Rayman 3 scores

[MandM81]

I have updated my points strategy for part 2, which now includes a new maximum.

Part 2

The Lavicraft Combo (4 Yellow Gems and a Pig, 2 Lavicrafts + Lums)
Basic points: 1300
Combo points: 3620
Total points: 4920
Accumulated: 4920
Note: The Lums Glitch after the first Lavicraft may yield up to 10 Lums on conversion. I counted 9 in this combo. The second Lavicraft provides just 1 Lum in this calculation.

Lose points in this room (4 Yellow Gems, Door + Lever)
Accumulated: 5200

The Hoodstormer Combo (12 Yellow Gems, 7 Hoodstormers + Lums, 6 Yellow Gems, 1 Yellow Gem, 2 Pigs with 6 Yellow Gems each)
Basic points: 1820
Combo points: 7190
Total points: 9010
Accumulated: 14210
Note1: The first two Hoodstormers are weakened with 4 hits each. The third Hoodstormer is weakened with a fully charged hit by helicoptering towards the exit of the room. A red circle will appear. The Lockjaw is acquired and the 12 Yellow Gems are collected. Make a few jumps while collecting the Gems in order to lock on to the nearest Hoodstormer that hovers above. Kill it when the Gems are collected. Get the Throttle Copter and kill the second Hoodstormer, get the Lums, renew the Throttle Copter and kill the third Hoodstormer with a Powerup. The remaining 4 Hoodstormers are taken without a Powerup.
After the final Hoodstormer is killed the Lockjaw is acquired. Fall down and get the 6 Yellow Gems on and near the revolving statue. Continue the combo with the two Pigs below. Collect the Gems and finish the combo with the Yellow Gem under the statue.
Note 2: It is actually possible to trigger the Lums Glitch, so two of the Hoodstormers provide up to 10 Lums each. It’s not included in these calculations, but may be an option if the game is tight. Each conversion in the calculations yields two Lums except for the last Hoodstormer.

Yellow Gems Combo (19 Yellow Gems in the Tower with the Elite Monger)
Basic points: 380
Combo points: 900
Total points: 1280
Accumulated: 15490

The Hoodstormer Combo (8 Red Gems, Hoodstormer + Lums)
Basic points: 880
Combo points: 1420
Total points: 2300
Accumulated: 17790
Note: Get the HMF, make a well-timed jump down to the right platform. Collect the 8 Red Gems and kill the Hoodstormer with one hit. Quite often the Lums Glitch works well here. Last time I played this combo I got 7 Lums on conversion. I thus calculated 7 Lums in this combo. Patience is needed when playing this combo as the camera often acts weird.

The Piggybank Combo (Pigs and Gems)
Basic points: 980
Combo points: 3880
Total points: 4860
Accumulated: 22650

Bonus point from Hoodblaster
Accumulated: 22710

The Final Combo
Basic points: 4900
Combo points: 16480
Total points: 21380
Note: Break the Cage as shown on the video. The video is a mess midway through. The reason for this is you have to use the camera to follow Rayman’s position. If he reaches the Cage area the game will lock. Thus he must break the cage AND get out before the game locks. You now have the Hoodstyler and the Hoodblaster available for the Final Combo. A combo can go like this (maybe the Gem under the statue can be included):

YYYYP|YYYYY|YPHGP|YYYRR|RHLLPYYYYYYPDPPPYYYYYYYYYRRRYYYRRR

Maximum non-IPG score for console players (so far): 116509 points.

Points needed before the Final Combo: 99999 - 4900 + 30 = 95129.

Scoring options.

It is possible for console players to get 22710 points before the Final Combo. That requires a minimum score after part 1 of 95129 - 22710 = 72419 points.

I would suggest a score of at least 73k points after part 1 to avoid having to restart part 2 due to unlucky Lum conversions. The margin between the true maximum score and the theoretical calculations is now big enough to make me optimistic about a new console maximum.

[1234]

I just saw your new TOTL-video, MandM. I think that's an awesome workaround for the green gem problem too!

One note to your calculations: In the final combo you can start with the single yellow gem beside the hook (--> YYYYY|PYYYY...). You can see it in Maz' video.
That should be 160 points more.

It's quite cool that console players can get 116k+ points in TOTL, even without the IPG. But also for PC-Players it doesn't look bad. I calculated that the maximum should be 113390 points. With the improved hoodstormer combo in part 1 even 113730 points.

Speaking of the hoodstormer combo, unfortunately the combo is harder than I thought. I guess I just had luck with the SJs in my first few attempts, but now my success rate actually is quite low. That's why I only uploaded two attempts. The first one shows that the entire combo is possible (only the powerup ran out too early). The second attempt shows that with a more efficient movement (and without the mistake from the first attempt) the powerup will last long enough.

Btw., I have a question regarding the recording software Bandicam:
When I use the "Game Recording" mode, the game will run too fast. However this won't happen, when I use the "Screen Recording" mode. The problem in the latter mode is that the fps-number won't be displayed so that you also won't see whether you're recording or not. Does anyone know why Bandicam speeds the game up in the one mode, but not in the other one? Also, how can I solve this problem?

[Cut]

Screen capture mode requires your computer to display what you see on the screen in the first place, that is then recaptured by Bandicam and sent back to your hard drive, which can cause slowdown on slightly weaker computers since this requires quite some computing power. Game recording on the other hand uses DirectX, which is basically the graphical interface between the game and windows, thus allowing Bandicam to capture the video before the data is sent to your screen. Since Rayman 3 is a very old game and doesn't really work well with modern graphic cards (modern meaning anything newer than 2006 really), this can mess up the speed of the game (because Bandicam is not able to repeat the received data from the game the same way the game sent it to the software in the first place because of some incompatibilities), especially since Bandicam forces games to run at 60FPS in this mode, while Rayman can only handle 72FPS or 36FPS constantly, and is always having ups and downs in frames when you're not running at these exact FPS-numbers. This problem can be slightly mitigated by recording at exact 72 or 36FPS, but it won't eliminate your problems entirely.

[1234]

Thanks for the explanation Cut!
It's a pity that this speedup seems to be unavoidable, but setting the fps to 36 or 72 indeed helps to make the change in speed not too noticeable.

Today I played a little bit around in the second room in TOTL 2 (the one with the elite monger and the rising lava). For exploring purposes I used the infinite throttle copter, and unless I have overseen something I think I've found some small improvements:

1.) It seems that the door will get only closed if you enter a specific area, which is somewhere around the gap in the wall (where you can climb up). I simply imagine a "trigger-sphere", which you shouldn't enter. However this "sphere" doesn't cover the entire ground, so you can jump down without triggering the door to get closed. Then you can hit the elite monger so that he'll move a little bit towards you. In order to get up again you can use the mushroom glitch/trick. Since now the elite monger is closer to you, you can kill him from above and convert his lum, both with a powerup. That should be 540 extra points.

2.) It seems that the "sphere" is small enough so that you can take every gem in this room, except the first two gems between the walls, without triggering anything. Also, for some reason the "trigger-sphere" from the door seems to be smaller than (or simply different from) the one from the lava: When I took the second gem between the walls, the lava began to rise, but the door was still open. Only when I took the first gem (the lowest one), the door also got closed. Since the lava isn't a problem, I think that it should be possible to take everything in this room except the lowest yellow gem (i.e. 24 gems). Unless there is something I don't know about, that should also give us a few extra points.

Btw., how does the glitch in MandMs video actually work? I mean what conditions must be fulfilled so that it'll work? I thought that we could possibly use it e.g. to exit the last tower or for some other improvements.

[Cut]

Btw., how does the glitch in MandMs video actually work? I mean what conditions must be fulfilled so that it'll work? I thought that we could possibly use it e.g. to exit the last tower or for some other improvements.

You might have noticed, that the visible walls in TOTL2 (especially the first big tower) do not correspond with the actual walls you collide with. Especially in the higher parts of the first room (the areas where the devs never expected you to reach there), that becomes very noticable. Another good example is the pile of rocks and junk right next to the entrance, they simply put a few invisible walls above this strucutre to prevent you from interfering with it, because the thing itself has no collision at all. The thing with these invisible walls is, they appear to just be pure collision-barriers rather than true walls. I assume that collision-barrier is just an abstract class and has derived classes such as floor, regular walls, slippery floor or any type of object you can collide with. Now, these invisible walls though are not actual walls, that would prevent you from walking onto them while being squashed, they appear to be just a very lazy implementation of the collision barrier, with only an "you can't walk here" property. This is also illustrated by how well Shockrocket-Hopping works on these walls (which means, jump "on a wall", fire your shockrocket right in the wall, and after it's exploded, jump again. There are certain walls that are corrupted in a way that the game won't instantly notice that you're not on the ground, so it gives you a short time frame to jump again and repeat this trick). Since any type of wall is not supposed to handle the squashed-state ever, the game probably just doesn't know what to do and let's you go right through it. The one thing Rayman 3 is very good at is handling errors and exceptions without actually crashing the game, so it probably does the easiest thing it can: if you move, just act accordingly to any present collision barriers, and if you don't move, just don't do anything (which means don't even collide with this wall but just go through it).

To cut a long story short, I would be suprised if this worked anywhere else because I don't think these weird types of walls can be found anywhere else in the game. This is also the reason it took us forever to find a way to exit the first big room in TOTL2 without using the glidewalk. Once the developers noticed that the entire part was corrupted and all the walls did not work as intended, they just covered literally everything with a shitton of walls, just to make sure they don't leave any holes in the ground. An annoying consequence was, that they even plugged the holes that they would normally leave open in other levels, because nobody would think that anyone could get to these places anyway.

[MandM81]

I just saw your new TOTL-video, MandM. I think that's an awesome workaround for the green gem problem too!

Thanks! It was the first time I tried with the camera mode, so there was some exploring on the video. It can be done faster.

Yeah, I overlooked that Gem entirely, thanks.

Cool videos of the Secret Room Combo. As far as I can tell it's a nice boost for pc players. It's a minor boost for console players as some Lums are lost if you have to include the Gems on the Stairs in the Hoodlum Combo.

Actually I tried the exact same things around the Elite Monger including the Mushroom Trick. I was close to succeeding in returning to the open door, but I never did. Did you have any success with the Mushroom Trick?

It would be nice with an extra 500 points.

I have tried to use the "Cage" trick elsewhere in order to escape the first room. So far no luck.

I'll keep trying though.

[1234]

@Cut: Thank you for the detailed information, it definitely makes sense!
That should help in further investigations.

@MandM: Yes, I managed to return to the open door by using the mushroom trick. As far as I know it's important to get hit quite at the highest point of your jump and, after you got hit, to press the jump-button again.
I could make a video of it, but I think that I've actually found a better way to deal with the elite monger:

In my last post I wrote that it's possible to trigger the lava to start rising without triggering the door to get closed. Now the idea is to do exactly this, then wait a little bit, take a yellow gem on one of the platforms above the door, fall down and kill the elite monger in combo. Since the lava is rising, you'll be able to return to the open door, and provided you've waited long enough before, you won't even lose too many points because of the lava. You can even use the lava to reach the upper platform again, so you don't need to perform the SJ a second time.
That way you can even get in total 1000 points from the elite monger.
I tested it just quickly and it actually worked. I think I'll record it soon after I've done some more tests.

Edit: I think I've found a way to get in total even 1500 points from the elite monger: Take the lockjaw and lock onto the hook just above the elite monger. Helicopter down towards the gems between the walls. Shortly after the lava begins to rise, grab the hook. In that process you'll take the two upper gems. Land on top of the platform with the single yellow gem and take that gem. Continue with the following two gems, fall down and kill the elite monger.
I guess that getting more points from the elite monger, while avoiding that the door will get closed, should be impossible (or ridiculously hard).

[PluMGMK]

Once the developers noticed that the entire part was corrupted and all the walls did not work as intended, they just covered literally everything with a shitton of walls, just to make sure they don't leave any holes in the ground. An annoying consequence was, that they even plugged the holes that they would normally leave open in other levels, because nobody would think that anyone could get to these places anyway.

So that's why it's possible for the Elite Monger to fall through the floor in the last room before the lava starts rising? Also, I'm curious (and not as intimately acquainted with the nooks and crannies of the game as a lot of people here), what are some examples of holes they plugged?

[1234]

As promised I recorded the new findings in the second big room of TOTL 2.

A few notes:
1.) To reach the upper platform I didn't use the rolling SJ from MandM, but another glitch I've found, since it seems to be a little bit easier.
2.) I got 1000 combo points for the Elite Monger. I have two ideas to get 2000 or even 2500 combo points from him, but I think it'd be much harder than the combo in the video. Maybe I'll test them somewhen anyway.
3.) In the Yellow Gem Combo I took all gems with a powerup except for one. I think it might be even possible to get all with a powerup in one combo, but I actually didn't test it yet.

I added some more information/tips in the description of the video.

The Elite Monger Combo yields 1800 points (640-1160-1800) and the Yellow Gem Combo yields 1160 points (350-810-1160). Thus the PC-maximum should be 115410 points now, if I'm not mistaken.

So that's why it's possible for the Elite Monger to fall through the floor in the last room before the lava starts rising?

I'm not sure, but I think that as soon as the Elite Monger starts falling down, he won't be a "real" (solid) object, but rather only a "visual effect" without a hitbox. I think so, because when I tried to exit the last room in order to return to the previous areas, I had the idea to let an Elite Monger fall down on Rayman, while Rayman is standing on the ground, in the hope that the Elite Monger will push him right through the ground. Unfortunately the Hoodlum fell right through Rayman.

[MandM81]

As promised I recorded the new findings in the second big room of TOTL 2.

Thanks for the video. It's a clever way to use the Lockjaw

It could be worth looking for a way to get 2000 or 2500 combo points from the Elite Monger as it may be possible to use a reduced Elite Monger combo in part 1. No matter how it turns out, that combo will be a "deal breaker". I'll look into it after next week, when I will have to play again.

[Cut]

I couldn't help myself and went to explore some Rayman 3 stuff again. So I started up BOM3 because I am still very much interested in this weird two-levels-on-one-map thing and the mysterious yellow gems that appear in the BOM-4-part of the map when you are in BOM3. To warm myself up, I played through BOM3 the standard way, especially to get a feel for the big combo again, because maybe there's still some potential there. Anyway, when I was done with the Green Gem Combo, I got interrupted by a phone call and forgot to pause the game because I cleared everything already anyway, so Rayman just drove around on the boat for a while. Surprisingly, when I came back after ~45 minutes, Rayman was in the middle of nowhere

It appears that the boat doesn't move in a perfect circle, it actually comes closer towards the direction of the green gem island everytime it makes one lap. This went on for a while, until the boat reached the end of the solid map this way. I fell through the swamp together with the boat and apparently the game really didn't like it. Everything blacked out (probably because I fell out of bounds), it stuttered (kind of made the impression of my CPU being very busy) and all out of sudden, it put me at the start of BOM4, with the Hoodlums and everything all being there

I minimized the game and checked my savefile: last date of change was a couple weeks back which means the game didn't save, so techincally I'm still in BOM3. So, considering that there are some launching glitches in the first area of BOM4, it could be possible to maybe connect these to parts by going into BOM4 this way, and then using for example the long combo time of a hoodblaster to launch back into BOM3 and continue there

Unfortunately I couldn't find any time to investigate this weird glitch further (mainly because it takes forever to do this), but I can at least confirm that everything is where it's supposed to be (and the 3 mysterious yellow gems from BOM3 actually existed like "twice", there were two gems on top of each other in these places).

So possibly there could be a new maximum in BOM very soon thanks to combining both these parts somehow. All we have to do is hang around on a boat for like 1 hour

[1234]

Nice try Cut! Unfortunately this time I was aware of the date yesterday.
It's still a cool and creative idea! (Have you tried it actually?)

I once saw a video, which shows how someone got to the areas of part 4 while being in part 3 (with the help of CheatEngine). So far as I recall there were no Hoodlums. However I think that the four yellow gems were in the usual position, so maybe it's possible to get these without cheats (e.g. by using an ESJ or maybe the boat )?


As for TOTL 2, yet I didn't try to improve the Elite Monger Combo. There's still a small update: In the Yellow Gem Combo you can get all yellow gems with a powerup. That gives us additional 20 points compared to the combo in my video.

[RibShark]

I once saw a video, which shows how someone got to the areas of part 4 while being in part 3 (with the help of CheatEngine). So far as I recall there were no Hoodlums. However I think that the four yellow gems were in the usual position, so maybe it's possible to get these without cheats (e.g. by using an ESJ or maybe the boat )?

There is a way to get there via an ECBSJ on GameCube only. You can get back to BOM3 with an ESJ on all platforms though. There might be another glitch to get there on other platforms, but I haven't found one yet.

[Xenon]

Ffs, I saw Cut's post on Saturday and was genuinely intrigued by it. There's something about this thread that allows April Fools jokes to slip by unnoticed. Maybe it's the seriousness of the discussions here. To be fair he made it after noon though...

[PluMGMK]

Yeah, well try reading back over it several months later, it gets even harder!

[1234]

Ffs, I saw Cut's post on Saturday and was genuinely intrigued by it. There's something about this thread that allows April Fools jokes to slip by unnoticed. Maybe it's the seriousness of the discussions here. To be fair he made it after noon though...

That's true. If I forgot that it was the 1st of April, I'm sure I'd fall for it (which would be quite annoying, but also funny, because I'd test the glitch out and wait in the boat for about half an hour )

Also, thanks RibShark for the information. That way GC-Players should be able to get a few extra points in part 3 and also in part 4.

As for TOTL 2, I didn't find a way to get out of the last tower, but I thought that I can tell a few maybe interesting things I found out, so maybe someone will come up with some ideas:
1.) The lava stops rising shortly before it will flood the upper hallway. When the lava is that high, you can pass the lava (i.e. get down again) by helicoptering through a gap between the lava and the wall, which the devs accidently left. The lava only has to be high enough, otherwise the gap will be too small or won't even be there yet.
2.) With the infinite throttle copter I entered the tower from above (I think with a SJ it might be possible too?). Then the lava started rising, but the door was still open. With the trick I described above, I passed the lava, and then I could return to the hallway (since the door was still open). Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to return to one of the previous rooms.
I guess that's quite useless, but it won't do any harm to just say that.

[MandM81]

I tried to investigate getting in and out of the Balloon Tower a while back. I came to about the same conclusions you did. I need an SJ into the Tower and a way out of the area outside the entrance at the foot of the Tower. Regarding the latter the best effort came from rolling on the Pigs while focusing on the Cage. The camera position is less than optimal and the roll off is soft. Nevertheless I managed to get launched quite high in the air, but just not high enough to reach the upper level. Maybe I should give it another go and also search for an SJ into the Tower.

With the recent improvements regarding the Elite Monger in part 2, console players will be able to settle for at score of 71k after part 1.

[Hunchman801]

Does anyone know if launching glitches work on R3HD? I was playing it last night and tried to trigger the one on the boat. but to no avail.

As promised I recorded the new findings in the second big room of TOTL 2.

That's a stylish combo!

Ffs, I saw Cut's post on Saturday and was genuinely intrigued by it. There's something about this thread that allows April Fools jokes to slip by unnoticed. Maybe it's the seriousness of the discussions here. To be fair he made it after noon though...

Same here. On saw it today, April 1st was over a week ago and I just believed it straight away.

[1234]

With the recent improvements regarding the Elite Monger in part 2, console players will be able to settle for at score of 71k after part 1.

Good to know. That means that one may lose around 8k points in part 1 and thus avoid playing the horrible hoodstormer combo.
Actually, due to these extra points, it might be worth looking for a better final combo for console players, so that we can increase at least the theoretical maximum.

Does anyone know if launching glitches work on R3HD? I was playing it last night and tried to trigger the one on the boat. but to no avail.

When I googled "Rayman 3 HD speedrun" I found i.a. this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PC41bwF ... e&t=13m15s
In e.g. 13:23 you can see a SJ, so I guess that it should work on R3HD. (btw., this SJ is quite easy to perform, so you could try this one out )

I don't know whether the launching glitch in SBTC 1 on the boat works too, but this glitch isn't easy, so it might happen that it will take some time until it will be triggered.

That's a stylish combo!

Thanks!


A few days ago I said that, as far as I know, when you are in BOM part 3 and enter the areas from part 4, there'll be the usual 4 yellow gems.
I wanted to check whether I was right, and thus looked into the part with CheatEngine. While flying around, I noticed quite a few usually inaccessible gems. I've taken some screenshots. They are in pairs, i.e. the first two belong together, and the second two belong together.

In the first two screenshots you can see all hidden gems (at least I think that it's all). The four gems on the left are the gems from part 4.

In the second two screenshots you can see all hidden gems, except for the 4 gems, but in return a little bit closer, so that it's easier to recognize something.
In the green circles are just the dollar-signs from the hoodblasters and the stumbleboom.
The two gems on the left are the gems which Lance found (the ones behind the tree).
The single gem on the left is located just before the entrance of part 4 (OoB).
The next two yellow gems are in the "building". In order to get them we'd have to find a way to glitch into the building...
The next one is under the platform where the blue can will spawn.
The single gem on the right is somewhere in the bog (near the boat, as you can see).
The other two gems on the right are out of bounds. However you can actually "swim" there and take these gems that way. We'd only have to find a SJ to get there.

I don't know it, but I think that possibly there was a connection between part 3 and part 4 (because they wanted to make just one part instead of two), and those gems were lying on the way. I can imagine that after you fall into the hollow tree trunk, the part shouldn't end, but you was supposed to go to the right, then towards the single gem on the right, go in a half circle (follow the gems) and then somehow run towards the entrance of part 4?

[PluMGMK]

So weird. If there was going to be a passage between the two areas, I wonder why they deleted the passage, but not the rest of the unused bits.