Re: Rayman 1
Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2015 5:10 pm
'Tethering' is when you grab onto the ring from farther away than the default length it puts you at when you hold onto it. The longest, most forceful tethers are always achieved by having no speed fist upgrades and hitting the ring from the fist's rebound and while moving away from it. The latter often isn't the best solution in the grand scheme of things when it comes to speedrunning, because while it allows you to make a bigger 'jump', it doesn't necessarily get you to the exit goal any faster given that it requires you to stop moving forward for a half second or so.Fifo wrote:Wonder how to pull off a tether boost…
'Fruitlooping' is the exploit in which you hold up or down while letting go of a ring and for the remainder of your flight, which preserves the horizontal velocity you picked up while on the ring, which, if combined with a good tether, can send you flying forward extremely fast. In most cases I would recommend against holding down, as that means ledgegrabbing is unfeasible given that down makes you drop off from a ledge. In some cases it is necessary to hold down though, such as if you wanted to preserve that horizontal velocity you got from the fruitloop when landing on a slippery surface with a crawlspace you have to get through ahead (this happens in the first area of Pencil Pentathalon and in the second area of Mister Dark's Dare).
My hypothesis on fruitlooping and the game's physics as a whole- everything here is only based on observation and isn't necessarily correct, but seems most likely:
The game has a basic physics system in place that takes into account things like velocity and accelleration, which is applied to Rayman* amongst a variety of other objects. If not holding a direction, the game demands that Rayman's horizontal velocity be zero. If holding right or left, his horizontal velocity is set to 2 or -2 respectively**. There's nothing to be said for holding up or down though***, which means that while holding either of those, Rayman's velocity is not being affected by anything but the world around him, allowing him to be pushed/launched into the air and retain the same velocity he had whilst being pushed or launched.
* A second layer of physics that affects Rayman is layered on top, which activates when touching a slippery surface. It also has its own velocity and accelleration system put in place; two distinctions will be made, Rayman's physics (RP), and the extra physics layer applied when standing on a slippery surface (SP). RP's velocity gets added to SP's accelleration, and SP's velocity in turn becomes RP's velocity. This would perfectly replicate what happens in-game, as well as explain why many find the game's physics to be incredibly unrealistic - it's a kind of fake, partially-simulated inertia which leaves out some crucial elements. Its most observed flaw is the ridiculously exaggerated speed at which you build up velocity when running down a slippery slope, as, while inertia is an easy concept applied to SP and RP individually through the simple logistics of velocity and accelleration existing, simply 'adding' specific things back and forth between two physics systems doesn't properly represent real-life physics at all where everything is unified. To get obtain a realistic result, there would have to be an extra bit of 'number inertia' that every signal sent between SP and RP would have to travel through, determined by the friction of the surface, and this would be achieved through interpolation, which is a fairly difficult thing to program correctly, and it's understandable for a small team why it wouldn't have been used, especially seeing as the game plays and was designed just fine the way it is, despite being unrealistic. To better understand, realise how standing still on a slippery slope, allowing yourself to slide down onto flat ground, then maybe up and back down another hill seems perfectly realistic, but that it's the addition of Rayman's movement that makes things so unrealistic.
** These numbers might be incorrect, as, from my time spent modding Rayman Designer, I know some different behaviour libraries work off of a different number/physics scale. For instance, standard moving clouds use the scale I described for Rayman (they move at a speed of 16, which is the equivalent of Rayman's walking pace), whereas the pencil sharpeners in Picture City (part of a different behaviour library), while apparently moving the same speed, according to the programming move at a speed of '2'.
*** Having up or down force Rayman's velocity to zero, akin to not holding any direction at all, would mean that if you were to, for example, transition from holding right to right+down, Rayman would halt in place, even if right was still being held - this is assuming that the latest input is given priority. Either that, or there would be a conflict between which is given priority. This would be solved by always giving priority to left/right over up/down, or by simply not having up or down be a part of the equation when determining what directions are being pressed, but again: small programming team, small budget.
