The History of Trackmania's Most Shortcut Track

this is f9 one of the official campaign tracks in trackmania nation's esports world cup a competitive formula racing game released in 2006. the timeline of track media games can get a little confusing but this game was nadeo's first big international hit trackmania nation's esports world cup featured online multiplayer in-game track building and replay editing tools and even global ranking leaderboards all for free which was a rare thing 15 years ago the game attracted millions of players to take to the international stadium and try their hands at racing for the fastest records two years later in 2008 nadea would polish the game even further and re-release it as the now infamous trackmania nations forever trackmania nation's esports world cup and trackmania nations forever are almost identical featuring very similar physics and graphics the biggest difference between them is the campaign tracks in each game trackmania nations forever has a campaign of 65 tracks but nation's esports world cup has a campaign of 121 tracks and one of these tracks is f9 where for the last 15 years players have battled to hold the world record the objective in any track mania game is to drive as fast as you possibly can to the finish line and compete for the top records on the leaderboards so it's essentially made for speedrunning competition there are individual leaderboards for each track in the game and on every leaderboard thousands of players have attempted to become the best over the years but f9 stands out as a particularly interesting track it has such an incredibly rich history of innovation and improvement because on this track there are seemingly no limits to how far players are willing to go in order to win welcome to the world record history of trakmania's f9 let's start by taking a look at the track the route on f9 is pretty simple consisting of only left turns and jumps that goes round and round in a spiral with increasingly higher speeds the formula for going fast on this track is having good speed management maximizing how much speed you're able to carry into each jump through each turn and after every landing if you go a little bit too fast you'll launch right off the track and if you slow down too much well you won't get a very fast time already in the early days the top players were tethering right at the edge of this limit and trying to push the track record as low as they could the first record ever uploaded to leaderboards was a 4608 set by the player iron dragons driven on the 27th of january 2006 the same day as the game released but this one was far from optimized on the release day the world record would be improved five more times down to a 44.79 driven by the player petit khan over the following two weeks the record would continue to drop lower and lower on the 7th of february 2006 the player xenon achieved a time of 43-29 this was a really strong record considering it was driven one and a half decades ago cenon's run had no big visible floss he had good racing lines and great speed management on every jump maintaining a lot of momentum after each landing and setting a very tough benchmark to beat for anyone who wanted the f9 record but sadly for xenon the record wouldn't stand for as long as it probably should have because only three months later the player kari would take the track and achieve a 4306 using a new trick that trick was to air brake on every single jump kari tapped the brake mid air which for whatever reason stops your car's rotation and it allowed khari to land perfectly flat on every jump building up much more speed throughout the race it's hard to imagine a time where the air brake was a revolutionary technique in trackmania as it now stands as one of the most fundamental tricks we know but players back in 2006 didn't have any guides or tutorials to go off of they had to figure this out on their own and kari managed to use the air brakes on f9 to great effect beating the world record by 2300 of a second kari wasn't done yet though he really liked the track f9 claiming it as his favorite in the campaign and over the course of the year 2006 he improved his own world record four more times down to a 42-53 doing the same strategy but with more refined racing lines throughout 2007 the record was improved a bit further by players like marvin dlg jerry and chinran but it wasn't until march of 2008 that f9 would get its first truly strong world record when jerry achieved a 42-31 even for today's standards this is a great time and it was driven 13 years ago jerry had impeccable speed on every jump on the track it should be noted that in the old track mania games you cannot afford to land on the grey border of the track known as the ramstein border if you do you'll get a so-called landing bug where there's a high probability of flipping upside down or losing all your speed and jerry was cutting each jump extremely close to the border taking the tightest possible lines and he beat the all-world record by 600 of a second in april of 2008 one month after jerry's record nadeo would release their brand new more polished trackmania game trackmania nations forever and most of the playerbase moved over to try it out the community at the time got the idea to recreate the campaign tracks from nations cswc in nations forever so that they could keep competing for the records on them in the new version and this idea is what gave birth to the tm and race campaign the tmn race campaign is a complete remake of the original eswc campaign tracks made in trakmania nations forever the idea of the campaign was to keep the track route the exact same while giving the tracks a fresh look with the new decoration blocks that were introduced in trackmania nations forever and it was here on tm and race f9 that the competition for the record would continue but it got off to a bit of a slow start after the tmn race campaign released the player baron would quickly achieve a 42 second run on tm race f9 but nobody could get close to the 42-31 achieved on the original track by jerry part of the reason why was that nadeo had slightly altered the physics in trackmania nations forever they made the formula car heavier which resulted in harder impact landings making it impossible to maintain as much speed after each jump as on the original track this left players feeling unsatisfied as they weren't able to match their records from the old game because of this and the fact that nations forever now had its own campaign of 65 new tracks neither tm and race f9 or the original f9 saw much action players were simply busy competing for other records at the time over the next few years nation's eswc would see less activity as a whole due to the game's star force drivers being incompatible with windows 7 so if you had a computer with any modern operating system you could no longer access nation's eswc every now and then there would be an occasional record improvement on tmn race f9 with a player shaving off a few hundredths but it would take until 2014 for the spark on f9 to be reignited that year the trackmania shortcut legend nino created a team called fastest way only their mission to shortcut as many official campaign tracks as possible at its inception the group consisted of nino and four other very dedicated trackmania shortcut players the group would instantly gain notoriety and status in the community as they were one of the first real shortcutting teams in the game the players in the team were not only great at discovering new shortcuts but they also had the patience and determination to grind the track together for hours on end until one of them successfully managed to pull it off after seeing what fastest way only were doing many players wanted to join the group and their recruitment rules were pretty straight forward the way to get accepted into fastest way only was by proving your skills and doing a new shortcut on an official campaign track that nobody else had done before you so naturally whenever a new shortcut idea was shared in the community a lot of players rushed to the track to try to be the first person to pull it off so they could become a fastest way only member in december of 2014 the player ors discovered a potential shortcut on f9 that caught the trackmania community's attention you see f9 only has two checkpoints one placed here after the first few jumps on the track and the other one here two turns later but there were huge portions of the track that had no checkpoints at all which meant that in theory they could be skipped horse's shortcut idea was to drive the first two checkpoints as normal and then on the big jump after attack point 2 he would take off at full speed to the left and skip one of the ramps in order to do this worst turn his car completely sideways on the jump so he could perform a trick called the bug slide when he landed as when you land at 90 degrees sideways and drift in track mania you can do a very sharp slide while preserving your speed you then instantly launch off the next ramp and try to land back on your wheels while maintaining enough speed to make the final jump directly to the finish road it was estimated that this approach could save upwards of 1 second if done well which in trackmania is a big deal but what if there was also another shortcut that could save even more time because amidst the hype around the or shortcut idea the player error discovered a shortcut that could shave off even more time if it were possible his idea was to drive to the second checkpoint as normal then make a u-turn gather speed and try to climb over the road border and drop directly into the finish which clearly was the shortest path to the finish line but was it actually possible the biggest problem with error shortcut idea was getting enough speed to clear the gap between the road and the finish mainly due to this booster after doing a u-turn in the checkpoint and driving the track in reverse the booster becomes an anti-booster that you cannot simply drive normally across however there is a trick in track mania called the anti-boost skip whereby driving with extreme precision it's possible to drive on the grey border in between the anti-booster and the wall without losing speed but even if you pulled off this trick and managed to perform a good wall climb the jump to the finish was questionable in order to clear that gap you needed to somehow generate more speed most players were convinced that it was impossible but error insisted that it could be done he kept trying the idea and on the 14th of december 2014 error surprised everyone when he uploaded this run to the leaderboards a 3742 with the u-turn shortcut at first people were extremely hyped to see such a big shortcut being done but when analyzing the replay file players discovered some strange anomalies first of all he had a very slow start losing almost a second to marvin up to the first checkpoint and then in the turn before the second checkpoint he drifted right into the wall seemingly without losing speed but the most absurd part of the run was the ending where error drove right across the anti-boosters without losing speed he was in fact gaining speed from it error claimed that this was a one in a million bug which allowed him to gain speed from anti-boosters and knowing how buggy track mania can be it sounded somewhat believable but after seeing the run some players checked the replay file in the in-game validation tool and discovered that despite the claim of a new bug the run wasn't legitimate the in-game validation tool checks whether or not a player's input matches their record trackmania's physics are 100 deterministic which means that if you do the exact same steering inputs the game will produce the exact same result the validation tool ran a simulation of errors inputs and the end result it got was completely different meaning that error must have modified trackmania's physics himself the run was promptly removed from the leaderboards and error later admitted to using a trackmania cheat client to achieve the run that allowed him to gain speed from driving across anti-boosters despite two big shortcut ideas being discovered the real world record on tmm race f9 was still a 42-48 driven the intended way by marvin but how about an even crazier shortcut idea you see around the same time nino the mastermind behind fastest way only discovered an absolutely wild shortcut approach on the track in 2008 when the tmn race campaign was created they used some of the new scenery blocks to give the tracks a fresh look and as it turns out this new scenery can be heavily exploited more specifically this airship what nino discovered is that you could take a wide line through the second checkpoint drift and then angle your car towards the left on the jump and then with a very specific speed you could land on the back of the airship and bug slide off of it to try to reach the finish road if possible this idea would likely save even more time than the oars shortcut jump but it was far more difficult the weird geometry of the airship block made it very difficult to bug slide on most of the time you would jump on the airship try to drift and nothing would happen or you'd crash right into the red fin at the back of it instead of launching off to its side and once in a blue moon when you finally launched off the distance you had to clear to land on the road looked absurd but maybe with a phenomenal bug slide someone could make it to the other side tmn race f9 now had three competing shortcut ideas the horse jump error's wall climb and nino's airship nosebug all tethering right at the limit of what was possible in the game and the race was on to see which one of these shortcuts would be done first but amidst the hype around all the shortcut ideas one player would first set a new normal way world record and you might have heard of him before it was none other than pablo gd who in january of 2015 drove a 42-32 on the track eating marvin by 1600 of a second and racing the bar just a little bit higher for anyone who wanted to beat it shortly thereafter players gathered on community servers to grind tiem and race f9 together both fastest way only members and aspiring shortcut players alike trying the idea that they deemed the most possible but after a few days and then a few weeks and several months of trying later nobody had succeeded most players had lost interest but fastest way only pushed onward still believing in their idea one and a half years would pass until the summer of 2016 where nino the team's leader decided that enough was enough he wanted to see the shortcut done once and for all so he opened a public server and put up a huge prize pool of the in-game currency coppers to whoever managed to set a new world record with a shortcut nino's online server had just one rule and it was that driving the normal way was forbidden if you finished a run the normal way you would be permanently banned from the server but apart from that you were free to shortcut the track however you'd like the community gathered on nino server to try to once and for all break the record and on the third day of the project perhaps surprisingly it was pablo gd who got this run [Music] a 4176 beating his own world record by over half a second finally at long last a shortcut had been proven to be possible on f9 and though the group had finally succeeded they weren't done yet pablo dd's success with the horse jump inspired many to try nino's airship nosebug and be the first person to set a world record with it but because pablo had gotten a great time with the horse jump the martin for error was much slimmer at this point it was no longer enough to meet the normal way record of 4232 you had to go up against 4176 which would prove to be a tall order the players grinding the airship shortcut eventually got many runs faster than the normally record but no one managed to beat pablo they knew that all that was missing was one clean landing after the nosebug and the record would be set in stone but somehow it just didn't happen the airship nosebug tended to produce really awkward landing angles and no one at the time managed to get it clean enough to beat 4176 it would take another nine months of tireless grinding by the shortcut players until finally on the 18th of march 2017 raiso got this run [Music] [Music] 41 35 a new world record with the airship nosebug with this run raiso could well deservedly join fastest way only after pulling off one of the most difficult shortcuts in the history of the game this run was the end result of over two years of trying by multiple players out of the thousands of attempts players had poured at the shortcut this was the one majestic flight that cut straight across f9 and landed cleanly on the other side saving four tenths of a second to most players this was it the ultimate f9 record perhaps there was still a little bit of room for improvement by executing the bug more cleanly but the consensus at the time was that nobody bothered to try it because it had taken so long to be done for the first time one year later near the end of 2018 fastest way only members ranked the top 50 shortcuts the team had ever done and the members ranked razor's f9 record a second place on the list it was a monumental record and nobody wanted to go up against it except for raiso himself raiso enjoyed playing the map and he knew that there was still a little bit of time to be saved so only a few days after the top 50 record list was published razer was playing the map and incredibly enough he managed to improve his own world record again down to a 41-15 in his new world record racer got a nosebug that landed much closer to the finish and he saved 20 hundredths of a second razo was just on another level on tm race f9 he had now done the nino airship shortcut twice before any other player could even do it once tmn race f9 had now been completely destroyed by two big shortcuts and for a long time it seemed like that was that but as more time passed some players started re-examining the third shortcut idea on f9 the error wall climb what if players in the past were too quick to disregard it as impossible in 2020 the two korean players heart attack and twins decided to try the error wall climb to see if there was any way to make it possible the first thing they did was modify the track to remove the booster completely and try to figure out if they could reach the finish and just like players before them had discovered the finish seemed to be just barely out of reach but then they had a bright idea because they were trying to wall climb on the tm and race version of f9 but in the older game trackmania nation's esports world cup the car is a little bit lighter than the nations forever and this not only might make the car jump higher but it would also allow you to climb the wall with more ease the original f9 leaderboards had basically been untouched for the past 12 years at this point marvin had gotten the world record back in 2013 but the game was largely a ghost town as nobody had computers that ran windows xp or windows vista the korean brothers heart attacking twins didn't have computers that old either but they thought of something clever and that is using a virtual machine virtual machines make it possible to simulate a version of windows inside of windows you can effectively run a computer inside of your computer early in 2020 heartache and twins managed to launch trackmania nation's esports world cup on a virtual machine running windows xp they now had access to the game which was a golden ticket to joining fastest way only but upon launching the track they noticed a big problem the frame rate was horrible virtual machines require a very powerful computer to run smoothly and they could only at best achieve 30 frames per second which made precise tricks such as the anti-booster skip and the wall climb even harder but despite that twins was really motivated to overcome the shortcut he played the track every day for seven to eight hours trying countless times to get past the anti-booster without losing speed just to have one chance at the ending wall climb as twins as a keyboard player it was all the more difficult to do the very quick taps to adjust this line to get past the anti-booster any small error would result in speed loss and make it impossible to reach the finish after four days of playing he'd gotten almost 100 antibodies skips but he had yet to get a launch into the finish all he needed was just that one run where everything worked and at long last he would be rewarded for his patience when on the 6th of april 2020 twins got this one on f9 [Music] [Music] 39.63 saving two and a half seconds over the previous world record by marvin and also beating the tm and race f9 record by raiso by over 1.5 seconds twins had just proven the final shortcut idea possible on f9 getting a new world record and successfully joining fastest way only to most people the track now seemed complete it was a perfect story with three out of three shortcuts being successfully done by the players due to their determination and their effort all the shortcuts were unique in their own way but with the shared goal of pushing the track record closer to perfection but what more could realistically be done on f9 now or perhaps that's the wrong question to ask because if you only think about what can realistically be done you won't end up thinking of something extraordinary all along the question that players have asked themselves on f9 is what more can unrealistically be done none of the shortcut ideas were seen as realistic when they were conceived of but because players tried them regardless they ended up raising the bar of the competition much higher in every competition it always takes someone to challenge what we currently believe is possible to advance us to a new level and the answer often lies in the unrealistic the player horse knew this when he discovered the first shortcut on f9 in 2014 and six years later he returned to the track with an even crazier idea on the 20th of may 2020 wars got this run on tiaman race f9 [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] 39.86 what wars had discovered is that it's possible to do a trick called the uber book landing sideways and drifting in trackmania will let you do a trick called the bug slide which is a very powerful drift with a lot of grip if you'll remember it was also used on the landing in horse's original shortcut jump from 2014 if you bug slide and crash into a wall and track mania it has some strange properties where for whatever reason the game miscalculates your speed and you can gain speed from the crash which in some cases will send you flying this is what's known as a uber bug and though the reason for why it happens isn't quite understood yet it's what sent wars flying across the map and onto the finish road the one problem with uber bugs is that they are completely uncontrollable the game can really launch you into any direction and since you have no air control in track mania you just have to hope to get sent towards where you want to go in his own words wars managed to get the flight to the finish road on his 10th uber bug overall this was an incredible breakthrough on f9 a ram flip into a sideways landing in order to bug slide into a uber bug to make a formula race car fly across the map absolutely stunning oars had raised the bar and this was the new level of competition speedrunning was brought to on f9 this new shortcut beautifully coincided with another breakthrough in the trackmania community when just a few days later the player's stingler developed a patch that made trackmania nation's esports world cup work on windows 7 8 and 10. thanks to him and his work a game that had been almost unplayable for the past decade now had its doors wide open and players rushed in to break any world records they could force decided to give his shortcut idea a shot on the original f9 and after playing the track for 20 hours he got this one [Music] 3882 beating twins by 0.8 seconds and achieving the world record on both versions of the track the fact that there was no airship on the original track made things a bit easier as it wouldn't be blocking your flight towards the finish and though wars now had achieved both world records the trajectories and the landings left some room for improvement and a little bit more to be desired whenever there's a uber bug shortcut on a trackmania map players often dream of the perfect uber just a launch up into the sky and dropping directly into the finish across such a long distance the chance to get sent perfectly into the finish is incredibly small but on f9 some players were determined to beat the odds throughout the tail end of 2020 the player monster was grinding tm and race f9 chasing the perfect uber bug and on the 7th of january 2021 monster got this run [Music] 37.49 improving the world record by 2.3 seconds and almost soaring directly into the finish on the original f9 heart attack was also grinding the uber bug and on the 30th of july 2021 heart attack got this one 3732 which brought the world records on f9 to where they stand as of today in theory there's still a few more seconds to be gained on both versions with a lower trajectory into the finishes but when looking back through the tracks history it's crazy to think that all these shortcuts existed on the same 40 second long track mania track and that in just seven years players have mastered all of them and for all we know perhaps there's an even faster shortcut out there but for that i guess we will just have to wait and see f9 as it stands is already one of trackmania's most shortcut tracks and a pristine example of how far thinking outside the box will get you and i hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about its world record history thanks for watching if you enjoyed this video then please consider subscribing to the channel so you never miss when i upload new content also a big thank you to my patrons for directly supporting my work i really appreciate all of your generosity if you'd like to become a patron there's a link in the description below but that's all for now i will see you all in the next video and until then have a good one [Music] you

Channel: Wirtual

Views: 2,780,060

Keywords: Trackmania, Speedrun, Speedrunning, History, World Record, WR Progression, Wirtual, Summoning Salt, Karl Jobst, Virtual, Trackmania World Record, Best, Shortcut, Skip, Glitch, Tournament, Biggest Shortcut, Hefest, WirtualTV, Wirtual Clips

Id: mfLRBS3RYW0

Length: 35min 31sec (2131 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/SatardeMental]

Nice video as always! Love those speedrunning documentaries.