How to create the perfect speedrun - Tool-assisted speedrunning explained

have you ever wondered what the perfect speed one would look like if you made no mistakes if you were the luckiest possible and if you could have instant reflexes just how amazing would that be this is what tool assisted speed owners have done for years however it is one of the most widely misunderstood concepts in speedrunning and perhaps gaming as a whole let's see what it is how and why people do it and fear upselling the mystery behind tool assisted speed running first what is a tool-assisted speedrun a tool-assisted speedrun tasks or TAS for short is a set sequence of controller inputs that completes a task in a video game while optimizing for time this is a bit of a daunting definition so let's analyze it before we get to it though we need to distinguish between a regular and a tool-assisted speedrun a regular speedrun is a performance done in real time like a concert or a play a TAS is a creation polished over a long period of time like a painting or a sculpture now what does a set sequence of controller inputs mean think of it like a player piano player pianos use rolls of paper with holes that dictate which nodes to play at what time a task works exactly the same way passers write the sequence of button presses and feed it into the game using an emulator or a modified controller completing a task in a videogame is pretty straightforward it usually means beating the game but it can also be a specific level or an arbitrary objective sometimes the restriction is added to make it more interesting such as avoiding the use of the a button in a Mario game or never using any doors in the Zelda game finally optimizing for time is also straightforward the goal of a speedrun is to go as fast as possible so the same is true for tool assisted speedruns one thing to note is that tool assisted speedruns are a subset of a similar concept called tool-assisted superplay they're identical in nature but the super play category also considers high score runs glitz exhibitions and good old messing around we're gonna focus our attention on the speedruns but almost everything said here applies to tool-assisted superplay z-- in general what tools are involved one of the most misunderstood elements of tool assisted speedruns is the tools themselves there isn't a list of all the tools involved in making a task because anything can be used the essential ones are emulation safe States speed control and memory watch emulation is required to read or to say the sequence of inputs which a typical console can't do for this reason nearly all tasses are made using emulators a safe State is an emulator function that lets you take a snapshot of the current state of the game that you can load at any point later on this lets you go back and change your sequence of inputs at will correcting any mistakes along the way or testing various ways to approach a challenge to find the best solution speed control is key to go beyond human limitations when creating a task by controlling the speed of the game you can slow it down as much as you want most asses are made using the frame advance feature the game is paused and pressing a button advances it by one frame the smallest unit of time the game registers this way you can choose exactly which buttons you want to input at each individual frame thanks to frame advance you don't need to have amazing gameplay skills to make a good pass when combined with safe States it is an extremely powerful tool to have complete control over the game and figure out the most optimal way to beat it memory watch is a little more advanced it consists of monitoring the games memory to get precise readings of various game elements that are otherwise hard to measure exactly analyzing this information can be useful in many different ways you can look at the value for your character's horizontal speed and figure out the combination of inputs that maximizes that value you can look at the numbers that gave uses to simulate randomness and experiment with ways to manipulate it to get the luckiest results you can see which objects are loaded in the games memory and where they are stored and use that information to manipulate the game in all sorts of crazy ways there is almost no limit to what memory watch enables you to do if you how to use the information it provides but to make the best use out of it you need to have a much deeper understanding of the game's inner mechanics than the average player there are many other tools testers can use such as scripts that can find the best sequence of inputs through forcing all the possible combinations memory editors used to simulate theoretically achievable game states for testing purposes input editors that display sequences like a guitar hero or dense dense revolution chart for easy viewing and editing and put plugins that let you enter exact coordinates for control stick inputs for more precision and so on the main takeaway from this is that all the tools being used are only involved in the creation process of a task when the pass is being played back the only thing it does is follow the sequence of button presses that was created no external modification is done to the game to get it to behave the way it does in a test by hooking up the play back to the controller port of a console a task in the console verified this means that the sequence of inputs is fed into a physical console with an official copy of the game interpreting the inputs in real time passers use this process to prove that their sequence of inputs actually works in the real game but why would anyone subject themselves to the painstaking process that is making a test well there are five reasons one the first is fun if it's not fun why bother for people who enjoy problem-solving creating a test is a very fun experience watching a task that you spend hours to make being played back is extremely satisfying there's also a lot of effort that goes into making it as fun for the audience passers often try to show off funny or unexpected game behavior in their taxes to entertain viewers whenever possible the second reason is to find the perfect speed-run testing is a bit like trying to solve an extremely complicated puzzle and as few moves as possible this is usually a collective effort the entire community works together to find new ways to save time with the ultimate goal being perfection anyone can open an input file using an emulator making passes both easy to share and easy to verify the third one is to help the speed on community password has helped real-time speedrunners countless times over the years with discoveries like the flag bow glitch and Super Mario Brothers arbitrary code execution leading to credits warps in Super Mario Brothers 3 in Super Mario World Ganondorf in Ocarina of Time the perfect speedran of Drexler and dozens of others all of these tricks were first discovered with tool assistance and only through the work of dedicated testers where they eventually made humanly possible when it carefully crafted set up another reason is simply to learn making a test involves a lot of looking at a game's precise behavior and understanding how it interprets different scenarios the process of creating a test space you learn a lot about how a game works and why needless to say we love to learn how things work and video games are no exception finally a bit of a less common reason to test is competition full game testers are usually community projects but task competitions also exist in the typical event testers have a limited amount of time to produce a task with a specific set of goals and restrictions one of the most popular is the Super Mario 64 task competition which dates back to 2009 and is being held annually since 2015 [Music] now that we know exactly what tool assisted speedrun is let's have a look at the four most common misconceptions surrounding it first many people see testing as a form of cheating it's not cheating because it's not even trying to compete with regular speedruns so unless someone is trying to disguise a tas as a real time speedrun they're not trying to cheat however this is why speedruns and emulators are often subject to stricter rules to make sure they were done in real time without using any other tools second there is sometimes a timing discrepancy between tool-assisted in real time runs which leads people to incorrectly believe that a specific real time run is faster than the fasiq Riverland this happens because the main governing body of tool assisted speedruns past videos org has a standardized timing rule set that goes for nearly every single submitted tests while real time speedruns have a timing rule set unique to each game for a test timing starts when the console is powered on and it stops at the final controller input required to read the game for real-time runs most of them start timing either when selecting a new game in the main menu or when gaining control of a character since both of these points happen after the console is powered on a test will have an automatic disadvantage if both timing methods are compared directly real time runs usually stop timing at the point where the game is considered beaten typically it is the same as a test timing give or take a second or two but sometimes a game can reach a state where no controller input is required to finish beating it and it will play out by itself on the other hand a game can be considered beaten by real-time standards but there is still dialogue that needs to be cleared with a button press which makes a test timing and minutes after the real time run does another reason why timing discrepancies can happen is because a variable stored in static random-access memory or SRAM this is a little complicated so let me explain with an example Donkey Kong 64 lets you unlock extras like in multiplayer mode in the mystery menu by progressing through the single-player adventure in collecting items these are unlocked permanently and they can't be reverted back to their original state because of that there real time speedrun community decided that using those extras was fair game because everyone has them unlocked already they are stored on their cartridge in the games SRAM however by the TAS rules the game needs to start in a completely clean state which also means clean SRAM as a result the TAS of Donkey Kong 64 can't use the unlocked extras right away they do save so much time that it is still worth it to first unlock them and then to perform the glitches related to them to beat the game the extra time required to do that combined with the timing differences I already mentioned means that the TAS is slower than the real-time world record of course that doesn't mean it's actually played slower it simply means that the additional things counted in its timing amount for more than the time it saves over the real time runs the third misconception is that a TAS is a mathematically perfect speedrun that is not the case the ultimate goal is to create perfect speed-run but in nearly every case there is no way to prove that any particular test is perfect for example the no left plus for our TAS of Super Mario Brothers that I discussed in a previous video was improved by one frame on April 29th from four fifty four point two eight two two four fifty four point two six five generally speaking the more complex a game is the more unoptimized its TAS is the most famous counter example to this is Dragster which was mathematically proven by omnigamer to have an optimal time of five point 57 seconds finally passes are often set to be played perfectly by a computer or an AI that is simply not true while computers run the tools and the emulators used to make a test they are still created by humans artificial intelligence is nowhere near the level it would need to be at to solve videogames perfectly except the most basic ones in the past few years we've seen AI being used to try to beat video games such as set bangs Mario project which was eventually able to clear a stage in Super Mario World using machine learning however after dozens of generations who was not performing any better than an average human and definitely not as good as an experienced speedrunner let alone a tool-assisted run we might also think computers brute forced a perfect solution by testing every single combination until it finds the best one unfortunately that is not going to work and here's why let's imagine a very simple game that runs at 30 frames per second and that only has four different buttons that can be pressed left-right a and B this means that on each frame there are 16 different button combinations we can simplify it further by saying that in that game you can't press left and right at the same time which cuts four combinations to bring it down to twelve testing all twelve combinations on every frame should be pretty simple right well the problem is that the total number of combinations goes up exponentially on each frame after only one tenth of a second the number of combinations already at 1728 after one second it's 237 known aliens or 237 thousand billion billion billions after one minute the number is too large to even bother saying it calculating the perfect speed one with this method is never going to happen now there has been some work done for classes that involved brute forcing a solution but it was always limited to a very specific scenario that only allowed a few thousand possibilities usually by testing only one or two buttons at once and using a period of less than one second to keep the total amount of possibilities in a workable range this is how sock folders found the humanly possible flagpole glitch setup in Super Mario Brothers and the setup to quickly break the web in the DECA tree in ocarina of time beyond a few specific uses computers are no match against the creativity and ingenuity of humans when creating a tool-assisted speedrun the entire process of tool assisted speedrun is a manifestation of human nature when we see a puzzle we don't just try to solve it we try to find the best solution the most elegant solution the perfect solution perfection has motivated artists for centuries in the most creative ways and tool-assisted speed running is no exception it is just another aspect of our endless quest for perfection [Music] you

Channel: Bismuth

Views: 395,329

Rating: 4.9376945 out of 5

Keywords: Tool-assisted speedrunning, TAS, TASing, TASers, TASer, Tool-assisted, emulator, emulation, speedrun, speed, run, speedrunning, running, perfect, explained, explanation, what, how, why, tool-assisted superplay, superplay, glitch, cheat, hack, glitching, glitches, world, record, what is TAS, how to TAS, what is a TAS

Id: Ietk1-Wb7oY

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/5DSpence]

This is a great watch, even for those who are already familiar with TASing. Nice job!

[u/Baffan]

As usual, a brilliant video from Bismuth! <3

[u/DeRockProject]

I love TAS and fucking love you <3 <3 <3 everything i wanted to say about TAS is right here

[u/DogfishHeadBeer]

Really great video. I thought I knew a lot about Terry Adam Smith, but his technique is more impressive than I initially thought!