Anyhow, I just realized that I never posted this here, but part of my motivation for the thing in the previous post was that a couple months ago I attempted to make some custom enemies:
These buddies are the Autector, Autclast, and Autool from Metroid Dread, which share some design traits with the Autrack, Autoad, and Autom from M2. I was curious how these would translate to the older style, so that was enough motivation for me to pixel them (also I wanted to see how much I could optimize the tile counts).
Once I shared them on the metconst Discord, however, someone there goaded me into submitting them to a contest he was running that was ending in just a couple days. Within the time allotted I got as far as making the metasprite definitions for the enemies, but frustrations related to the aforementioned tables prevented me from going much further (little things like “making hitboxes”, “writing AI”, and “writing a tutorial for how to insert the enemies into the game”).
Now actually adding these to the game should be much easier (not that I’ll necessarily get around to it soon).
Apparently, if you do a neutral spin jump (press forward+jump, then release forward within 5/6 frames) and hold up on the dpad, then you will fall at 1/4 of the normal rate. Pressing left or right (or letting go of up) breaks you out of this little hover.
I’m struggling to think of any application for this trick, aside from dealing with respawning blocks in some niche situations.
(This discovery elicited a “w h a t” from a current AM2R dev, and a “oh I already knew that” from someone I don’t know.)
Somewhat related to this, there is some vestigial code in several Samus movement functions that is supposed to allow her to jump while in acid. However, the flag the functions in question check (acidContactFlag) is never set because (a) it’s cleared every frame and (b) those functions perform Samus-BG collision detection after checking the acid flag. I attempted to hack this functionality back in, but the result feels really janky (mostly because you have to be in a falling state to initiate these jumps).
