NY00123 wrote:Now, one small question CapnClever (and/or others): In the current description of the video above, you have said that a run can be shortened by toggling on audio. For certain technical reasons, I suspect it comes to the music setting.
So, what about having a run with sound effects toggled on, but no music? I think it should have the same speed as no-audio gameplay, but actual tests are often better than theory.
No-sound in this case refers specifically to "SFX" and not "music". The reason for the extra time is almost entirely due to start/end level jingles (apparently considered sound effects instead of music), which have to play completely before you can move on. (If you're wondering why "almost", the other time-saver is using the rocket which, again, has a forced sound clip.) I suppose I haven't checked the no-music, with-sound case, but I checked no-music, no-sound and it didn't appear to differ from with-music, no-sound.
I haven't tried this in other Keen games, but it's likely to also be the case. At the very least, in Keen4 you're able to "override" the end-level sound with the inventory pop-up/down noise, saving a little bit of time in the any% run. I'll take a quick look tonight to be sure, but it's a pretty noticeable time difference that you could eyeball it yourself.
KeenRush wrote:I suddenly feel like trying to do a tool-assisted run of one of my mods. Where should I begin?

TASVideos uses an emulator called
JPC-RR for its videos. It's really handy albeit requires some setup to get working, so let me know if you choose this route and have trouble getting it running. (This is what I used to figure out the Vorticon engine "air jump" timing.)
In searching for other options, I found a custom build of DOSBox that includes savestates. Go to
this website and click "DOSBox SVN builds" near the top, then download for whatever platform you use. Note I haven't actually tried this myself: I will tonight because this particular function seems interesting. It could very well cause desync in recording, so I don't know if it'll be useful for a TAS.