I love this video. He made a more recent one as well that goes into specific technical aspects of the N64 (TW: floating point) - https://youtu.be/nYDmBdUalgo
This video also explains what a 0.5 A press ("Half A-press") is and why they care.
Because Mario64 doesn't care about releases, the runners don't distinguish releases, you can always choose not to release A and so if you're doing this run (fewest A presses) you would only ever release in order to press A again. In a live setting commentators might briefly explain what a 0.5 A "means" but without this explanation to head off questions you'd likely have about why they care.
Did you watch the intro? It's more than semantics. It doesn't come from (key down+key up)/2, it comes from the fact it counts as 0 in a full game run, and 1 in isolation. He even specifically says "as for the release, there are no cases where that's useful or important" (paraphrased).
To be more precise, the game sometimes expects you to press A, but sometimes it's enough for A to be held for the action to happen. You can press A and not release in the first case, so that the second one can leech off it.
Because Mario64 doesn't care about releases, the runners don't distinguish releases, you can always choose not to release A and so if you're doing this run (fewest A presses) you would only ever release in order to press A again
Just reading this, it doesn't make sense to someone not familiar with the game why you wouldn't only hold A the last time you press it. It also has to be noted that holding A makes Mario do different things from not holding A.
Is that really true though? If it cares about holding, such as in gliding in the air, then it necessarily cares about not holding, such as being in the air but not gliding, and the way to transition from being in the air gliding to being in the air not gliding is to release.
Is that wrong? I've only ever played M64 for like 5 minutes, but it's been on my list and I keep urging my children to get into it as a way for me to find the time to get into it too.
I could see how this could be confusing. SM64 does distinguish between before a release and after a release, so technically the game itself doesn't care. I think what they were trying to say is that there really isn't any benefit in speedrunning the game to keep track of releasing (and this can be confirmed in the video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpk2tdsPh0A&t=105).
I think it's possible that if the next level requires .5 a presses but, for example, you are falling with a wing cap in the current level, you have to decide between bumping that half a press into a full a press or losing time when falling with the wing cap. I just don't think it's a common case though because you could use a different route where the held A won't affect you. It looks like in the A Button Challenge (ABC), there are only 5 half a presses: https://ukikipedia.net/wiki/A_Button_Challenge
> In order to jump for a second time you need to release it first.
Is that true? Mechanically it's true, but I don't know whether the game code actually knows this is true. It depends whether the N64, and the SM64 code specifically, tracks the button state and the events separately.
Compare the situation with Left + Right in TAS Mario 1. The TAS has no problem telling a console that both left and right are pressed, but obviously a real human player cannot press both directions, they're opposites. Nevertheless this does "work" in the game and so although no-right-plus-left is an interesting benchmark to compare against RTA where live human players couldn't do the trick, the TAS records allow both pressed at once.
The sheer depth of knowledge and analytical ability pannenkoek has is honestly quite amazing. I've become quite spoiled watching their SM64 videos, it's been incredibly hard to find something of similar rigor and production value for other games. The closest I've found so far has been a video on how a group of speed runners were able to conquer RNG for a puzzle in Wind waker[0].
Speaking of Wind Waker speedrunning, did you follow the GCN barrier skip saga at all? I can't believe they managed to force the entire barrier to despawn by overloading the game's memory. It actually made me think back to a pannenkoek2012 video where they demonstrated SM64's memory limit for objects/particles and managed to freeze up an entire level (I want to say it was Tick-Tock Clock?).
[1] is about speedrunning peach's break the target test in smash bros melee which involves some craziness (including rng considerations), very good watch. AsumSaus also has tons of breakdowns of weird mechanics in melee, very hard to choose as pretty much all his videos are excellent but [2] and [3] are as good a starting place as any.
"Retro Game Mechanics Explained" is exactly what you're looking for for retro games. They talk about things like memory layout, how unintended bugs work, the cpu instruction set, how things happen on the hardware level, etc etc. Highly recommended.
https://www.youtube.com/@RGMechEx
The SciCraft and ZipKrowd Minecraft servers both have a few insanely impressive videos, going extremely deep into Minecraft internals for builds - I highly recommend https://youtu.be/6sPS4yqC72I or https://youtu.be/TM7SutJyDCk
It's over five hours long. I put it on in the background or to pass the time. The amount of knowledge and abuse of bugs these guys are performing is insane.
I also watched through this recently and would highly recommend it to anyone with a passing interest. Some of the discoveries made were just insane, and the number of things that only barely work is kind of mind blowing.
Bismuth is also just a generally high quality YouTuber.
If you enjoy talking about parallel universes, I highly, highly recommend watching the SM64 1-Key speedrun [1] and then Bismuth's explainer [2]. It's a truly amazing technical achievement based in large part in pannenkoek2012's research.
I do find it funny the terms gamers have came up with to describe what boils down to bugs in a game. Parallel universes and all the lore around them are all caused by just a 16-bit integer wrapping inside the floor check code. Mario64 usually stores positions as floats but for collision checks it gets converted to a 16 bit int.
Even so, the effects of these bugs are interesting enough to give names to. I remember some glitches in Sonic the Hedgehog 1 through 3 I called "The Valley of the Shadow of No Background" and "The Valley of the Shadow of No Sprites". The latter of which was caused by an integer coordinate wraparound that caused the game to draw the tile map scenery from your location modulo N, but not populate it with game objects because the coordinates didn't match. As a result, things like loops only half-worked, and the corkscrew things from Emerald Hill Zone didn't work at all -- because invisible objects triggered the movement mechanics specific to those scenery bits.
Since you sound dismissive, do you have a better term?
Lots of bugs have specific names. It would be crazy not to name any.
Changing your position so that you're in the same spot but you're also in a completely different location, all at once. I think the term fits pretty well.
I agree with pests—it's definitely an interesting and funny way to describe the technical process that is occurring, but it adds a bit of undue mysticism for the casual viewer.
Not dismissive at all? Maybe 'funny' was the wrong word but interesting at the least.
The PU term fits very well. It makes sense. It just is also funny knowing what is going on behind the scenes and seeing their explanations and rationaliations.
It reminds me of outsider art. Someone comes along and documents what they find with no exposure to the community or its conventions.
It's less about outsider-ness than about these things being a permanent feature of the game and the details becoming important.
I'd bet that almost anyone that has ever managed to make this trick work could have told you the coordinate is wrapping. What rationalizations are happening?
Why are you being so combative in this thread? I pointed out a simple "huh thats interesting" observation and you just want to debate me.
I think if they weren't rationalizing they would explain the concept as is - its a wrapping coordinate. I do agree they understand what is happening low-level and that it is a wrapping coordinate. They still choose to use this parallel universe explaination for ease of understanding and explainability to outsiders. A rationalization is just "the action of attempting to explain or justify behavior or an attitude with logical reasons, even if these are not appropriate" which sounds exactly what the PU explaination is. There is no derogatory insinuation or anything involved here.
I'm not trying to be combative. I'm not sure what you think is combative about my second post? (or the first post other than maybe the first line)
But I do disagree about rationalization. If something is a deliberately oversimplified explanatory tool, that's not a rationalization by my understanding of the word.
On the other hand... I mean, doesn't it feel like a bit of a waste? I mean his mind is free to use however he likes but it seems absolutely crazy to dedicate yourself to this extreme level of obscure bugs in a 30ish-year-old game in order to prove some crazy feat is technically possible although not actually possible to execute in a tool-unassisted fashion.
The explaining video is great, but the underlying goal just seems absurd to me.
as i said in the first version of my comment, “ This is what happens when you have the mind of a von Neumann and no great national project to work on. Give this guy a UFO . he could figure it out, at least how to use it!”
But I removed that because I thought it was too reductive and dismissive of peoples individual enjoyment, and it took a too utilitarian approach towards our daily activities. I don’t think we should reduce everything to a utilitarian collective good view point.
At the same time I have that perspective too, but I definitely think there’s value in the pursuit of these things like this person has done.
I hope to be able to share nuance and multiple perspectives on HN without angering, or having to engage with anyone particular zealot of any one particular side.
I love their videos, so full of insight and quite elaborated with a bunch of self-made scientific terminology, it's even timidating for a IT professional.
I remember seeing one of his videos years ago about half-A presses. Did it ever catch on as something other people in the speedrunning (or whatever this is) community care about? I kinda assume not…
A press notation is really only something used within the A Button Challenge, since the point of the challenge is to optimize for lowest A press count. Other categories don't do this, so they have no use for it.
That being said, like other lines from this video, it's definitely become a bit of a meme in the community.
Most speedrun categories focus on sheer speed, for obvious reasons, but there are some less-popular offshoots that create unique challenges just to push the boundaries of the games (and the people running them).
I think the A button challenge focuses on reducing the number of A-presses above all else, so it's not a speedrun proper. There is a really fun type of speedrun called low% where the goal is to complete the game with as low a "completion percent" as possible (e.g., minimum items collected, quests and bosses completed, etc.) and do it as quickly as possible. But a run that's technically slower with a lower% will "beat" a run that's faster with a higher%.
That's where you get Twilight Princess speedruns that can take more than 24 hours to complete. Although I believe the current record is actually just under 16:
(For those who don't want to watch an entire video: the secret sauce here is a glitch with Link's "item get!" animation that verrrryyyy slooooowlyyyy pushes him backwards in space every time it loops. So if you open a chest and leave the animation running for hours on end, you can phase backwards through walls and bypass the need for keys/progress checks/etc. Which is perfect for a low% run where the goal is to bypass as many things as possible.)
On one hand, hacking/speed-running/homebrew and other gaming niches should make it so older games like Mario N64 remains popular longer... On the other, I doubt niches make much of a difference for Nintendo's bottom line, and considering their track record, I assume they would kill all sorts of hacks around their platforms, if they could.
So, fuzzing tests [1] seem to be in order for Nintendo games... :-)
> I assume they would kill all sorts of hacks around their platforms, if they could
They've been doing exactly this with Tears of the Kingdom: patching pretty much every glitch that gets found, no matter how likely it is to affect casual players or whether it arguably makes the game more fun. I wouldn't be shocked if they had people lurking in the glitch hunting/speed running Discords just so they can learn about glitches and fix them ASAP.
It's important to note that glitches that speedrunners utilize are often game breaking bugs that would give a normal player a really bad time. And it could be that the obvious utility of the glitch (like item duping) could also have a less useful manifestation from the same buggy code (crashing the game).
There is a video on YT with a speedrunner walking the Portal team through the speedrunning community's hacks, and there is a part where this is touched on.
I just want to say that this is nerd-porn at its purest and I love it! There's something about someone explaining things like how the game's collision detection actually takes a float value and converts it to a short that tickles my brain.
It says a lot about a game like SM64 that it manages to still fascinate and captivate decades after its release while a dwindling number of mainstream games made today share that level of player enthusiasm.
pannen's commentated videos are always a treat. He started uploading again this year after a long hiatus (that started after this video) and I can't wait for more.
If you're interested in Super Mario 64 speedruns, the video[0] "The Story of the Greatest Super Mario 64 Speedrunners" is great.
Is this the perfect youtube video? Amazing Mario soundtrack in the background and gameplay visuals. Home made charts that VISUALLY show what's going on. AUDIO voice commentary explaining what you see. References to other youtube videos and commenters. Detailed, insanely knowledgeable, not selling me anything, created for love not for viewers. IDK this is peak youtube for me.
God I wish, but our discord keeps getting kids, who can't possibly help or contribute to TASing, keep asking us questions answered in the video they just watched before joining...
We sometimes get smart af people joining and even making accomplishments though. College students or otherwise.
Pannen's a really patient guy for tolerating his fans all the time
Sucking at something is the first step to being amazing at something, and it's a step everyone goes through, no exceptions. Being kind and tolerant of others sucking (missing what seem like obvious bits of core knowledge, not knowing what details are important, taking way too long on tasks) is absolutely essential to the health and growth of any size or kind of creative community.
Being able to find answers to commonly asked questions instead of making demands on people's time by asking is a huge part of maturity. It's very common for Discord servers to have a self-serve faq/resources channel. It's rude to ask questions that can be answered there.
In this situation I find the best thing to do is to link to the resource that answers the question. A 'teach how to fish' approach. If a question is often asked that isn't answered in documentation then I enhance the documentation.
Sure, but
1) they're kids. Of course they're immature (and of course there will be kids. It's a community built around video games).
2) asking questions is just kind of how Discord works. Knowledge isn't stored and organized like on old-school forums or Reddit. Discord is a tool where people are expected to be available for almost real-time discussion. I personally struggle with that format, and tend to only use Discord as a messaging app for small groups of friends. I've tried joining Discord servers organized around a topic with larger groups of people, and it just doesn't seem to work for my brain, so I leave.
> Sucking at something is the first step to being amazing at something, and it's a step everyone goes through, no exceptions.
The thing that gets me about OP's remark is that pannenkoek2012 himself made a YouTube comment in 2013 asking how to make Mario kick in the air without pressing the A button to jump. [0]
>eferences to other youtube videos and commenters. Detailed, insanely knowledgeable, not selling me anything, created for love not for viewers
I feel the same about HealthyGamerGG's videos: detailed, insanely knowledgeable, references across neurochemistry/biochemistry, psychology, gaming, human behavior, culture and religion (and how they've changed over time), etc.
I feel like HealthyGamerGG is trying to make it sound like every mental health issue is somehow trivial to solve if you just do his one silly trick; he doesn't say it like that explicitly, but after watching a pile of his videos the pattern started becoming evident. I also feel like his definitions of key terms don't really align all that well with other people who do video content on mental health, which made me quite skeptical.
Can anyone recommend other rabbit hole videos like the parents? It can be in any topic. I love these types of videos that show just how deep things are.
I recommend his video on speedrunning the first level of Quake, including an overview of the importance of Quake to speedrunning as a whole, and an explanation of Quake's movement mechanics that make getting a good time so complex:
I would hire this person based on just this video. This demonstrates every quality I want to see in a smart candidate. I wouldn't even care if they know X language with Y framework, if they made this then they are more than equipped.
The youtuber does a bit of complaining about how people keep asking something he's ostensibly answered. Even does that "well, akshyually, I said that right here in the man page (comments section) if only you would RTFM".
This is important: if the user (customer, patron, etc.) is repeatedly doing something "wrong", then it's not they who are wrong, it's you, your design, your inadequate explanation, etc.
On top of that, the whining and blame directed at the user for not conforming to your own internal model is just so unwarranted and does nothing to help your case here. It's pure self-cope for not doing a better job at explaining, designing, etc.
Empathize!
I know it's hard for nerds to do this, especially when they so often feel the opposite, that they not only don't lack empathy, they feel they have more than the average person. How wrong they are! Consider that maybe you're wrong and the customer is right. Adapt to their world view rather than trying to get them to conform to yours. You might be so deeply immersed in your domain that what you consider common wisdom is a foreign language to others. Again, empathize! And you use that empathy to improve your communication, design, etc.
I think engineers and designers really need to hear this stuff because there's just so much user-blame, whining, bad interfaces, and bad communication out there that doesn't have to be bad, if only the nerd-engineer would cultivate some empathy and humility.
I appreciate where you are coming from here, but I think your rant is misplaced. This is a video about a rather technical, very niche topic. The whole concept of a "half press" is a particular bit of jargon with a particular meaning in this field. The onus is on the reader to learn.
There is nothing quite so irritating as someone who confidently criticizes you out of ignorance. You see this all the time when professionals showcase their work on video sharing sites, the comments will be filled with people who pipe up insisting that the creator is doing something wrong rather than asking questions or seeking to understand. "There is no such thing as a half press" as popularized by TJ "Henry" Yoshi is a case of the former, an ignorant outsider lecturing the person who demonstrably knows what they are doing.
Empathy and humility are two way streets. In the comments section, you are a guest and should behave as such.
The user in this case though is getting free content in a very niche area. I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism here, though your overall point is valid.
To be fair to the author (and I know this is by no means obvious context coming into the video), his channel blew up shortly before this video. His previous audience consisted of people in the Super Mario 64 speedrun/challenge community who would need less explanation.
The thoroughness of this video seems to me to be proof that he wanted to get these newer viewers up to speed. In fact it's basically a love letter to the uninformed viewer. The "complaining" at the start is just lightly poking fun at these newer people while also serving the double purpose of informing them about the explanations in his description boxes. Given the lasting popularity of this video, I don't think too many people took offense.
> In fact it's basically a love letter to the uninformed viewer
Absolutely, and it shows in how many people I've recommended this video to who know nothing about sm64 who absolutely love it. (I also know nothing about sm64 and absolutely love it.)
> The thoroughness of this video seems to me to be proof that he wanted to get these newer viewers up to speed
Yep and he literally says it right in the video, "but maybe what you guys need isn't a paragraph, maybe you guys need an example". He admits his previous attempts were maybe not getting across and adapted. Teaching at its finest. The TJ Henry Yoshi callout was clearly for comedic effect, and if I were TJ I'd be pretty happy to get an answer this thorough, understandable, and entertaining.
edit: listening to it again, even calling it a callout as I did above is kind of incorrect. "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, hear me out." He didn't say "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, this is where you're wrong" or "Well TJ Henry Yoshi, what didn't you understand about the paragraph?", he just asked for a listening ear for another chance to explain his perspective in a different way.
I am so amazed by this. I am always impressed when people are so moved by some passion that they can put this extreme level of dedicated work into something. I have only rarely felt passions that move me to work as hard as this creator did. Sometimes I wish that people like this would use their talent and energy to work on truly important things like curing diseases or making scientific breakthroughs - if only for their own sakes to feel like their great potential didn't go to waste. Certainly the effort that went into this video could have produced a decent research paper, for example. I also wish I could have this level of motivation for my own work. But overall I am just amazed.
I dislike the "half a-press" term of art because it creates the question: If I release the a-press within the level to access his non-a-pressed abilities, would that count still as half-an-a-press? It seems to me that "half" an a-press should represent an edge (going up or down), and starting out holding "a" should count as like 0.1.
Or simply don't count A-button phases that aren't press events/keydowns as "half presses". That's what's always bugged me about it; if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately. Don't use a misnomer to suggest something that doesn't exist. It's obtuse jargon for the sake of it.
It rubs up wrongly against common sense, which is why people call it out; when you press a digital button with only two states, you'd refer to that action as a button press in any other context. General game logic refers to a digital button press as a button press/keydown event or state/key press; there's no "half", it's Boolean. And it's doubly confusing if you don't know that the N64 doesn't have pressure sensitive buttons, in which the term "half-press" would make more sense.
Not really. The speedrun is to optimize for fewest total A-button presses. This metric is known from the controller's perspective in the sense that if you sniffed the communications between the controller and console, you could know the number of A-presses. Given this metric, the term half A-press makes total sense once it is understood. To reiterate the video, in a single level run, a half press rounds up to 1, but in a full game run it rounds down. How else would you communicate that without "obtuse jargon"?
> if press, hold, and release are different actions, and those are meaningful to the speedrun, and you care about what a general audience thinks about it, then just count them separately
If you want to distinguish between the actions taken based on the state of the a button, that is fundamentally different from tracking the number of button presses since it requires knowledge of the game state. Not only does it make much harder to define but it's also much harder to track without advanced tooling (how do you know if the game state was modified in an important way or not if someone presses the button for eg 2 frames vs 4 frames?). I'm not sure how I see this would make it easier for the general audience to understand either since now they also have to understand the game state rather than how many times a button was pressed. Also, this makes it entirely disconnected from the physical world, when presumably the idea of the challenge was to use the buttons on your controller less.
There's nothing stopping speed runners from tracking it this way I suppose but complaining about how a community plays a game is a bit odd. Although it is a nintendo game so I guess complaining about how the hardcore fans play it is pretty much expected.
I know this is a silly point but imagine if this guy put the same amount of effort, inventiveness and attention to detail to some engineering or scientific endeavor. The video is great but arbitrary benchmarks in old games aren't pushing society forward as much as technological advancement can.
Besides, the sheer magnitude of difference between advancing a highly contested real life science subject versus breaking ground in an obscure challenge in a 25 year old video game is massive. I know it's not that obscure but it sure feels that way sometimes...
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