Hi guys,
There is a thought that has occurred to me a few times but i don't have the TAS skills to test out the theory.
There is a glitch in the Japanese version of the game (this is the version used for speedrunnning) where you pause and exit course as mario is standing on a falling block (WF and LLL have blocks like this) you fall through the floor of the lobby and end up near the basement key door.
My question is whether this could be used to reroute the game slightly faster? After all you can now go from the lobby to the basement without walking through two doors using the blocks in WF.
I'm guessing this has already been thought of and dismissed but i don't think i've ever heard the idea discussed so i thought i'd share and see if anyone had ever done a comparison?
Here's a video of the glitch in question:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VX0WYWNvZlQ
What if you uploaded a TAS with a commentary track over it?
I always find it ironic whenever nintendo does this. I guess they forgot that their breakout game was a ripoff of king kong.
To actually answer your question, because BLJs gain speed exponentially (about a 50% increase per frame), it doesn't take very long to reach the maximum floating point value (about 3.402823 * 10^38). Starting at 16 speed and assuming an exact 50% increase every frame, it would take about 212 BLJs to reach the max float. With 1 BLJ every other frame, that's about 14 seconds. Most elevators aren't that long without pause-buffering, but you can do it non-tas on the BBH elevator. Just make sure to have fixed cam on, because it's easy to warp through to a PU at a lower speed, which will also cause a crash without fixed cam.
As for what actually happens when you max out the value, that depends on what you're playing on. On emulator (using a memory watching program) your speed becomes "Inf" as does your position, and you move to a PU-like spot, except you can't move horizontally because you can't increment infinity. On console, the game crashes, most likely because of a floating-point exception caused by the overflow. I don't know about VC.
That's really interesting, i recall crashing the game repeatedly when playing around with the BBH elevator BLJ, not sure if it was due to reaching infinite speed or just entering a parallel universe. No way to leverage it for anything useful though? that's a bummer.
question for the parallel universe wizards here.
using this technique is it possible to gain an infinite amount of speed? Im thinking once you enter the PUs you could keep hitting blj locations to keep increasing your speed. if that is the case, what happens when Mario's speed overflows? Does it just wrap back round to a negative number or does it have some weirder effect similar to how mario's lives get screwed up when you collect 1000 coins in the Japanese version?
That can happen (see 50 Star Room Stairs ABC strat), but there's a height limit of 239 units on the glitch, which isn't all that high.
Cool, didn't know that but glad to know I wasn't totally off base ;)
The only other suggestion I have is writing some sort of brute-force algorithm to fling mario at that spot at every possible speed and angle and record the results.
Wow, what a weird glitch. As others have said it looks to me like Mario intersects a bunch of different polygons at once and gets warped upwards. No idea why it shoots him upwards instead of downwards though.
I'm also reminded of the cannonless star glitch. Maybe mario is trying to grab the ledge of the platform and since there's no room there (the ledge is up against a wall) the game snaps him to the nearest grabbable ledge in vertical range (in this case the intersection of those two ceilings). Just some ideas.
Moat door skipped? Finally!
Another holy grail down... you guys are insane!
fun fact: I think i was the first to crash my console back in the day doing BLJs on elevators, funny that it would come back all these years later and be useful.
'uhm… I don’t think so… all of the crazy cloning glitches pannenkoek has uploaded actually do look impressive, a jumpkick from a previously already known OoB area isn’t'
People definitely tried to jump to the coin from the water in the past, but getting a jump out of the water is a frame-perfect jump, which wasn't known about until recently. Without that jump you can't reach the coin.
Looking forward to watching this when I've got a spare couple of hours. Just spotted that in the submission in the thanks section the link to my youtube channel is wrong (it links to diamondrazer). My actual channel is in my sig. I Don't mind if you leave it, just feels good to be on there ;)
I discovered this glitch around 2006 I think :)
I noticed that when chuckya grabs you in water you can briefly control an invisible mario, if you grab chuckya while controlling this invisible mario you end up invisible and you can drop chuckya as long as the game has 'unloaded' the mario and chuckya model (ie. you are far enough away)
Eru has achieved the same result by having chuckya grab mario then using BLJ speed to move far enough away from it so the models are unloaded. Notice Mario reappears when he gets near the start of the level.
link to my original video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRtl8w30bx4
using my method you can pretty much do the trick anywhere with chuckya and water (WDW, THI and TTM). Think I have some old videos of this, I might dig them out and put them on youtube.
I doubt this trick will be that useful to speed runners since you don't gain any advantage, you're just controlling an invisible version of normal mario. It's fun to see though, and you never know what tricks might evolve from it!
is talking to the bobomb required for speed, or will doing it before the trick make mario late for the platform? (or does it not matter? I'm not sure if the platform keeps moving during talk)
iirc you need to talk to the pink bob-omb to switch mario's direction from moving backwards to moving forwards. (so you can wall kick etc)
Not trying to fan the flames here but I have a question for all those in favour of entertainment over speed.
If you don't want to see the game pushed to the absolute limit of what is possible within the confines of its own code, then why bother with TASing at all? It seems bizarre to me that you would want to stop at an arbitrary point and say 'well, enough is enough'. As soon as you go beyond the capabilities of a human, then you've opened pandora's box.
I suppose this is where different catagories come in to play, so everyone can work within the same self-imposed limits.
I love super monkey ball! Can't wait to see this run guys whichever you decide to do.
This really takes me back, i've even got a few vids up on that site in the first post
http://server1.vortiginous.com/smb/compilations/
Oh and I forget exactly how it works but if you beat expert does is carry on straight to master? If so I'd love to see a run of expert and master combined.
Blech, registered my account. Wouldn't let me log in with the user/pass I gave. Have my password re-issued. Still won't work. Try to re-register. Claims my email address is already registered. :(
Anyone got an account they don't mind me logging in with?