I'd like to tell you about my failures in TASing this game. After all, negative experience is also experience.
Settings:
- Speed Units = km/h - for better comparison with speedruns
- Transmission = Manual.
Automatic one switches gears too early. As a result, you car drives slower.
- Stability control (SC) = Off.
When SC is On, your car is more sticky to the ground which affect both your throttling (speed gaining) and steering a little. As a result, your car moves slower by 1-2%.
When SC is Off, the steering a little more slippery, especially when you drive over sidewalks/pavements.
I feel like all it does is tweak the gravity for your car.
Known speedrun tricks:
Double steering (DS) -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0bKpCz7GOk
Double tapping (DT) -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMGFfoUwtaQ
Both techniques are used to make the car enter the drifting without major speed looses, which results in covering the turning sections much faster.
Why I dropped it so quick?
I have been meshing input for 3 hours to perform a trick to cover the first turn of the Tutorial Race (the very 1st race in the game) faster and didn't get any luck. I am shocked how easily speedruns utilize these tricks!! I even downloaded one of the speedrun videos, copy-pasted its input frame-by-frame and still failed to perform DT. No luck with DS too.
I have major doubts that even if you manage to perform any of them, it won't be easy to adapt it to your case to complete your section faster.
I can assume stable 60 FPS of PC version helps doing that or maybe some plugins I'm not aware of. GC runs at 25-50 FPS depending on the render state, but I'm sure it still should be possible.
Global TAS problems
- If for most games RTA timings can be relatively easily beaten by slow-motion runs, let alone frame-by-frame building, NFS: Underground is one of the hardest ones to do so. It's gonna be cumbersome to achieve "Beats all known RTA records" goal.
- The game is very long and tedious. Any person, except for some special hyper-patient individual, will go nuts spending years to compose an acceptable 4 hours of input to beat the game.
- Even if TAS bots become capable of Dolphin input bruteforcing, they will have to an extremely big amount of work, despite the fact that input variations can be narrowed down very much.
P.S: yeah, no input file this time. I made first 10 secs of the 1st race, but it shows nothing useful, since I didn't manage to perform a trick at least somehow.
