The Perfect Mario Kart Speedrun Explained

it's 1997. Mario Kart 64 has just been released and your dad is taking you to Blockbuster to rent a new game you're ecstatic when you arrive and see it's on the shelf and when you get home you fire it up on the living room TV but to your dismay you weren't the first to rent it someone else had the game first and they set an unbeatable record of 100th of a second in today's video we'll be going over the progression of the Yoshi Valley shortcut from its first discovery just two months after the game's release to the current day strategy that can set a perfect record of just 100th of a second please remember to rewind your VHS tapes before returning them and I hope you enjoy today's video Yoshi's Valley isn't your typical course it's actually an anomaly the other 15 courses follow a single path around the track with a few minor deviations and have a UI element that depict each character's General position and ranking in the current race Yoshi's Valley throws both of those conventions out the window offering multiple paths for players to take along with obscuring the current rank of each character through the entire race when it comes to beating your friends there is one path that is the fastest with speedrunners taking left right then left turns to arrive at the path leading back to the Finish Line there is a hairpin turn you can jump over to save some time but this is only useful on non-shortcut attempts as the first shortcut doesn't even leave the starting area so without further Ado let's rewind to April 1997. in the 90s a player named David Wan would maintain a website describing glitches in various games he had found a number of Skips in Mario Kart 64 and Yoshi's Valley wouldn't be an exception one thing you might notice about the track is that the leftmost path is adjacent to the starting line and Juan had the idea to try and jump the gap for a quick shortcut the finish line is elevated over the rest of the track so this jump did look possible but after a couple of attempts Juan realized it wasn't going to be easy you need to time it so you shroom and jump just as you approach the edge of the slope otherwise you'll crash into the fence which is impossible to get over with a normal jump but Juan was undeterred and he kept trying after a few failed attempts something very bizarre happened he landed at the bottom of the valley and when lakitu reset him he was in front of the Finish Line except he was credited for a full lap he wasn't sure what happened but after a few more hours of testing he was able to recreate it all he knew was that you had to jump from in front of the finish line and aim for a certain part of the wall and with a little luck you'd get placed down and be given credit for a full lap back in the 90s nobody knew why this worked but it's now 2023 and we have a better understanding of how Labs work get your scuba gear on because it's time for a deep dive every track in the game is divided into sections that are roughly 1 000 units in length with each having a unique path marker and when you cross from one section to the next the game updates your marker to get credit for a lap you need to drive at least 20 path markers before the game will allow it to be counted and then cross from behind the finish line to the front of it there are a few other checks but we'll cover those later as they aren't relevant for understanding this skip in this shortcut you're getting to the path marker on the other side of the canyon which is a marker greater than 20 you're then pushed left from hitting the wall which gets you behind the Finish Line when lackey2 places you back down you're now in front of the line which means you satisfied the conditions for a lap completion the path marker feature is what the majority of shortcuts are exploiting and it's incredible that back in the 90s before this was understood so many shortcuts were being found that took advantage of it so what does this mean for Yoshi's Valley when Juan first discovered covered this he completed a lap time of 9.3 seconds and sent an email to the early Community describing how to do the shortcut as this was well before video was easy to attach over the Internet it took almost a year before someone would lower the record but Kevin Booth an early Mario Kart Champion would knock happy second off the time the three lap would adopt this strategy for every lap and there's not much to say about it other than it was grinded to frame perfect optimization over 25 years with the record currently being shared by three players for the fast lap Runners would grind out lower times but in 1999 a new setup would be discovered instead of jumping off the hill at the beginning players would drive the entire way around the track and stop as they came back to the starting area once here they would line up for a jump where they didn't have to get over the fence but instead went behind it they would drive off the edge on a specific line and on the way to the bottom cross the finish line to complete the lab which happens because the Finish Line doesn't just exist between the posts it extends in both directions for a very large distance the reason you don't complete laps when driving through tracks that cross the line multiple times like on Mario stadium is due to the Finish Line not being active if you're more than 1 000 units away from it with this new method the first lap is satisfied before you hit the ground Lackey 2 then comes to pick you up and due to a special interaction with the out of bounds floor the game sets your path marker to zero the reason this happens is because the out of bounds floor sits in the FF section of memory so the game reads it as zero for purposes of of assigning a section number which coincidentally it interprets as being greater than 20. Lackey 2 then sets you down behind the finish line which means all that's left to do is finish the race since this version doesn't Grant an instant lab so players will hit all of their shrooms and take a direct line across the grass since this is the shortest distance to the Finish Line to demonstrate how much time is lost to falling and getting picked up in the first method here's a direct comparison completing the lap on the fall to the bottom saves enough time that even having to drive a short distance is more efficient than waiting to be placed for an instant lap Alex penith would set a time of 752 that stood for three years before miles buckram would tie it then lower it with the two battling for the record until October 1st 2004 when miles would go on an absolute Terror and set three records in a single day arriving at a 7 40 flat since this iteration of the skip still spends a lot of time getting picked up by lakitu there isn't a lot you can optimize the line to jump behind the fence is relatively constant with virtually no room for improvement leaving the short driving section for optimizations which means there wasn't much else to be improved for this strategy aside from a few frames the fast lap would see an improvement however in fact it came a lot sooner than anyone thought because after miles lowered the record on October 1st the very next day pennev revealed the Strat that saved a second and a half if jumping over the fence from the start of the finish line costs time due to waiting on lakitu to place you down and the second method had time to optimize from placing you further away from the Finish Line then a strat where you take the best part of both seems like a Natural Evolution this new setup doesn't require driving around the track on the first lap instead it involves something I previously said was impossible jumping over the fence without using the slope players during this period did think it was impossible to jump the fence normally but like all things in Mario Kart 64 impossible is just a suggestion under normal circumstances the fence on Yoshi's Valley is too high to get over with a standard jump as it doesn't have enough height to clear the hitbox but there is one exception to this rule if you press jump on the frame after you collide with the fence it's possible to clear it entirely this is because of a mechanic players call the large bounce when you approach an object it's possible that you'll be slightly inside of it due to how the game calculates your position if you're more than 1.7 units inside of the object the game ejects You by adding a force so that you don't continue traveling through it in the case of the Yoshi Valley Fence you clip into it on one frame so the game pushes you out on the next but if you hit a jump when this force is applied some of it is added to the jump allowing you to get more height than normal so if the fence jump possible what did the shortcut look like you'll drive around the track so you can do the setup at the end of lap one but this time you get closer to the finish line which updates your path marker so lakitu will set you down a lot closer in fact you're so close that a single shroom will get you across the line for a lap time under 6 seconds this is a very fast lab and there's not much room for improvement as the actual driving that matters is hitting the shroom on the first possible frame when lackey2 sets you down but you may have noticed that the timer for some players was very High when they started the setup for the lab there's no way it took nine minutes to drive the first lap so what's going on back in 2005 Martin McMullen and some other players would notice that the game's timer started acting weird the longer it ran in the game notable for speedrunners is that it would actually round down the hundredth position favorably if you waited long enough get your scuba gear back on it's time for another Deep dive when it comes to lap times there are two things that need to be understood the display timer itself and the math done under the hood that makes it work like everything in Mario Kart it's not as simple as starting a stopwatch and observing the lap time at completion as the game runs in frames so let's start with what's happening under the hood the game released with two versions the ntsc version in North America and pal for everywhere else there is a major difference between the two as ntsc runs at 30 frames per second with pal running at 25. so there's a big Advantage from running on pal due to it being easier to take precise race lines when it comes to the timer this means each version needs a different value to increment the timer by since if you use the same value each timer will arrive at a different number if you run them for one second due to the different frame rates to solve this problem the developers hard-coded a value into each game for ntsc it's this and for pal it's this if you divide the pal value by the ntsc value you'll get this number which is how much faster the clock increments in the pal version of the game and is also the conversion rate you can use for converting a time from pal to ntsc and vice versa the timer explanation should end here but due to how the game was coded things unfortunately can't be that simple it stores the race timer in memory as a single Precision floating Point number all this means is that the value can have a range between 340 and negative 117 Keen undecilian this is incredibly large but to make things even more difficult every frame the game reads this timer from memory it then converts it to a double Precision floating Point number which has an even greater range then adds the increment value based on what version you're playing on before it converts it back to a single Precision float and stores it back in memory this process of converting the number between two different levels of precision causes some discrepancies to arise due to how the numbers are stored in memory the conversion rate has an exponent of negative six and is stored as a single Precision floating Point number which looks like this in binary code while a lap time of 64 seconds has an exponent of positive 6 and is stored as a double precise floating Point number with this value in binary in order for these two numbers to be computed the conversion rate needs to have the numbers after the decimal shifted 12 places so that its length matches that of the internal timer during this process those 12 digits of precision are lost and need to be rounded so while a straight up calculation would give this number instead due to the rounding we get this number this number rounded up which means that the display timer can end up showing a lap time slightly higher than what was driven if you drive the lap after a certain number of seconds have elapsed to allow the rounding error to creep in but why would speedrunners wait to complete a lap if it adds time that's because like twitch subscriptions the timer splits two ways when the timer hits 128 elapsed seconds the exponent of the sum's float representation becomes seven so the timer increment value now needs to be shifted 13 digits to the right instead of 12. this causes the calculation to round down because there is no longer a leading one in the Lost digits so the game starts to add this number every frame instead that's a lot of math and not much in the way of visuals to help so here's everything in graph form give even an ntsc lap time of 40 seconds we can see how the game will round the time based on when the lap was started with laps rounding down to 39.99 if the lap is started after 128 seconds if you let the timer count for even longer durations before starting a lap some very bizarre things can happen like a 40 second lap time getting rounded to 75 seconds if the lap start time is after 74 hours have elapsed and lap times can even round to zero if the lap start time is after 4 days have passed on the timer bottom line the timer becomes more broken from rounding error the longer it runs for this reason there are rules on how long you can wait before starting a lab but even with these restrictions minor errors can creep in on Long three lap tracks such as Wario stadium and rainbow road but this was only half of the reason we still need to look at the display timer itself if you advance the timer frame by frame you'll notice that it only ever shows three different value use in the hundredths position but final lap times can show all numbers between 1 and 9 so what gives As you move through the course the game is constantly calculating where your card is on the current frame and where it expects it to be based on your speed for the next frame and then moves you accordingly when it comes to the Finish Line the same concept is applied but with more scrutiny the y coordinate of the card which in the game world is the coordinate that is perpendicular to the Finish Line is tracked such that the frame before you cross the finish line and the frame you're crossing the Finish Line are both saved in memory for simplicity's sake which seems counter-intuitive given everything else we've covered the game assumes that you're traveling the same speed on both frames so let's say it determines based on your speed that you'll cross the line three quarters of the way through the frame it then subtracts a quarter of a frame from the internal timer's current value which is a floating Point number and saves that as the time for the lap completion to get it to the display timer it takes the value of that number let's say it's this for example multiplies it by 100 and then rounds it down to a whole number so your lap time would be 137.48 back in the mid-2000s speedrunners didn't have this information as it wouldn't be compiled until 2014 by solely they did know that weird things happened after enough time passed but they weren't intentionally waiting for good time around him they just took that long to set up an attempt but it was a good spot to segue into the timer since it does play a role in later shortcuts after it was discovered in 2004 it would be lowered to a 582 by miles before it was dropped to a 578 by Ben Miller this would be tied by vaj Miles and Carlo over the next five years the lap was just that good the room for improvement was incredibly small a task was created for the fast lap with the time being a 575 so players assumed this was the limit and through the next 11 years a fair number of Runners would tie the Tass but but a Time save of a single hundredth of a second was possible players had been holding a from a dead start on the previous attempts but there was a technique where you triple tap the a button by holding and releasing it for the first four frames then holding it on the fifth to gain more speed than a straight hold the tasks in the early 2010s wasn't that precise so a 575 was assumed to be the limit but with a triple tap you could get a time of 574 and that's just what Abney did on August 25th 2021 Alec hounds would tie this time just a week later with the two appearing to be co-record holders for the rest of Eternity Yoshi's Valley for all intents and purposes was perfected it looked like 574 was the absolute maximum for this track but two months later 464 dropped a task showing a new lab skip the skip takes advantage of some Concepts we covered earlier so here's a quick refresher to complete a lap you must cross from behind the finish line to the front of it the finish line is only active when you're within 1000 units from its Center you need to have reached a section marker of 20 or higher and the Finish Line extends Beyond its visual representation in the game for a very long distance for this new method it's best to visualize the distance requirement as a sphere that is centered on the finish line or saw that the sphere was very close to the edge of the left path where the other shortcuts took place which is why the previous skips worked players would leave the sphere hit the wall in front of the finish line and enable A New Path marker bounce left from the hit so you're now behind the Finish Line while it's inactive then have lakitu place them inside the sphere and cross the finish finish line for a lab the issue with the old skip was that you need to fall to the bottom of the valley and get picked up by lakitu which takes time so Forrest figured out a way to trigger the lap on the way down he theorized that if you could cross the line backwards while outside of the sphere then bounce to the right to re-enter the sphere and cross over the finish line that you could trigger a lap complete but there was one issue hitting the wall always sent you to the left so getting sent right didn't appear to be possible however there was one piece of wall that did send you to the right when you crash into it but it was almost entirely in front of the finish line so you wouldn't be able to satisfy the requirement of being behind the Finish Line while outside of the sphere luckily Forrest also discovered that this right bouncing piece of wall had a section near the top that was located behind the finish line but this posed its own problems the part of this polygon you need to hit is barely behind the finish line so after you hit it there's a good chance you cross the finish line before entering the sphere As you move up the wall the right bounce section gets a little bit wider which does allow you to exit the sphere behind the line and get pushed back into the sphere to cross the line but this spot is very close to the top of the wall and getting the required amount of height and speed to cover the Distance by jumping the fence wasn't possible all hope wasn't lost however weatherton had proved that it was possible to do this shortcut in 150 cc with the speed boost from a star combined with a mushroom this is the top speed that can be achieved in the game which isn't possible in time trials since you don't have access to stars and time trials are driven in the 100cc setting but weatherton didn't do an ordinary large bounce in this task he modified it in a big way if you shroom the frame before getting the effects from a large bounce you'll supercharge the jump that results this not only gets you more height but more speed as well resulting in enough distance that a star may not have been a requirement for the new skip so the shroom-infused large bounce that weatherton cooked up did have potential in time trials Forrest decided to investigate if the height from a supercharged large bounce would be enough and it was indeed possible to clear the Gap with enough height to hit the sweet spot on the right bouncing polygon this proved it was possible with tasks but would it be possible for a human if we look at the Precision required when forests crossed the Finish Line after bouncing he was only 999.9978 units from the center of the sphere if the wall was three thousands more of a unit away this trick wouldn't be possible even for Taz due to the level of precision required and literally only having three thousandths of a unit for a margin of error this shortcut was likely going to be tasks only so it was a big surprise when later the same month soft syrup would hit the lap and break the two-way tie between Abney and Alec Boris realized that you could increase your distance outside of the 1000 unit sphere if you took more of a left angle when hitting the fence this this gave you more height and allowed for humans to hit the skip the requirements were still very precise but much more attainable than first thought the task was a 213 and soft syrups record was a 417 over a second and a half faster than the last record but with lots of room to improve VHA would lower the time later the same day and what would a Mario Kart 64 video be without a VHA reaction yes we got it we got it we got it we got it we got it we got it World Records despite these records happening on the same day this wasn't a shortcut that was easy to hit and it would take several days before Abby would hit it himself dropping the record by another two tenths of a second there are two things worth noting about the first three records using this method they were all driven on pal to make the execution a bit easier so the times I cited were converted to ntsc to keep things in line with the rest of the video they were also driven on the first lab which meant a lap 2 setup would save some time since you could cut out having to leave from a start line and get closer to the fence Abney wrote in the description of his record that other Runners were already going for lap 2 setups so his record was likely to be beaten and later that same day Alec would swoop in with a 282 time that would be the end of Records on this track for a while grinding lap 2 attempts is quite exhausting especially when the success rate is very low and it wouldn't see a new Improvement until December of that year Abney would put in two solid week of attempts starting in December and his efforts would finally be rewarded on the 13th with a 275. oh come on yes yes oh my God I did it just seven tenths faster than Alex record under normal circumstances this likely would have started a war but the difficulty of the skip combined with the setup time held back a rivalry that likely would have exploded given that there was still over half a second left to optimize those theoretical rivalries will be explored by other abisoffs in the Multiverse because in our timeline Forest released another skip on April 30th 2023 Forest would go live in a rare twitch stream where he went over the technical details of a new skip he had discovered on Yoshi Valley in the beginning of the video I said that Yoshi Valley offered multiple paths but these weren't just more tracks to drive on each path has a distinct identity in the game's code there are a total of four paths the game recognizes and due to programming reasons they're counted starting at zero zero is the default path that the game assigns you at the start of the race with a new one being assigned if you select a different path when you enter the course proper the interesting thing about the different paths is that for whatever reason they all have unique points for where the finish line is centered rather than all being on the same spot their centers on the Finish Line are slightly deviated which changes the 1000 unit distance check for each of them in particular the sphere for path 3 is centered 5 units to the right Boris had the idea to change his path during the race so that he could exploit this discrepancy for an exceptionally fast lap the problem was the only way to change your path is to physically be on a different one but there is one exception to this if your 1000 units away from the sphere Center and fall off the track so that you're above the out of bound section the game will set your path to the default which is zero this means that your Finish Line sphere will change and shift to the left a few units which also moves it down slightly so why is this significant if you set your path to 3 then go to the wall where speedrunners perform shortcuts your Finish Line sphere is for path three but it won't be active with a very precise setup that involves getting your cart into the correct angle you can shroom and reverse off the track you'll fall into the sphere so the Finish Line gets activated Then Fall outside of it and this is where things get very interesting the first frame you're outside of the path 3 sphere the game does the check to see if your 1000 units away and it determines correctly that you are indeed out of range but but then it does another check before the frame is over because you're now outside of the sphere and over the out of bound section it sets your path to zero which is the default this causes the Finish Line sphere to shift to the left due to the paths not being aligned properly but it's already checked to see if you were outside of the sphere and won't check again until the next frame so while we're inside of a new sphere as far as the game is concerned we're not close enough for the Finish Line to be active on the next frame it checks to see if you're inside of the sphere and since we are it sets the Finish Line active again which means we've just satisfied every condition for finishing a lap inside of a single frame that was a lot of info so let's recap you enter the sphere for path 3 by boosting in reverse and have it set to active you leave the path 3 sphere and the game performs the 1000 unit check so it sets the Finish Line to inactive you're now over the out of bounds zone so it sets your sphere to path zero but due to the order of operations it won't check again until the next frame it performs the activation check for the finish line and since everything else has been satisfied you're given credit for a full lap the reason you shroom when you fall is to get your speed correct so the lap time is calculated favorably when the y-coordinate calculation is performed when crossing the Finish Line while you're falling you also need to press B at certain times to reverse so that the position requirements of crossing the finish line from Back to Front are mat there's also an extensive setup involved to get your angle correct but there's not much to say about it other than it takes a few minutes and is quite difficult so how fast of a lap can this get Forest would complete the setup in real time after a thorough explanation and achieved a lap time of .02 seconds with Abney achieving the same result the next day but this still left a single hundredth of a second on the table for a perfect lap there were two additional requirements while falling you would need to press B for a single frame let go of it for a frame then press it again for a frame with this button sequence needing to be pressed at a specific spot on your fall to the bottom this was done to optimize how much time to subtract from your lap based on your speed when crossing the line but this wasn't the only thing at play doing all of this would get you a time of 0.19 but as we know the timer gets broken the longer you wait to do a lab and with some luck you can get the timer to round that down to a 0.01 about 10 percent of the time Forest would fire Upstream on May 3rd with the goal of hitting a perfect lab he'd come this far with researching all of the new developments and wasn't going to let anything stop him it took four attempts before he had a successful hit and it was only a .02 so he kept trying each attempt takes about five minutes to set up so this isn't a trick you can easily grind out patience is a big part of it and with his fifth attempt he was rewarded with another O2 sixth attempt another O2 was he getting bad rounding or was he pressing the buttons on the wrong frames another five minutes another failed attempt his eighth attempt and another Miss was the perfect lap even possible [Music] with that Forest became the first person to hit a perfect Lap In The Game's history accomplishing one of the greatest achievements in all of Mario Kart over the next month Abney Alec Jonesy and Martin would all tie the perfect record and I think Abney said something interesting when he achieved his perfect lab [Music] it's done stop playing this forever now I can stop playing this forever now a single track that can't be improved it's sad in a way it has nothing left to offer players record Perfection is where this story ends but it's not the only Track Force found a perfect strategy for in fact May and June would see two more tracks get perfected but those are stories for another time if you enjoyed the content consider supporting me on patreon thanks for watching and don't forget to rewind your VHS tapes before returning them

Channel: Abyssoft

Views: 210,762

Keywords: mk64, mario kart, mario kart 64, nintendo, mk, perfect lap, fast lap, abney317, beck abney, abney, kart, world record, skips, shortcut, abyssoft, speedrun, mk64 speedrun, speedrunning

Id: h98rg45rUbQ

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2023