Difference between revisions of "Mission records"

Revision as of 18:22, 2 November 2009

Thanks to the Replay feature introduced by the WA Updates, some players are recording their mission attempts to show how some missions can be completed in record times with the use of ingenius methods or mesmerising skill. Below is a table of these "world records". Click the links to download the replays.

If you have a replay in which you completed a mission in a record time or record number of turns, please send it to CyberShadow (or a WKB SysOp) with your WormNET nickname so that we can upload it here.

Understanding this table

Method credit

Getting a record is not simply a case of speed and reflexes. Missions can be completed in a large variety of ways, some faster than others, and some less obvious than others. As well as those that achieve records through their skill, so should players who have developed a new method (or part of it) deserve credit for their ideas.

Turns and Time

The time counted for these speedruns is the human team's total turn time, not including retreat time. The time taken for enemy worms to take their turn, crates to land, health to be deducted, etc, is not counted. An easy way to find this time in a replay of your own is to export a log of your replay by right-clicking it and choosing "Export Log", open the resulting log file (which will be in the same folder with the same file name as a "*.log" file) and check the time displayed after the first instance of "Turn:", which is near the end of the file.

The number of turns used is always considered first when determining the best run of a mission. This is to prevent players from using an indefinite number of 0-second turns to win missions.

Tool-assisted speedruns

These tool-assisted speedruns are similar in nature to tool-assisted speedruns for console games, such as the ones hosted at NESVideos, which archives complete speedruns of various classic console games. However, special tools were developed by Deadcode specifically for Worms Armageddon, because there is no emulation system which runs WA with tools already built in. The tools are still in development, and are not nearly as powerful as they could be yet.

These tool-assisted speedruns are played frame-by-frame, with trajectory mapping, power-angle-scanning, multiple undos (similar to the use of "savestates" in console tool-assisted speedruns) and useful indicators, allowing the player to perform actions and make shots precisely without reliance on reaction speed. These tools will not necessarily tell the player what the quickest way to complete the mission is, but they will allow the player to try out different ideas without having to rely on fast reflexes. There is often room for improvement, so no particular tool-assisted replay should be considered the fastest that is theoretically possible. Sometimes, when a new glitch is found in the game, it can be exploited to improve the time in a tool-assisted speedrun. Tool-assisted players often make use of luck manipulation, which involves a deep understanding of the game's pseudo-random number generator. This luck manipulation can affect many game elements, including the wind on subsequent turns, the trajectories of a clustered explosive, and the falling patterns of flame bits.

Tool-assisted speedruns can be regarded as goal times for unassisted players to strive for in their attempts.

Compared to tool-assisted

This comparison shows how many seconds the current record is short of the tool-assisted speedrun, and a percentage value which is calculated as (toolassisted time)/(record time). If we take the tool-assisted replay to be perfect, then this gives us an idea of how close the record holder was to achieving unbeatable perfection in his speedrun. The higher the percentage, the closer it was.

Highlighted

Highlighted table elements indicate the most recent updates. For a list of pre-2009 updates, view this page's source code.

Mission records

1. ↑ In both replays, a parachute is deployed to skip the landing animation, enabling the uzi to be fired 0.36 seconds earlier. The unassisted record beats Deadcode's old tool-assisted record, which had a time of 1.56 seconds.
2. ↑ Interesting note: The current unassisted record is faster than Deadcode's first tool-assisted record of 4.22 seconds.
3. ↑ Note that in the first tool-assisted replay, the player's worm survives, whereas in the current unassisted replay it does not.
4. ↑ This tool-assisted speedrun beats the previous run by Deadcode by a mere 3 frames! All extraneous movement has been eliminated, leaving only worm selection frames.
5. ↑ The tool-assisted replay was made with an old version of WA, with which the wind on the first turn is different from that of the latest version.
6. ↑ ^{6.0 6.1} Although the mission is not complete until the crate is collected, turns that are instantaneously skipped while waiting for the crate to land have been discounted. The record replay and the TA replay are therefore considered 9- and 7-turn solutions respectively.

Credits

This page was originally maintained by Run on his Nanacide website, and was moved to the Worms Knowledge Base in May 2009.

We would like to thank:

Run for creating and maintaining this page all these years
Deadcode for introducing the replay feature
Lex and CyberShadow for helping Run out with this page
M3ntal for starting the whole thing off with his Jurassic Worm replay
And everyone and anyone who's participated!