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Ramzi, this has been researched for five years, and the entire game has been decompiled in that time. Everything you can think of has likely been tested extensively. I'd strongly suggest joining the SM64 server (which has a channel specicially for this topic) if you want to discuss this further, because arguing with the experts here is going to get absolutely nowhere.
https://discord.gg/ECskvyF
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Congrats everyone! This was a ton of fun, and in fact the first DTC where every team finished :)
A lot of the levels we were beaten on had completely different routes, so I'm very interested in investigating those further and trying to cut the final time down even more!
And here's the RAM watch we used, with subpixels and speed for the players, and subpixels for all the bugs. Also has a few other random things thrown in that weren't too useful: http://tasvideos.org/userfiles/info/66486917398392995
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Sharkey91 wrote:
Also, The Secret under the Moat is faster as Mario (by clipping inside the black brick)
To clarify: three months ago Jordan Raugutt (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgrETgba3PsvDva9EqMfS3w) made the SM64DS community aware of a pause clipping glitch. In some courses the camera will display a zoomed out view when you pause, and this will unload certain objects very briefly, giving you enough time to clip inside. In the 150 Star TAS this will be used for the black brick at the entrance to The Secret under the Moat, as well as the cannon in Whomp's Fortress.
Explanation video:
Link to video
Now for some other information about the 150 Star TAS. Since the summer, Adeal and Migu joined the project, so there are four of us working on it. We've been focused on lots of different tests, mainly route tests: even before figuring out the Wario Early route we'd already made some changes.
Sharkey91 wrote:
Many tests have been done in SL and TTM, and the route is now cooler with even more star cancels.
There was another recent discovery back in August that makes this possible. You may remember that previously, a star cancel in Snowman's Land required a special setup with an 100 coin star:
Link to video
For loading zones that have a slow white fade, just licking a star as you enter them isn't enough, because the celebration will interrupt the loading zone. That doesn't happen with the other type of loading zone that has a quick black fade (like the SSL loading zone used for the star cancel in the Any% TAS). So the solution for the slow loading zones was to regain tangibility and control using a 100 coin star, then touch the star after the transition had begun. But it turned out that regaining control is actually simpler to achieve than we thought. Sharkey found that by simply swallowing something, such as a coin, you get the same effect:
Link to video
This means that a star cancel is now possible in TTM, and SL will use more than one!
Link to videoLink to video
There's one other thing worth mentioning. Over the past couple of years we have been doing a lot of research and testing to try and determine whether Bob-omb Battlefield is faster as Yoshi or as Mario: they both have their advantages. The main thing being tested was the 100 coin star. For a very long time we were combining it with the red coin star as Mario (latest version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cz0i0IOJgI). At the start of 2017 I figured out a Yoshi route that was a similar speed, and this is when the uncertainty began. Adeal also recently tested combining the 100 coin star with Footrace with Koopa the Quick (latest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sp_NFdE-zSI). However, he didn't beat the new and improved Yoshi version I worked on over the summer that utilises hyperspeed. So 100 coins combined with red coins as Yoshi is confirmed to be fastest, and we can finally say that Bob-omb Battlefield will be completed as Yoshi!
Link to video
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It's great to finally see this TAS done! Congrats to all of the authors on their hard work.
The category justification is completely reasonable and I think it's the best showcase of this game possible. Yes vote :)
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PikachuMan wrote:
Thanks to Pannenkoek2012 for coming up with the idea in the first place.
SM64's A Button Challenge began long before pannenkoek's involvement: http://www.curtisbright.com/sm64/abc/
He was a big inspiration to me though, along with most likely everyone else who has worked on the B Button Challenge.
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It's great to see this run come to fruition. I had extremely little involvement with it and was waiting along with everyone else, and I'm glad it met my expectations! I enjoyed the extremely creative route the most out of everything.
thatguy wrote:
Not sure whether it's publishable, though. Super Mario Bros has a no-B-button movie, largely because this was thought to be impossible for the longest time, and it relies on TAS-only tricks. I'm not sure either of these things are true for this game, though I don't know too much of the background, so feel free to correct me.
Beating the game in 0 B presses was not possible until mid 2016, because of Bowser in the Sky.
First, 0.5 B presses was figured out by Josh65536: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuMhuIDyvEg
Then I realised that with the different bounce mechanics in the U 1.0 version, using essentially the same strat meant no B presses for the whole game was possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vaKIx2GwNw
Nobody has yet managed to complete the game in 0 B presses in real-time, the main obstacle of course being BitS. Getting 50 stars is feasible but humans would take a much slower route.
I think there should be no issue with accepting this run to Moons if the entertainment value is judged to be sufficient, which I believe it is, apart from one detail: the credits sequence is not fully completed. Beating the game as Yoshi, which is necessary to complete this challenge, causes you to die near the end of the credits. I know glitched endings are generally looked down upon here at TASVideos, especially in game end glitch TASes where they can be avoided, but I hope it can be overlooked in this movie given there is absolutely no workaround. This is one of the most interesting challenge categories for SM64DS and it showcases a completely different approach to any other, so I'd love to see it published.
(Note: I've been added as editor and I'm going to add some information about why the U 1.0 version is necessary, why the end of the credits isn't reached, etc, tomorrow the day after tomorrow.)
Are these all going to be changed then? Many of them have no branch.
I think trying to label uncommon major skips explicitly rather than using a generic "major skip glitch" label (akin to the current "game end glitch", "warp glitch", etc, labels) is detrimental to the site. When a run uses several different major skips this will get out of hand and lead to a complete lack of clarity. For example, if [3497] PSX Crash Bandicoot: Warped "item glitch, gate clip" by pirohiko in 05:40.77 was obsoleted using a new major glitch, maybe even twice, would it end up with four labels? Even the current name seems almost as bad as the example quoted in the first post.
Publisher Guidelines wrote:
Avoid more than two goals in the label. All the extra conditions can instead be put into movie description.
This rule would seem to mitigate the problem slightly, but then you have to decide which of the major skip glitches are worth mentioning. The biggest ones? The most recent ones? Even determining the biggest or second-biggest could be difficult and subjective, depending on the structure of the game.
In SM64DS, the biggest skip is clearly the endless stairs skip, as 80 stars are required otherwise. However, all of the five movies but one have notable route changes due to new skips. And even the first movie included other major skips that made the run 14 instead of 40 minutes long, the second-biggest being 50 star door skip, then 30 star door skip, then moat skip... if the aim is to differentiate notable route changes by marking the skips that cut a large portion of the run, this seems like it will result in a complete mess. The current movie might be "endless stairs skip, 50 star door skip, 8 star door skip, moat skip, 2nd key door skip", as without a single one of these skips the run would be over 10% longer, but this still doesn't make clear that a completely different method of the 2nd key door skip was used between the last two movies. Then there's the improvement being worked on which uses generally the same route but a different method for the endless stairs skip, resulting in a notable timesave.
I wouldn't expect the actual label to end up this complex, but there would need to be subjective decisions of which skips are the most important to limit the name down to two skips. And no, a name such as "3 Star" wouldn't be ideal, given the unintuitive improvement from 1 Star to 3 Star, along with the notable improvements between the last two movies despite them both getting 3 stars. The branch name chosen might have skips moving in and out of it between movies based on the combination of other skips used, and it wouldn't help understand the improvement, instead creating clutter and confusion.
To summarise, I think this push to improve the branch names will have the opposite effect when applied to uncommon major skip glitches, so I propose a generic "major skip glitch" label to alleviate this issue. I do appreciate the effort to fix branch names, but creating unique names for major skip glitches in hundreds of different games seems like the wrong way to go about it.
P.S. This "major skip glitch" label could be an optional choice depending on author/staff preference, or only used if there would be 2+ or 3+ glitches in the label. It could also replace some of the common major skip labels currently used: the details aren't final. But I think for games where it is difficult and annoying to accurately reflect the contents of a major skip glitch run by putting specific skip names in the label, such as SM64DS, the option of a generic name would be beneficial, so I hope this suggestion is considered.
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Spot cases where some rare condition is used, and a new branch is made out of that. If that condition is used the same way in some other games, but is still very rare, each run that uses it for a different branch must be labeled.
If it's a "game-breaking glitch", the label must be "X glitch". If the rare condition is still used in most runs of some game (like BLJ in SM64), the run that avoids it should be 'no X".
After looking over this more, especially the quote above, I think that the current SM64DS movies should remain as the trunk branch. Use of major skips is what will be seen in the majority of movies, with the rare condition being to limit their use. So the fastest completion remains the trunk, 80 Star would be "80 Star, No Castle OoB" or a similar variant like No Castle Skips or No Overworld Skips, and 150 Star would be "150 Star". Any other goal would be "<goal>" or "<goal>, No Castle OoB", though another goal restricting castle OoB is very unlikely. Potential goals for the future are "B Button Challenge", "Best Ending" or "Maximum Coins", all of which would not restrict castle skips, consolidating my point that restricting castle skips is the rare condition. Hope I've understood that right, and if I have then nothing needs changed.
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Simply linking to the new guidelines does not make it clear how they've changed. Even looking through the page history, both the new and old versions are fairly wordy, and structured differently, so an explanation of the goal of this tidy-up would be appreciated. Only including the new goal names in this thread didn't help with comprehension either. I'll leave comments on branch names for SM64DS until after there's more clarification.
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jlun2 wrote:
1. What versions should the run be done on now?
2. If you were to beat the game up to the UFO battle at the Princess Shroob statue, and then went back outside the castle to play the game's story "normally", would it allow you?
3. With every area before the desert out of the way, any more other potential skips?
4. How viable is it in real time? Not just the execution, but the final fights due to severe underleveled.
1. For TAS and RTA, E/J is faster than U. When it was only Gate Skip and the desert still needed done, Migu said the timesave of U had been reduced to only a minute for TAS. With Baby Spin Skip the extra health for the final boss is an even bigger factor now, and the only U exclusive skips left that haven't been obsoleted by these new skips are minor (it's only stuff in Yoshi's Island).
2. I believe so, but that has not been tested specifically. Migu was saying it seems you can do stuff out of order, and a routing idea for a potential All Bosses category is doing Gate Skip straight after getting ball to grab some items.
3. I'm guessing you mean after the desert. There are still some potential skips: using top screen storage it might be possible to trigger the final Yoshi's Island cutscene early, skipping the entire area, but not with current knowledge. Some additional clips in Shroob Castle could also save a couple of minutes. The amount of potential skips for Any% is pretty diminished though, every skip in this document (https://docs.google.com/document/d/17U8ZGFvvhP74TDrUWvLMq4yO-y2Lix52QAHWMbsHbrk/edit) made a couple of weeks ago is now irrelevant lol.
4. There will be detours in the castle to grab items, and likely some grinding for a couple of levels. Snoion said he thinks 2:40 will be an amazing time, but no routes have been fully tested yet.
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andypanther wrote:
Could someone update the first link to the TASes of the original game, to include the most recent 0 Star?
Additionally, the screenshot is not HD. The one within the submission (http://i.imgur.com/8i0yzpx.png) is better quality, taken with a variant of the X432R build of DeSmuME. Retaking the screenshot at a higher resolution or simply using the one we took would be appreciated.
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Could it be possible to collect the red coins and press the ! switch, do a BLJ on the elevators to get enough speed for Moat Skip, hit the death barrier, and then use PU movement to hit the star? Not sure if this would kill your speed with no way to prevent it, or if the idea is in any way feasible, but if it did somehow work I'd think it would be the ideal start to the 120 Star TAS.
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Awesome run, congrats on finishing! Well worth the wait :)
I would have thought it was possible to reach PU speed somewhere in BitS and do an OJ straight to the pipe, but I guess not.
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Link to video
New glitch I found yesterday makes this possible. May also save time in the TAS from faster Star Cancels in THI and SSL. Also allows Timestop in more courses. The glitch I found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45ahej0bE9k
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