User Files for Mario Party 8

This is my second movie of this game. Not a final product, but very close to it.

This is "Star Battle Arena", the solo mode of Mario Party 8 which leads to the game credits. You face an opponent in the six game boards, and then defeat Bowser in a final boss fight.

This improves my previous movie by close to twenty seconds from a faster King Boo board layout, better RNG manipulation and attempting to reduce lag. I made and used this Lua script to assist me in the RNG manipulation process, with great success!

Routing wise this is very close to my previous attempt, with the exception of King Boo's board which I was able to complete in two turns without needing a candy or a DK space.

By far King Boo's board has the biggest potential, with up to ten seconds to be saved with an ideal layout: one less coin block animation (4s), two less branches (2 x 1.5s), no shop on the way (1s) and at least one King Boo place two rooms away from the start instead of three (1s). The board layout is entirely dictated by RNG, so there is no telling if such a layout can be found in a reasonable time, or if it is obtainable at all. Plus for now the board layout must be checked manually, which is quite time consuming. My goal for this second attempt was to use no candy and no DK space, and in this regard it was successful.

Other than that I lost 1 frame compared to my planned route. In turn 2 of Shy Guy's board my opponent landed one space further than planned (7 frames slower). However it was a red space instead of a blue one, which saved 6 frames due to a shorter animation. While this was 1 frame slower than planned, I kept it because I was not able to manipulate RNG well enough in order to get a faster time locally with the planned strategy.

Although much better than in my first attempt, I feel that my RNG manipulation could still be a bit better in the last two boards. Though at this point it is ruled by my luck in my... RNG manipulation process...

Finally I am just getting started with lag management. I would say it was fine overall except in the final boss fight where I got nineteen additional lag frames compared to my first movie. So I will experiment and try to improve this part at the very least before submitting this movie.

EDIT: minor rewording

My first Lua script. Enjoy!

This is my first full-game movie on Dolphin, I hope that it syncs and that you will enjoy it!

This is "Star Battle Arena", the solo mode of Mario Party 8 which leads to the game credits. You face an opponent in the six game boards, and then defeat Bowser in a final boss fight. This RNG gauntlet has been quite a popular speedrunning category with 58 entrants on speedrun.com and a WR time in 50:15 by StillSoftSpoken. In contrast a TAS of this game mode is expected to take around 24 minutes.

This movie file took inspiration from the strategies used by both Mizumaririn in their WIP up to the end of King Boo's board and the full TAS run of 豪華客船乗組員 on Nicovideo (part 1 up to the end of King Boo's board, part 2 for the rest). Mizumaririn had the fastest strategies and times known at the time on the first three boards, while the Nicovideo TAS was the state of the art for the rest of the run. I also tested some creative strategies from Truepixel__'s playlist but none were actually faster (and it is a shame given my love for several of these strategies).

Routing wise this TAS reused the known fastest strategies on DK, Shy Guy and Bowser's boards. I brought minor improvements to the strategies in Goomba and Koopa's boards: respectively landing on a red space in turn 1 instead of a blue space (6 frames faster) and better coin route/hotel investment (roughly a couple seconds saved). A detailed description of the board routes is given in this Google doc and a detailed time breakdown of the movie is available in this Google spreadsheet.

I lost 21 frames compared to my planned route. In Goomba's board my opponent got 10 coins from their coin block instead of 5 (15 frames slower), and in turn 2 of Shy Guy's board I landed on a blue space instead of a red one (6 frames slower). Both inaccuracies were kept because I was not able to manipulate RNG well enough in order to get a faster time locally with the planned strategies.

My RNG manipulation was also not ideal, especially in the first two boards. This makes sense because this was my first experience with it and my progress is already noticeable by comparing the first half of this movie to its second half.

I intend to improve this in the future, notably with help from better RNG manipulation. I have ideas to automate and make my RNG manipulation process more efficient with Lua scripting.

EDIT: added encode link + minor rewording