Trackmania's Biggest Shortcut Mystery Was FINALLY Solved

this is do3 acrobatic one of the 65 campaign tracks in trackmania nations forever at a first glance this track might not look like anything special dl3 acrobatic consists of only two wall rides and it can be completed in just 15 seconds of driving but what makes dl3 acrobatics so unique is that for almost its entire lifespan it's had one unsolved mystery a potential shortcut idea which for the longest time existed just outside the realms of possibility but in recent years the trackmania community has put an immense effort into theorycrafting to try to make the dream of the do3 shortcut become a reality and this is the story of how trackmania players finally broke do3 acrobatic trackmania nations forever was released in april of 2008 and very quickly following its release many players were already grinding the tracks and submitting their records to the leaderboards many tracks in the game have things like drifts or precise corners that were really hard to execute for players in the beginning but d03 didn't have any of that this track is basically just a straight line race up to the finish and because of this dl3 was one of the first tracks in the game to become very optimized in may of 2008 only one month after the release of the game the player der peel managed to set a 1545 on the track in the start of his run their appeal approached the downhill diagonally and steered sharply to maintain full grip on the track building up more speed than if he just gone straight then he entered the wall ride as low as possible and tried to do only the bare minimum steering movements to give him a smooth line into the next quarter pipe and he ended his run by jumping as low as he could into the second wall ride and gently steering towards the finish at the time it was set this was a very strong record and in all the years since this run players haven't managed to improve by more than 1700 of a second when driving the normal way but when looking at the track from a bird's eye view some players quickly noticed a promising idea to save time a potential shortcut jump the earliest mention of it comes from the player andrei 1 in may of 2009 but the early surviving video of the shortcut comes from the player phil coss where he drove up the wall ride all the way to the top and then jumped out towards the finish almost making it to the finish road if he had landed on the road then the shortcut might have saved time as it is a much more direct line to the finish but getting those missing centimeters would be a problem because it seemed like the road was just a little bit out of reach phil koss had already gone at full throttle in his attempt and he still fell short and nobody at the time had any ideas on where they could gain the missing speed but a couple of years later in 2014 the player bossman had a very interesting idea on how to make the shortcut viable you see when you spawn on the start and track mania there's a bit of room behind you on the starting ramp so bossman experimented with reversing all the way to the edge and then going forwards again doing this he got a tiny bit more speed than a normal attempt at the cost of a minor time loss but if the additional speed could result in a good bounce to the finish then this strategy would save time overall players once again booted up the track and got to work and though they now got closer attempts than before it still wasn't enough to get a fast bounce into the finish the hype was short-lived and the activity on d03 quickly died down again for the next few years the shortcut idea fell into a state of limbo everyone in the community knew that it was there and that it had potential but the jump still required more speed and nobody could seem to find the missing kilometers an hour that was needed but perhaps more speed wasn't really needed what if you could do an entirely different shortcut approach instead as time went by some players realized that there were more ways you could reach the finish on d0 than just the wall ride jump and they got to theorycrafting first up there was nixion who in 2020 had the idea of driving the entire first wall ride then dropping into the quarter pipe clipping his back wheel and setting his car up sideways for a bug slide with the idea of using the quarter pipe as a launching ramp to get to the finish this idea seemed promising at first but the margin of time save against normal way was much slimmer since you now took a less direct line to the finish and after thorough testing it was discovered just how difficult and unlikely it was to land in an angle where one could get a fast and low block slide into the finish and the idea was disregarded but nixion later had another idea where he thought that you could drive all the way up to the top of the wall ride and then clip the top of the wall right with the back wheel so that the nose of the car dipped down then you will land on top of the thin railing with the nose of the car pointed straight down and no splunk to the finish by pressing the drift keys when the car is in the state it is possible to yank the car to the side while preserving all of your speed this nosebook approach looked crazy enough that it might just work but after more testing nixteen discovered that you also lacked the speed needed to reach the finish line before the normal waited so itsu wasn't any good but one year later in march of 2021 players were getting closer and closer to finally cracking the code first the player complex was driving the track and he noticed one previously unseen shortcut approach the uber book complex's idea was to drive up the wall ride and then flip out below it land back on the starting road sideways and drift to the right and from there try to get a so-called uber bug into the finish the uber bug is a bugging track mania where when you drift and crash against the wall the game sometimes does a miscalculation giving you more speed instead of less and with this miscalculation you can go flying but huber bugs don't happen too often and they are very unpredictable and from all the players who tried this idea only the player jav got one small uber bug and it was way too slow to reach the finish line making the idea seem just a little too far-fetched but jav himself would come up with the next crazy shortcut idea remember the nosebug from earlier well it's possible to chain together several nosebugs in a row and jab had the idea of going out on the grass in the start clipping the bottom of the wall right to set himself up for the first nosebug then his idea was to get another nosebug on the grass and bounce on one of the water edges to fly up into the finish though maybe possible in theory this approach was astronomically unlikely to happen in an actual run so that too wouldn't really work taking a step back the trackmania community now found itself 12 years after the inception of the shortcut idea still without solving the mystery and though there had been no shortage of ideas over the years none of them seemed truly viable players were getting so tantalizingly close to breaking the track and it really seemed like all it would take was one missing piece to completing the puzzle and finally in april of 2021 the player ploster x may have just found the missing piece plus rex was a familiar face on dl3 acrobatic he had competed for the world record on the track many times and with the recent hype in the community about new shortcuts he decided to give the do3 shortcut a second chance to see if there was any way to make it possible he started playing the track on a whim and noticed a previously undiscovered approach you see when competing for the world record in the normal way players drive out towards the left side of the track crossing this border to initiate a so called speed slide whereby sliding the car at a very specific angle the car will accelerate faster for world record attempts it's best to speed slide in combination with entering the wall ride at the lowest possible point to build up the most amount of speed but what plus rex noticed was a game changer because instead of starting the speed slide from the left side why not do it from the right side of the track this way your car would be speed sliding for longer and you could build up a tiny bit more speed than on the left side and maybe just maybe it was enough of a difference that you could reach the finished platform this idea might seem obvious but the reason that nobody truly tried it before is because of the camera perspectives on d03 you're locked into the internal camera and this turns out to be a big problem for speed sliding because track mania players look at the width of their skid marks to measure how good their speed slide is speed sliding is very precise and it requires about 40 overlap to gain the most amount of speed and on d03 when locked in the internal camera there was no way to tell if you had a good angle or not because you couldn't see your skid marks so plus rex decided to make a training map where he removed the forced camera perspective and try to see how fast he could get if he did a perfect speed slide and after a little bit of experimentation plaster x got this one on the track maybe you have better angle which i'm not familiar with holy [Music] a 16.30 one second behind the world record but definitely showing the potential of the approach plus rex sent this run to dunadigu who is a trackmania tool-assisted speedrunner donatiko was able to demonstrate that with a slightly altered steering movement in the wall ride his run could have been a 1497. beating the world record from half us by 3100 of a second and for the first time with 100 certainty proving that the dl3 acrobatic shortcut was possible the community simply couldn't believe it it had taken over 12 years of theory crafting strategy innovations and ideas to get to this point but for the first time the mystery of do3 was solved and the race was now on to become the first person to set a world record with it over the course of the next days many players tried to break the record and on the fateful day april 11th the first shortcut time was set on the track and well by who else then roll it [Music] [Music] 14.83 beating the world record on the track by 45 hundredths of a second and becoming the first person to shortcut deal through the acrobatic following this hafez managed to get the shortcut as well driving a 15.18 on the track and that same day a little while later hafez got this run [Music] 1459 beating roland by 2400 of a second which is where the world record stands currently but even with this improvement the track is in theory far from optimized because in the recent record hunt the player draker got a near perfect start on the track getting just a little bit more speed than other players and with a start like that draker and donald eagle show that it's possible to do this [Music] 1397. donation had used a script to brute force test potential searing movements in the ending and his script found that with a start like rockers and a perfect ending jump it's just barely possible to hit the trigger for the finish line from the side doing what's known as a bug finish and shaving off another half a second this trick still hasn't been done by any players in a real run yet but they are getting very close and i suspect it might be done in the near future but who would have thought that what at first seems like a boring track could have such a rich history of innovation and strategy developments that finally led to a shortcut being possible the history of do3 acrobatic goes to show that no idea truly is a bad idea as it was only through ruling out the long chain of bright but unsuccessful ideas that the trackmania community finally landed on a working approach if players hadn't innovated and tried to think of new strategies then we wouldn't have gotten to where we are today so my advice is go out there and check another time for good measure if you overlooked any potential strategies on the tracks and perhaps you'll be the one that discovers the next big shortcut that will revolutionize trackmania history once again if you enjoyed this video then please consider supporting the channel on patreon for as little as 2.50 a month you can be a game changer in helping me make these documentaries without taking sponsorships as it is a lot of work to research edit and narrate them speaking of which thank you so much to all my patreon supporters for making this video possible your generosity is wholeheartedly appreciated but that's it for now guys thank you so much for watching this video and until next time have a good one you

Channel: Wirtual

Views: 1,838,524

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, Zerator

Id: 3pTCXEdrmyg

Length: 14min 39sec (879 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheBestUsername231]

I dont play trackmania anymore but i always love a wirtual vid

[u/Philnol]

Such a great storyteller

[u/TheOnlyFallenCookie]

I got back into trackmania thanks to Wirtual.