Dom's Scripted TASes
Hello All,
I've been recommended by a couple people to better archive the scripted TASes I've been working on, and so this thread has been created as an outlet to do as such. Here, I will post all of my TASes that are scripted by HiGuy's tool. Some general information first:
- The game registers 1/65535 distinct camera angles, though its not necessarily human possible to physically move the camera to these positions nor does the game visually show all of these camera angles. All the camera angles are sharp turns as this maximizes acceleration in a given direction, but is obviously not humanly possible.
- A few of these TAS'es utilize rolling from one input to another. The game accelerates each direction independently, and at times it is minutely optimal to press one key a few frames before another to manipulate spin.
- A couple new starts have been 'found' due to these TASes including what I like to call the KallePerks tweak. It is faster on many of these stages to roll after the Natural Bounce in the Kalle tweak (similar to the hPerks tweak) to maximize acceleration before continuously jumping.
Now for the a little nitty gritty. This first post has been updated to include all beginner level information. Recs/scripts are attached and a link to the compilation is included at the bottom.
Learning to Roll (2.249): This was actually the last of the trio that I did, and is the simplest one. It is a single camera turn a couple frames after the jump that allows me manipulate spin with the shortest path to the edge as possible. I believe the slightly altered rotation causes a less aggressive trim edge hit, so I get more speed and land in the finish before actually bouncing. Floating point rounding caused me to need to make a second version for Mac.
Collect The Gems (8.428): An optimization of Cobalt's Rewind TAS (8.467) which uses an alternate edge hit path. The auto-start is still necessary and the turn for the two quick edge hits is very tight. I found jumping these gave me the best results, however, it made collecting gems 1 & 2 very difficult as I was fighting a lot of momentum. Because of that, there are some harsh camera turns to optimize the speed of these grabs and still be in position for gem 3. The jump at the end only saves .001 but usually saves nothing plus it's very easy to lose a ton jumping early. For some reason, gem 6 is not grabbed on Mac, so a separate Mac version is attached.
Jump Training (3.611): Originally a 3.633 by optimizing m@s's WRR5 PB. DKman00 got a 3.636 the night of the reveal with a no-roll strat which, after dissecting his PB, was utilized in this TAS. The double jump trim hit is extremely precise and saves about .01.
Learn the Super Jump (2.881): Gonna come clean... basically not my TAS. Nature Freak gave me his TAS which is an incredibly elegant small single camera turn. All I did to speed things up was clean up the script, saved 1ms with a slightly different camera angle and found that manipulating IC at the end saved 1ms.
Platform Training (5.705): Xelna's PB is insane. Enough said. I tried everything to bring this down further but the balance between gaining enough speed to jump the gap but not be too fast to hop of the platform complicated things. The second hop on the platform was always faster for unknown reasons. A TAS only .004 is saved by back-spinning before the jump to maximize forward spin the rest of the run.
Learn the Super Speed (2.738): I originally TASed a 2.749 using the RTA route, but Xelna wanted me to try out some finish sign edge hits and it ended up working! The idea is to basically not slow down at all, but in practice I had to slow down 12 ms with specific camera angles to hit the tip of the finish sign. Just the tip. You also want to hit it in a sort of angle as getting hit straight down is .02 slower for some reason. This TAS looks a bits weird as the 1f flick to activate the super speed doesnt register even on Matan's 120fps recordings. There is a separate version of this TAS for Mac.
Elevator (3.558): The 3.559 by DKman00 and Xelna are probably the human limit. This TAS saves a mere .001 by jumping ~10ms earlier and rolling > into ^> to curve around the edge into the finish. This is possible on a very specific slightly left camera and has an extremely tight window. A lot of various starts were tested, but the frame perfect jump ended up being ideal as the platform trigger is simply a plane around the trap, and the fastest forward velocity is achieved with this start.
Air Movement (2.917): Another TAS that I borrowed from Nature Freak, but this one I found a sizeable improvement. By hitting the sign a little more to the right, the resulting edge hit pushes the marble slightly more out and to the right. This allows for earlier backspin, and this faster turn around is needed in order to fall into the finish without bouncing, but you do need to turn the camera slightly to do so.
Gyrocopter (2.717): This start is interesting as there was an ever so slightly longer delay on when WASD is released for the start pad trick. This slightly slower start for some reason caused the marble to fall a bit more steeply, so I was able to activate the gyrocopter slightly earlier.
Time Trial (2.155): This TAS is what caused me to discover the KallePerks tweak. By delaying the roll after the NB, it is possible to not need any IC or camera shenanigans to get the Time Stop earlier.
Super Bounce (2.873): This is mostly an optimized camera angle to maximize the time rolling. Similar to Gyrocopter, it was faster to slightly delay when to let go of WASD for the start pad trick because the bounce into the finish registered ever so slightly earlier.
Gravity Helix (5.042): A new start discovered by Doomblah and optimized in this TAS. The rest of the stage is essentially just 2 camera angle changes (one right into Gravity Switch 1 and another just after the bounce after exiting Gravity Switch 2) with a tiny not humanly possible one shorter after the second camera turn that saved an additional .001 under very specific conditions.
Shock Absorber (2.871): This was my first ever TAS and started it all. It uses Regi's delayed start which is optimized by actually bouncing a little after go, thus maximizing how late we can start the spin and just barely clear the first edge. In additional, the rolling between directions in employed twice: once at the start and the next on the turnaround. At the start, the TAS rolls < into <^ with a mere 12ms delay between inputs, but this was necessary to optimize the turnaround where the opposite > into v> occurs. There is no releasing of WASD at all throughout this TAS, rather, exploiting the fact that directions accelerate independently to curve around the two edges and maximizing velocity for the bounce into the finish.
There and Back Again (7.623): This is another one that I could not have done without Nature Freak. I spent hours trying to figure out how to get the sign hit and couldnt find anything, then got access to his script and still barely improved anything at all. Eventually I found that by holding <^ just before the first sign hit, you can turn the camera and back spin later and thus hit the first sign with more speed. I feel like this is TAS only though... There is a separate MAC version for this TAS.
Marble Materials Lab (4.362): This TAS Nature Freak and I did separately, but came to the same conclusions. The slope jump is frame perfect and requires IC manipulation to nearly 30fps in order to reduce the height of the jump and catch the last two gems. I ended up saving 1ms over Nature Freaks TAS due to a camera perfect angle into the finish. This TAS is probably maxed.
Bumper Training (2.253): Similar to Learning to Roll, but the slope isnt as sunk into the ground. As a result, not only is there a slight turn at the start, but also a slight turn right after the edge hit for maximum speed.
Breezeway (2.477): Apparently, the Kalle tweak is possible after a slight roll after the NB. You need very precise camera turns to hit the sign post but not the sign itself. Even more precision and you can quickly jump after the sign post and save a ton of time. Unfortunately, the fans cause the TAS to desync with slower times (or outright fail) on lower frame rates. On my 160fps iMac, I had a 50% success rate, and on the successes saw a lot of 2.481. Because this is an issue related to frame rate when playing back recs rather than the OS, I did not bother attaching other versions.
Mine Field (2.187): Credit goes to Nature Freak for this TAS. It is 99% his work, but his TAS did not work on Windows. While trying to stabilize his TAS for Windows, I found a slight tweak where I moved the time he turned the camera to just before the edge hit, stabilizing the TAS to work on both Mac and Windows and saving .001. I'm not sure if this humanly possible, but the idea is to have a slighty left camera angle as you can delay the jump every so slightly later since the corners of the pad stick out a bit more, and then turn the camera at the latest possible moment to steer the marble into the edge hit.
Trapdoors! (2.177): TT2.0. Nothing different other than subtle changes in the start pad trick and KallePerks tweak.
Tornado Bowl (1.445): The Time Travel in this is super weird... the hit box makes no sense. Grabbing this optimally made it basically impossible to get up and over the slope for the second TT, so I ended up finding an alternative path that also skips the third TT. Its all basically swag though. There is a separate version of this TAS for Mac.
Pitfalls (9.814 Win/9.815 Mac): The TAS I am probably most proud of for this bunch. Cobalt's start for his rewind TAS was basically perfect, and his jump pattern is absolutely necessary to get the right edge hits. I spent hours tweaking this to get the lowest jump I could in the right angle such that the edge hit at the pit is as fast as possible. The second half of the level is a tweak I came up with where instead of jumping low and keeping speed after the wall jump, I stay high and get a forward edge hit on a pit. As a player, you should be fine to the finish, but the TAS goes so fast that it jumps the first frame after it clears the pit and was running into the front of the pit at the end. Because of that, I needed to turn the camera and get another side edge hit on the last pit to be sent directly to the center of the finish pad. The Mac version is .001 slower as I started getting tired of making Mac versions by this point...
Platform Party (6.291 Win/6.292 Mac): So what is going on - well a few things are certains. For starters, it is most likely impossible to bullet to the finish as the trajectory simply never sends the marble directly to the finish pad. Because of that, locked frame rate was emulated to slow things down a little. Traplaunches are also highly variable, but I did recognize patterns after spending dozens of hours chipping away at this TAS. For starters, the launch itself is completely position-based and typically sets in place the xy position and initial speed. IC then slows the speed which in turn affects the z axis. If the launch is too fast, it becomes impossible to manipulate the marble with camera, so it's important that the IC slows the marble down enough that you can still curve into the finish, but fast enough to get up to the platform and get the fastest time. 64fps seemed to hit that sweet spot.
IC was, for the most part, very close to 64 fps. This launch is most likely not possible though as the final frame during the squeeze is 11ms which I do not believe occurs at 64 FPS. That's not say that this trajectory is impossible, but the way I did it in the TAS is mostly likely not realistically possible. It might be possible to go slightly faster than this launch, but I know that even slightly faster speeds dramatically reduced my ability to use camera turn to influence direction. This would mean that I would need extremely aggressive camera turns which usually mean much slower times, but if you launched even closer to the platform then you'd need less camera turn and thus save more time. So it is tough to say if this is improvable and by how much, but finding a launch that works at all is a needle in a haystack. That can a project for someone else...
Winding Road (9.497 Win/9.498 Mac): The start of this is a bit different than the start of Pitfalls as you need to have a different angle for the second edge hit. I did experiment with jumping after the second edge hit but its slower, most likely because you come to a near complete stop. The resulting friction of needing to speed up again was a .06 time loss. There is no Mac version as the rec should play on Mac but be .001 slower.
Grand Finale (27.729): I could write a thesis on this level... Xelna knew that sub 28 was possible so I put 10 days into this TAS. I spent 5 days trying to look for possible moving platform skips and nothing worked, so by day 6 I was trying to figure out how to optimize the moving platform jump. Cobalt and I both came to the same conclusion to do an edge hit, however, my TAS was going so fast that I could not jump off the platform like in Xelna's PB. The result was spending about 4 days tweaking the momentum and angle of the gyro activation wall hit, then the momentum and location of the gem 5 bounce. Whats going on is that I purposely delay the activation of the Gyro until after the wall hit. This sets up the moving platform timing but also causes the marble to travel up more slowly. I grab gem 4 much later, and then wall hit much higher. This is necessary for a higher bounce after you fall from the gyro ending.
The magic really happens after the bounce. I optimized the velocity and camera angle of this bounce such that I don't land on the gem 5, but bounce into gem 5, ramp matrix gem 6, and fall into the MP edge hit which just so happens to hit me at the exact angle that sends me to gem 7. Because of that, the camera turn after the edge hit is basically perfect, maximizing the velocity towards gem 7 and needing only a slight turn to get the right jump location over the pit to gem 8. Gem 7 is a frame perfect catch where if my momentum is built even 1ms longer I'd jump over it. The ending was actually pretty easy to fine tune since all of this is so delicate than changing basically anything breaks the rec. There is no Mac version of this TAS as it breaks right at the bounce, and I cannot be asked to spend 4 days fine tuning a separate Mac version.
Link to Matan's Youtube video of the compilation:
[TAS] Marble Blast Gold - Beginner Levels by DomTurchi in 2:03.600
I've been recommended by a couple people to better archive the scripted TASes I've been working on, and so this thread has been created as an outlet to do as such. Here, I will post all of my TASes that are scripted by HiGuy's tool. Some general information first:
- The game registers 1/65535 distinct camera angles, though its not necessarily human possible to physically move the camera to these positions nor does the game visually show all of these camera angles. All the camera angles are sharp turns as this maximizes acceleration in a given direction, but is obviously not humanly possible.
- A few of these TAS'es utilize rolling from one input to another. The game accelerates each direction independently, and at times it is minutely optimal to press one key a few frames before another to manipulate spin.
- A couple new starts have been 'found' due to these TASes including what I like to call the KallePerks tweak. It is faster on many of these stages to roll after the Natural Bounce in the Kalle tweak (similar to the hPerks tweak) to maximize acceleration before continuously jumping.
Now for the a little nitty gritty. This first post has been updated to include all beginner level information. Recs/scripts are attached and a link to the compilation is included at the bottom.
Learning to Roll (2.249): This was actually the last of the trio that I did, and is the simplest one. It is a single camera turn a couple frames after the jump that allows me manipulate spin with the shortest path to the edge as possible. I believe the slightly altered rotation causes a less aggressive trim edge hit, so I get more speed and land in the finish before actually bouncing. Floating point rounding caused me to need to make a second version for Mac.
Collect The Gems (8.428): An optimization of Cobalt's Rewind TAS (8.467) which uses an alternate edge hit path. The auto-start is still necessary and the turn for the two quick edge hits is very tight. I found jumping these gave me the best results, however, it made collecting gems 1 & 2 very difficult as I was fighting a lot of momentum. Because of that, there are some harsh camera turns to optimize the speed of these grabs and still be in position for gem 3. The jump at the end only saves .001 but usually saves nothing plus it's very easy to lose a ton jumping early. For some reason, gem 6 is not grabbed on Mac, so a separate Mac version is attached.
Jump Training (3.611): Originally a 3.633 by optimizing m@s's WRR5 PB. DKman00 got a 3.636 the night of the reveal with a no-roll strat which, after dissecting his PB, was utilized in this TAS. The double jump trim hit is extremely precise and saves about .01.
Learn the Super Jump (2.881): Gonna come clean... basically not my TAS. Nature Freak gave me his TAS which is an incredibly elegant small single camera turn. All I did to speed things up was clean up the script, saved 1ms with a slightly different camera angle and found that manipulating IC at the end saved 1ms.
Platform Training (5.705): Xelna's PB is insane. Enough said. I tried everything to bring this down further but the balance between gaining enough speed to jump the gap but not be too fast to hop of the platform complicated things. The second hop on the platform was always faster for unknown reasons. A TAS only .004 is saved by back-spinning before the jump to maximize forward spin the rest of the run.
Learn the Super Speed (2.738): I originally TASed a 2.749 using the RTA route, but Xelna wanted me to try out some finish sign edge hits and it ended up working! The idea is to basically not slow down at all, but in practice I had to slow down 12 ms with specific camera angles to hit the tip of the finish sign. Just the tip. You also want to hit it in a sort of angle as getting hit straight down is .02 slower for some reason. This TAS looks a bits weird as the 1f flick to activate the super speed doesnt register even on Matan's 120fps recordings. There is a separate version of this TAS for Mac.
Elevator (3.558): The 3.559 by DKman00 and Xelna are probably the human limit. This TAS saves a mere .001 by jumping ~10ms earlier and rolling > into ^> to curve around the edge into the finish. This is possible on a very specific slightly left camera and has an extremely tight window. A lot of various starts were tested, but the frame perfect jump ended up being ideal as the platform trigger is simply a plane around the trap, and the fastest forward velocity is achieved with this start.
Air Movement (2.917): Another TAS that I borrowed from Nature Freak, but this one I found a sizeable improvement. By hitting the sign a little more to the right, the resulting edge hit pushes the marble slightly more out and to the right. This allows for earlier backspin, and this faster turn around is needed in order to fall into the finish without bouncing, but you do need to turn the camera slightly to do so.
Gyrocopter (2.717): This start is interesting as there was an ever so slightly longer delay on when WASD is released for the start pad trick. This slightly slower start for some reason caused the marble to fall a bit more steeply, so I was able to activate the gyrocopter slightly earlier.
Time Trial (2.155): This TAS is what caused me to discover the KallePerks tweak. By delaying the roll after the NB, it is possible to not need any IC or camera shenanigans to get the Time Stop earlier.
Super Bounce (2.873): This is mostly an optimized camera angle to maximize the time rolling. Similar to Gyrocopter, it was faster to slightly delay when to let go of WASD for the start pad trick because the bounce into the finish registered ever so slightly earlier.
Gravity Helix (5.042): A new start discovered by Doomblah and optimized in this TAS. The rest of the stage is essentially just 2 camera angle changes (one right into Gravity Switch 1 and another just after the bounce after exiting Gravity Switch 2) with a tiny not humanly possible one shorter after the second camera turn that saved an additional .001 under very specific conditions.
Shock Absorber (2.871): This was my first ever TAS and started it all. It uses Regi's delayed start which is optimized by actually bouncing a little after go, thus maximizing how late we can start the spin and just barely clear the first edge. In additional, the rolling between directions in employed twice: once at the start and the next on the turnaround. At the start, the TAS rolls < into <^ with a mere 12ms delay between inputs, but this was necessary to optimize the turnaround where the opposite > into v> occurs. There is no releasing of WASD at all throughout this TAS, rather, exploiting the fact that directions accelerate independently to curve around the two edges and maximizing velocity for the bounce into the finish.
There and Back Again (7.623): This is another one that I could not have done without Nature Freak. I spent hours trying to figure out how to get the sign hit and couldnt find anything, then got access to his script and still barely improved anything at all. Eventually I found that by holding <^ just before the first sign hit, you can turn the camera and back spin later and thus hit the first sign with more speed. I feel like this is TAS only though... There is a separate MAC version for this TAS.
Marble Materials Lab (4.362): This TAS Nature Freak and I did separately, but came to the same conclusions. The slope jump is frame perfect and requires IC manipulation to nearly 30fps in order to reduce the height of the jump and catch the last two gems. I ended up saving 1ms over Nature Freaks TAS due to a camera perfect angle into the finish. This TAS is probably maxed.
Bumper Training (2.253): Similar to Learning to Roll, but the slope isnt as sunk into the ground. As a result, not only is there a slight turn at the start, but also a slight turn right after the edge hit for maximum speed.
Breezeway (2.477): Apparently, the Kalle tweak is possible after a slight roll after the NB. You need very precise camera turns to hit the sign post but not the sign itself. Even more precision and you can quickly jump after the sign post and save a ton of time. Unfortunately, the fans cause the TAS to desync with slower times (or outright fail) on lower frame rates. On my 160fps iMac, I had a 50% success rate, and on the successes saw a lot of 2.481. Because this is an issue related to frame rate when playing back recs rather than the OS, I did not bother attaching other versions.
Mine Field (2.187): Credit goes to Nature Freak for this TAS. It is 99% his work, but his TAS did not work on Windows. While trying to stabilize his TAS for Windows, I found a slight tweak where I moved the time he turned the camera to just before the edge hit, stabilizing the TAS to work on both Mac and Windows and saving .001. I'm not sure if this humanly possible, but the idea is to have a slighty left camera angle as you can delay the jump every so slightly later since the corners of the pad stick out a bit more, and then turn the camera at the latest possible moment to steer the marble into the edge hit.
Trapdoors! (2.177): TT2.0. Nothing different other than subtle changes in the start pad trick and KallePerks tweak.
Tornado Bowl (1.445): The Time Travel in this is super weird... the hit box makes no sense. Grabbing this optimally made it basically impossible to get up and over the slope for the second TT, so I ended up finding an alternative path that also skips the third TT. Its all basically swag though. There is a separate version of this TAS for Mac.
Pitfalls (9.814 Win/9.815 Mac): The TAS I am probably most proud of for this bunch. Cobalt's start for his rewind TAS was basically perfect, and his jump pattern is absolutely necessary to get the right edge hits. I spent hours tweaking this to get the lowest jump I could in the right angle such that the edge hit at the pit is as fast as possible. The second half of the level is a tweak I came up with where instead of jumping low and keeping speed after the wall jump, I stay high and get a forward edge hit on a pit. As a player, you should be fine to the finish, but the TAS goes so fast that it jumps the first frame after it clears the pit and was running into the front of the pit at the end. Because of that, I needed to turn the camera and get another side edge hit on the last pit to be sent directly to the center of the finish pad. The Mac version is .001 slower as I started getting tired of making Mac versions by this point...
Platform Party (6.291 Win/6.292 Mac): So what is going on - well a few things are certains. For starters, it is most likely impossible to bullet to the finish as the trajectory simply never sends the marble directly to the finish pad. Because of that, locked frame rate was emulated to slow things down a little. Traplaunches are also highly variable, but I did recognize patterns after spending dozens of hours chipping away at this TAS. For starters, the launch itself is completely position-based and typically sets in place the xy position and initial speed. IC then slows the speed which in turn affects the z axis. If the launch is too fast, it becomes impossible to manipulate the marble with camera, so it's important that the IC slows the marble down enough that you can still curve into the finish, but fast enough to get up to the platform and get the fastest time. 64fps seemed to hit that sweet spot.
IC was, for the most part, very close to 64 fps. This launch is most likely not possible though as the final frame during the squeeze is 11ms which I do not believe occurs at 64 FPS. That's not say that this trajectory is impossible, but the way I did it in the TAS is mostly likely not realistically possible. It might be possible to go slightly faster than this launch, but I know that even slightly faster speeds dramatically reduced my ability to use camera turn to influence direction. This would mean that I would need extremely aggressive camera turns which usually mean much slower times, but if you launched even closer to the platform then you'd need less camera turn and thus save more time. So it is tough to say if this is improvable and by how much, but finding a launch that works at all is a needle in a haystack. That can a project for someone else...
Winding Road (9.497 Win/9.498 Mac): The start of this is a bit different than the start of Pitfalls as you need to have a different angle for the second edge hit. I did experiment with jumping after the second edge hit but its slower, most likely because you come to a near complete stop. The resulting friction of needing to speed up again was a .06 time loss. There is no Mac version as the rec should play on Mac but be .001 slower.
Grand Finale (27.729): I could write a thesis on this level... Xelna knew that sub 28 was possible so I put 10 days into this TAS. I spent 5 days trying to look for possible moving platform skips and nothing worked, so by day 6 I was trying to figure out how to optimize the moving platform jump. Cobalt and I both came to the same conclusion to do an edge hit, however, my TAS was going so fast that I could not jump off the platform like in Xelna's PB. The result was spending about 4 days tweaking the momentum and angle of the gyro activation wall hit, then the momentum and location of the gem 5 bounce. Whats going on is that I purposely delay the activation of the Gyro until after the wall hit. This sets up the moving platform timing but also causes the marble to travel up more slowly. I grab gem 4 much later, and then wall hit much higher. This is necessary for a higher bounce after you fall from the gyro ending.
The magic really happens after the bounce. I optimized the velocity and camera angle of this bounce such that I don't land on the gem 5, but bounce into gem 5, ramp matrix gem 6, and fall into the MP edge hit which just so happens to hit me at the exact angle that sends me to gem 7. Because of that, the camera turn after the edge hit is basically perfect, maximizing the velocity towards gem 7 and needing only a slight turn to get the right jump location over the pit to gem 8. Gem 7 is a frame perfect catch where if my momentum is built even 1ms longer I'd jump over it. The ending was actually pretty easy to fine tune since all of this is so delicate than changing basically anything breaks the rec. There is no Mac version of this TAS as it breaks right at the bounce, and I cannot be asked to spend 4 days fine tuning a separate Mac version.
Link to Matan's Youtube video of the compilation:
[TAS] Marble Blast Gold - Beginner Levels by DomTurchi in 2:03.600
