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Introduction

A natural continuation of my work with off-road racing games (see: [5294] NES Ivan "Ironman" Stewart's Super Off Road by eien86 in 50:31.34), this time for its SNES port. I really enjoyed botting this game, with all its quirks.

Category Choice

This game contains 16 different tracks. Each of them contain 4 variations: forward/backwards direction, and with/without hay bales. This brings the total number of distinct races to 64, which cycle around once the race index goes back to zero. A detailed information can be found in this forum post.
In the SR leaderboards RTA players choose the faster goal of maximizing stats and getting 99 nitros. Since I had no problem with longer goals (because I am TASing), I chose instead to TAS all those 64 variations, getting all upgrades along the way. There is nothing else about this game, so this can be considered full completion.

Software + Hardware

Rom Information

  • Name: Super Off Road (USA)
  • ROM: Super Off Road (U) [!].smc
  • SHA1:1784C53C1B60047337109A5A9BF6A638D77B4219
  • MD5:0C1CC5369A31C988858A087598BAB9C3

Emulator

  • EmuHawk 2.10 (Core: Snes9x)

Routing Bot

  • Bot: JaffarPlus
  • Routing Core: QuickerSnes9x
  • Platform:
    • 2 x AMD Epyc 7742 (128 cores, 256 threads) + 384Gb RAM
    • Exploration Rate: 0.27 Mstates/s

Strategy

There is a money/shop component that requires some planning ahead. I decided to pursue engine performance first, as I reckon that would have the largest effect if bought early on. I'm pretty sure some deeper strategic planning might result in a faster movie, but we'll see if somebody wants to take that challenge.
Unlike the NES variant, bonuses (turbos and cash) are much harder to get along the way, so I decreased their importance in the bot's reward function. This movie goes for pure driving skills and only eventually got something along the way.


TASVideoAgent
They/Them
Moderator
Joined: 8/3/2004
Posts: 15774
Location: 127.0.0.1
This topic is for the purpose of discussing #9502: eien86's SNES Super Off Road "all tracks" in 42:32.00
Joined: 4/19/2019
Posts: 18
Congratulations on your TAS! I actually have a copy of pretty much the same set of notes about those races in this previous rejected TAS thread. Also, the distribution is actually uneven: you'd think you'd be racing through all 16 tracks four times through each of the four variants. That's almost correct, but one of the tracks is never driven through in the opposite direction. Subsequently...
  • Blaster is raced through five times, two of those in the opposite direction. The twelfth and 60th races are duplicates of each other if we only count the forward/backward/bales of hay variants (since this is forwards with bales of hay).
  • Cuttoff Pass is also raced through five times, two of those in the opposite direction. The 21st and 43rd races are duplicates of each other if we only count the forward/backward/bales of hay variants (since this is forwards without bales of hay).
  • Boulder Hill is never driven in the opposite direction, and thus is only used twice: once with bales of hay, and once without bales of hay.
Twisted_Eye
He/Him
Active player (418)
Joined: 10/17/2005
Posts: 642
Location: Seattle, WA
What does "Frictionless" mean in your YouTube encode's title? Is that why your truck is going so unusually fast or is this just a natural quirk of the game when played perfectly?
eien86
He/Him
Judge, Expert player (2005)
Joined: 3/21/2021
Posts: 279
Location: Switzerland
Twisted_Eye wrote:
What does "Frictionless" mean in your YouTube encode's title? Is that why your truck is going so unusually fast or is this just a natural quirk of the game when played perfectly?
Lol, it was a copy&paste mistake from my previous YouTube upload. I'll remove it

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