DKC Croctopus Chase History

Croctopus Chase notes history, from the TAS' perspective:

First documentation of Split Up Glitch as well as bringing animals to other stages came from here: https://davidwonn.kontek.net/snes.html#D
Back then, the glitch was only known to be doable in Oil Drum Alley.
The split up method using a DK barrel was later discovered by Tjp, who did several videos on it starting with this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cY4oJEuPM4

When I was working on the 101% TAS with Arnethegreat, Arne and I discussed the possibility to use Expresso to clear the level. He was the main man behind it and did a couple of testruns of the stage, starting in about July 2007
Here is one of the earlier videos made of it: https://youtu.be/_WROaYt13G0

First off he/we had to determine if it was faster at all to do this, due to the long setup required for it. Though it was quickly quite apparent that it would save a lot of time, even for an unoptimised version.
This was also long before the 101% TAS had actually reached this level, while I TASed forward, he focused a bit on the stage.

Though we quickly found many different problems with TASing it, mainly because Expresso would be moving a lot faster than what the camera is moving, a lot of it therefore had to be done blind. I gave it a quick try, but it was simply too tedious to work with.

Arne then worked out a camera hack for me that I could use when TASing. Which he made a demonstration video of here on how to use, around December 2008: https://youtu.be/g2ZsGpkV2Do

Though even with Arne's hack, a lot of problems still existed. With the hack active, objects that normally wouldn't be spawned; due to them being off camera, were spawned and active. While recording, I would therefore take damage from enemies that were spawned, but when I replayed the TAS they weren't actually in my path. Another problem was lag that ocurred while recording due to there being enemies on the screen, though no lag when I replayed the same section, or that you get lag when replaying that did not exist when TASing. These things made it too difficult and annoying for me to work on and I decided that I would drop the project completely, which I made a note about when I uploaded the second 101% WIP on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDmOyJjvFps
(Though a bit rude when I said that "no one has been able to help", as Arne really did try, I just couldn't TAS under those conditions :D )

New discoveries made me restart the TAS from scratch, but I still knew that I would eventually get back to the level again and get stuck. I made a post about it at TASVideos, explaining the problems I had: https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/6?CurrentPage=8&Highlight=313724#313724

Then after my detailed post about the level here: https://tasvideos.org/Forum/Topics/6?CurrentPage=9&Highlight=419984#419984
Alyosha took a look at it and made a script (which is also posted in the topic) that would make things easier to TAS the level. It did however not fit my TASing style, I was still unable to do an optimised-enough TAS of it. Though thankfully, Alyosha was better at it, and he ended up TASing the whole stage for me. He was however not as familiar with optimising TASing for the game, so I'm certain there are several parts that could be improveable a bit, but I was too "lazy" to redo anything but the very end of the stage, left the rest of his work in the level unchanged