the reaction stream/vid.

In his gathering swarm video TAS video he said that's his last reaction

I know your joking and it still hurt me

@@calebcasey599 This joke is as old and legendary as TASing itself, it will never die out.

to be fair, he's so good he got his own category

Your name is ironic in this case, but you are ea very nice person for saying that and doing the super thanks

How is the sink?

@@mid-boss6461 It cleans my dishes for me now. Truely a modern wonder.

@@CJTheExpertlol

And the second time seemed to have been much harder too. The dedication of this man, its unbelievable

“The wombling” Glorious phrase Edit, I had read this comment before the uumuu fight and now I realized I used the wrong pronunciation of wombling when reading it

Yeah, some of the skins available via CustomKnight mod are pretty fun. I'm not sure if any of them have trails, but pretty much everything else is customizable.

I'm not sure of trails but there are LOTs of skins that are available as mods that can change so much. The knight itself, the nail, the spells and even some charms. Would urge you to check them out!

Exactly; constraints breed creativity. The wcs restrictions are a bit of arcane minutia that mostly don't matter that much for human runners (it prevents them from having to do certain obnoxious skips in popular runs that otherwise could skip large chunks of the game), but they create an interesting playscape for TAS, which can get wcs for free by wiggling against any wall. And, in the context of the unique goal of staying off the floor, it becomes even more relevant. A lot of people have asked why not just ignore those rules if it's more efficient, but I think people grossly underestimate just how broken Hollow Knight is and the kinds of chaos that result if you remove all the shackles. If anyone is curious, I recommend watching an all glitches speedrun; current WR for that is 4 minutes, 36 seconds.

In this case, it also made for surprisingly good narrative pacing, as the run starts fairly tame but just gets wilder and wilder as it goes along. There's even a bit of an act structure going on from the tame beginning pre-dash, to a rising act as more powers are unlocked, to a climax as all the setups and threads setup by the constraints are brought together with the Uumuu and Monomon core sequences and a falling action as things wind down with last stretch and The Hollow Knight. Which is not something one generally comes to nor expects from a TAS, but here we are. The run and its commentary together made for some pretty good showmanship.

How did they trick u

OMG another delta

I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)

I think the trickiest part of minimal air time would be getting past enemies. You'd probably have to kill a lot more things and would need to kill them without jumping, so a lot of step in, hit the enemy, back off, repeat. Would probably be optimal to get VS as the itemless Baldur kill involves a lot of time in the air. It wouldn't have most of the nail turnaround boosts that normally show up in TAS, since most of those require jumping to reach a useful wall. Dashmaster might still be worth for the downdashes to get to the ground sooner when falling. If we want to get a bit cheeky, TAS could try to mostly jump using airwalk, which is technically grounded while in the air. Definitely could be interesting.

Literally used RNG manipulation to spawn in Menderbug, just so the TAS could immediately kill him and save *ONE* (1) frame. Absolutely mental.

The hollow knight is missing out by using the angel wings, they should get fishron wings for the flight time

Hehe

I think that's a common reaction. One time when I was playing Mother 2 soon after playing Mother 3, I tried to use M3's rhythm game mechanics to combo in a game that didn't have them.

@@tundraanderson9068*fledgling wings

Such epilepsy

that would be just over 4 minutes, mostly with the Knight in a cutscene, dream nail, or focus

And here I make my sad plea from within the chains of the Algorithm. (:

I actually realized after the fact that I calculated this incorrectly. The frames displayed in the counters are physics frames, but 250k is the number of input (render) frames. So it's really more 125k total physics frames. But still pretty good. :) I plan to do a breakdown chart showing how much of the time was due to movement and how much was just unavoidable grounded time from cutscenes.

@@jarlyk nice! But seriously these videos are awesome either way :)

This is a tool-assisted speedrun, so there's no muscle memory required. Inputs are specified one frame at a time and executed by software. There are a ton of tricks this TAS uses that wouldn't be human viable, as they're either too precise to execute reliably or there are limitations to hardware imprecision that make some of the tricks fundamentally random as to whether they can be executed on any given run.

I had a lot of fun making this one; the underlying concept is pretty simple, but it had all sorts of crazy routing implications and meant that there's not a single room here with 'normal' movement. I'd gotten a bit tired of TASing early game, since it's almost always the same, but here even KP is a completely new challenge. Thanks for your continued support and I hope you have as much fun watching it as I did making it.

​@@jarlyk Back from work now! Did you do some RNG manip to get menderbug, or were you just lucky?

@@hakonhassel4928 That was manipulated (:

@@jarlyk Where/when did you do the manip? Was it wiggles in dirtmouth or something like that?

@@hakonhassel4928 It was inventory manipulation while loading in on the bench. Moving the cursor around triggers particle effects that change rng.

Ah, good catch. That looks like a small mistake, probably introduced when I was tweaking the jump heights so that the final alignment with the spit would be correct. This sequence took a really long time with a ton of tweaking to get it to work properly, as can't just wait on the floor for the perfect time like the normal itemless Baldur.

@@jarlyk Thanks for the explanation! Love the video!

Good eye; that's a mistake. Possibly even a desync, as I thought I checked the entry to every room, but it's quite possible I just missed it. It wasn't grounded for the start of the dash, so I might've missed that it just barely dipped down and brushed the floor for a few frames at the edge.

​@@jarlyk also great tas.

"he needed to use menderbug to reduce the amount of ground touches" -🤓

This TAS took on the order of around 200 hours, which is fairly typical for a TAS of this length. GE would be incredibly long under these constraints, as you'd need to do all the fights with nail 0 and dive without shamans. The biggest impact on grounded time would be the lack of wcs, which would add a lot of grounded frames throughout the movement. It would change calculations for bench usage (the extra costs per room may justify using more nearby benches in a lot of cases.) It would be interesting, but quite a lot of work, especially since 1432 isn't as stable for libTAS, so it would require a lot of segmentation and splicing.

If you get far enough away from a wombling, it will turn into a void particle and chase you faster, then turns back into a wombling as soon as it's in a space where it can form. The TAS often moves quite quickly and therefore outpaces the womblings pretty frequently. We actually had to deliberately keep a wombling in this void form for an extended period by maneuvering it into the wall to delay its spawning when doing the Hwurmp early control at Ismas, as otherwise it would blow up the Hwurmp before it could get there.

I'm actually not sure; HK has a lot of weird interaction jank like this, but probably had something to do with the knight setting the attack pattern based on the knight being on the right side (pushing it toward the wall), but setting the facing direction to the left (the knight's new position.)