The Science Behind the Hardest Zelda Glitches

what's the most difficult trick in speed running maybe something that requires multiple frame perfect and position perfect inputs to skip to the credits like in Super Mario World or Ocarina of Time how about something incredibly physically demanding like zombie hovering and The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker or manual super swimming in The Legend of Zelda The Wind Waker wait hang on Wind Waker any percent is easily the most difficult speed run I've ever learned and certainly one of the most challenging in the world at the top level in this video I'll explain the math behind two of the most challenging tricks in Wind Waker any percent and just like how the last video was secretly an intro to probability this one might just secretly be an intro to some fundamental concepts in physics [Music] thank you 13 years ago Wind Waker glitch Hunters Serpent and Clyde storm discovered the zombie hover it is so named because when link dies you have 10 frames in which you can input a couple of actions if you had your sword out when you died you can jump slash we call this initial bit the liftoff the interesting thing about the liftoff is that when link is in midair with zero Hearts the death animation doesn't finish playing and the game over screen doesn't play until you touch the ground again the next key component of zombie hovering is the fact that if you jump off of a ledge or just are in midair for any reason and you have your sword out if you press B you will do a mid-air jump slash after the initial liftoff you then have a three Frame Window to press B to jump slash again this next jump slash just like the previous one just gives you a little bit of extra hype because since link is dead you can't do the full jump slash animation now if you just keep mashing B over and over and over and over and over again you can gain height infinitely the difficulty of this trick is that for it to truly be useful and for you to skip actually important parts of the game you're gonna have to mash that b button for a long long time in the current world record for Wind Waker any percent speedrunner Aloha Kirby uses three zombie hovers across the run the first is used to skip these grappling hook spots in Forest Haven to get the Deku Leaf early the second is used to skip the puppet Ganon boss fight and the third is used to skip the hook shot and get into the final boss room early for both early Deku leaf and puppet Ganon skip Kirby is mashing the B button for nearly a minute or more there's a secret I haven't told you yet though this trick is even harder than it looks it's not just about mashing any dummy with a controller can Master their hearts content what separates the good Wind Waker speedruns from the great ones is knowing that there's actually a rhythm to it let's go to the thought bubble wait that is not my show no that that is copyrighted material you cannot stop stop every time you hear speedrunners explaining tricks they always say stuff like it's like a frame perfect dupe alright here's going for a frame perfect trick he's got three frame perfect inputs entering the wraith on the same frame this is a essentially triple frame perfect floor clip but what does frame perfect really mean okay gamers are you ready for your two vocab words of the day period and frequency let's start with period period is the length of time it takes for something cyclic to repeat its cycle for instance let's say I want to run a lap around a track when I was more youthful and had knees that could actually Bend without causing me to scream I could run the 400 meter dash in about 68 seconds let's see how fast I can do it now [Music] how's the time 120 there's an 80 okay well Gamers apparently I can still run it in 80 Seconds not great but not bad my bones feel like not bones now my muscles feel like worms if I could run that exact same lap in 80 Seconds every single time forever then the period of me running the lap would be about 80 Seconds just over and over and over again cyclically in physics we represent period with a capital T since it's just another way to talk about time which is represented with little T okay I'm gonna go pass away okay next up frequency let's say instead of me wanting to know how quickly I could run the lap I wanted to know how many laps I could run every second I know this seems ridiculous but for the very Speedy things we'll be talking about in a moment I promise it makes sense I'm only completing a fraction of the lap every second so our frequency is that fraction we can find that fraction by taking the inverse of the period now since we divided by period we also divided by its units seconds which means that the unit for frequency is inverse seconds but the language for that is kind of clunky so it was decided that it would have its own name Hertz which is abbreviated Big H little Z I don't want to scare you but there are waves in your walls the electricity coursing through your home is almost certainly alternating current which is abbreviated AC I won't get into the reasons why alternating current is better than direct current for most applications in our world but every time you remember just how much better it is just spit on Thomas Edison's grave and curse his rotted corpse to a thousand eternities of unrest okay okay alternating current is electricity that alternates from a maximum voltage to a minimum voltage at a regular interval here the x-axis is time we can find the period of Waves by just looking at how many seconds it takes to get from one point on the wave to the same point in the next cycle that's like me completing one full lap on the track conversely to find the frequency of a wave just count the number of waves that pass in one second in North America some of South America and a few other parts of the world alternating current has a frequency of 60 hertz oh my God it's the gamer number in Europe and the rest of the world 50 hertz is used don't ask why they're different though just like uh just don't okay back to Wind Waker this game runs at 30 frames per second why not 60 well in the early days of gaming video games were played on cathode ray tube televisions the alternating current coming in from the wall socket dictated their refresh rate as games entered the Wacky World of the third dimension consoles were becoming more modernized and didn't have the same dependencies they once did however because it was the standard people were used to in network television and because it was still a nice goal to hit for most TVs games largely stuck to either 60 or 30 frames per second as their target now in the digital age we can send really whatever signal we want since it's being sent in digital packets instead of the analog waves of alternating current so your frame rate is really only limited by the refresh rate of your monitor or the power of your graphics card or a few other dumb limiting factors so go ahead King play Crisis 3 on Ultra Omega super insano Shader mode at 400 FPS on that twelve thousand dollar gaming rig you just bought maybe it'll finally make your wife's boyfriend Javier think you're cool let's go okay so if you're zombie hovering in Wind Waker a game that runs at 30 frames per second wouldn't it be best to mash at a speed of 30 times per second or 30 Hertz well first of all that's like not physically possible on a GameCube controller but second of all the astute among you will have already noticed that in order to press the B button and then press it again you're gonna have to release the B button in between those two presses so the most optimal way to zombie hover is to press B for exactly one frame release the B button for exactly one frame and then press again on the next frame this means that your mashing speed should be most optimally 15 times per second or 15 Hertz Mash any slower than that and you're not hovering on every possible frame that you could be Mash any faster than that and you'll start dropping inputs because the game literally can't interpret every single button press you're putting in this is actual footage of me sustaining between 14 and 15 Hertz for 20 seconds it felt horrible to be able to mash that fast but also be cognizant not to go any slower or any faster is what makes this trick so devilishly hard so you've mastered pressing the B button exactly 15 times a second for nearly a minute straight congratulations you've learned almost one percent of the hard tricks in this speedrun you did it you won congratulations a great way to learn a speedrun is to watch someone's PB whom you admire and copy what they do and practice it along the way bit by bit you know that scene in The Amazing Spider-Man where Andrew Garfield's character uh Spider-Man initially gets his powers and then he has to like figure it out from the very beginning it's like that wind waker starts on the appropriately named outset Island a tutorial area with barely any combat and just a sword and shield to acquire and a pirate to save how hard could it be certainly there isn't any oh oh no this my friends is the manual super swim the most common form of super swimming found in the Wind Waker 80 Speed Run actually looks like this first you get camera lock with a trick called storage and then you hop into the great sea when you have camera lock and you press up link turns around in one frame but that the camera turns back around the next frame to face him again so if you keep holding up you will turn around every single frame in the water and the camera will be turning around with you in Wind Waker distance is measured in the somewhat confusingly named units and speed is measured in units traveled per frame when swimming forward link has a speed cap of 18 units per frame however for whatever reason link doesn't have a speed cap in the negative direction if you've ever seen the backwards long jump or blj in Super Mario 64 the two tricks are pretty alike in this way vectors very simply contain magnitude or length and direction for movement this is the difference between speed and velocity speed just tells you how fast something is going velocity tells you how fast something is going and in what direction speed can't really be negative as traveling minus 40 miles per hour doesn't really make any sense however velocities can be negative since they encode Direction the negative sign doesn't mean that the speed is negative it just means that the object is traveling in the opposite direction from whatever we have called positive for simplicity's sake we'll call the positive direction for vectors in Wind Waker those vectors that face forwards from link and negative is facing behind him on the first frame he moves forward when swimming Link's velocity Vector goes up by three however when you turn around while swimming on the very first frame of turnaround for some reason your velocity Vector goes down by three this is the same thing as adding a vector of length 3 in the opposite direction the very next frame however it goes up by three again canceling out that one weird frame of -3 but this weird decision is good for us if you only ever turn around for one frame at a time and then immediately turn around again on the next frame never turning around for more than one frame at a time your velocity Vector will decrease by three every frame which is the same thing as just increasing the magnitude in the negative Direction and since there's no speed cap in the negative Direction you could theoretically gain as much speed as you want the only real legitimate speed cap is your air meter running out causing link to drown but at the very beginning of the game you're locked to outset Island until Tetra and the Pirates take you to forsaken Fortress how do we get to Dragon Roost Island early to get the Wind Waker if we don't already have the Wind Waker to get camera lock well dear viewers we're gonna have to do it manually this means alternating the joystick every single frame you can pause buffer this but if you actually want to go fast and save as much time as possible you're gonna have to do it unbuffered one Saving Grace is that when link speed reaches about 550 units per frame you can actually just start holding up to build Speed without camera lock and without having to do it manually so all you have to do right at the very beginning of the speedrun is jump off the Watchtower and start flicking that joystick as fast as you can until you reach 550 units per frame of speed and then you're home free if my overly sarcastic tone didn't make it incredibly obvious this does not make it easy in his world record Aloha Kirby manually charges the super swim for nearly a full minute before having the requisite speed to just start holding up the trick is so difficult in fact that the Wind Waker speedrunning Community decided to split the leaderboard into any percent and any percent no manual super swim those are just two of the most difficult glitches found in a run littered with impossible situations I'm not even covering barrier skip public and cutscene skip trial skip morph manipulation or any of the other wild tricks that make this incredible Zelda speedrun possible to beat in under one hour thank you so much for watching these videos are really difficult to make so I would really appreciate if you consider subscribing and liking this video and I'll see you next time

Channel: adef

Views: 28,276

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Id: pqQk6etpIn4

Length: 12min 59sec (779 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 12 2023