SM64 ABC History Part 8 Additional Notes

Note 1 (3:00): It takes that long because the amount of speed given to the bully is proportional to the squares of the speeds involved. Initially, a collision gives the bully about 5 speed, but at the end, one collision gives the bully 0.048 speed.

Note 2 (3:45): The signed 32-bit integer limit, 2^31, is exactly 2^16 times larger than the displacement angle, 2^15. So after 2^16 frames (36.4 minutes), the angle has drifted by 2^16 angle units, or exactly one full turn, and the angle is just shy of 2^31.

Note 3 (4:43): This is made more complicated by the fact that because the game uses lookup tables for trigonometric functions, collisions cannot result in every possible angle, only about 10% of angles can be achieved. Finding even collision angles sometimes required waiting for the bully to rotate a bit. Yes, Pannenkoek did use a brute forcer for that process.

Note 4 (5:39): Once the bully finds a floor to move onto, before the movement is actually made, friction is applied to his speed. For some reason, the friction coefficient is based on the floor the bully is calculated to move to, but applied before it actually does that move. In this particular case, the coefficient is 0.8, so the bully loses 20% of its speed, causing it to actually end up way short of the elevator. This is clearly an error by the developers but its effect in normal circumstances is negligible.

Note 5 (5:48): While it's moving in bounds, the bully's visual position lags one frame behind its real position. This doesn't happen when the out of bounds failsafe is triggered, causing it to visually appear in the same position two frames in a row. When talking about the moment the bully goes back in bounds, I took the liberty of using the next frames for visual clarity. In fact, if you look closely at 5:46, you can see the bully visually appear close to the camera for two frames in a row, but on the first of those frames, its shadow is on the far rock. What's happening is that the bully's real position is over lava on the frame before the bully can be seen. Then, when the bully appears over the lava, its shadow is on the rock, at its real position. On the frame after that, the failsafe triggers again and from that moment onwards the bully appears where it actually is.

Note 6 (7:28): The exposed ceiling Mario gets moved into is from the back side of the elevator platform, not the underside. The one right next to where Mario ends up, however, is from the underside of the platform. The underside is not slanted enough to cause a squish push. The check for Mario being moved out of the ceiling only happens on a squish push, which means the underside is no good for squish cancel.

Note 7 (8:13): This is because the bully is not fully perpendicular to the collision, which lets him transfer most of his speed to Mario and keep enough to stay hovering (or in this case, zoom across the map twice in half a second).

Note 8 (14:20): Technically, you can spawn more than one 100-coin star if you overflow your coins on the Japanese N64 version. But you can't get 65636 coins on Tick Tock Clock - cloning coins adds to the object count, so you can only get 279 coins (when not A-restricted) before you overflow the object count and crash the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dokE1J5wlhE&t=1067s

Note 9 (17:54): For Mario to be burned, his position needs to be inside the fire's hitbox without Mario's own hitbox touching any of the hitboxes of fire clones later in the processing order. This forces fire clones to be at least 37 units away from each other (the size of Mario's hitbox).

Note 10 (18:07): The elevator goes up by 6 units each frame and has a total range of motion of 200 units. When its position exceeds that range, it gets capped at that 200 maximum. Because 200 is not divisible by 6, this leaves two sets of possible positions, one going up and one going down. Furthermore, Mario can touch the fire clone one frame earlier than the optimal frame, which adds a couple more possible heights.

Note 11 (20:47): Again, it's possible to line up the fire clones in sets of 3 by slightly varying their heights and the setup to reach the ledge, lowering the amount of different HOLPs, and by extension, trips up the clock, needed to get past this part multiple times.

Note 12 (21:37): This specific nuance has never been particularly relevant in any of the ABC strategies, so it was never brought up until now.

Note 13 (23:02): This rotation is 2048 angle units per frame, or 1/32th of a turn. So, Mario can do a full rotation is just above one second. Also, if Mario is running fast enough and the stick is held more than 90º away from his facing angle, he will start to do a sliding turnaround instead (an action that he can sideflip from).

Note 14 (24:45): Normally, Mario can't get pushed around by objects in the punching action, except on the very first frame, which is the case here.

Note 15 (24:58): Mario has to spend at least one frame in a grabbing action before he can actually grab an object. If Mario dove directly at the bob-omb, it would take an extra frame to actually grab it, but before he was already punching on the frame before, he can grab it on the first frame of the dive because he was already in a grabbing action. This is the same mechanic behind light Chuckya. For Mario to have enough height to reach the spinner, he needs at least 22 vertical speed, so it was crucial that this dive grab would have to be done in a single frame.

Note 16 (27:18): Burning damage depends on the length of time Mario spends burning, which can be minimized by grinding on a ledge. More info on how burning works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeGNpeFOOCY&t=687s

Note 17 (35:28): Recently, some work has been put into trying to get around this requirement, mostly for time saving purposes. A blueprint for bouncing up using two goombas has been made, but so far, it has only been done using hacked initial conditions that may or may not be possible to achieve for real.

Note 18 (35:38): Sliding speed is preserved on pause exits, and if you enter the map you go to already underwater. The only three examples of that are falling out of Vanish Cap under the Moat, leaving Dire Dire Docks through the Bowser door, and entering the sunken ship in Jolly Roger Bay. Technically, entering the Secret Aquarium also preserves sliding speed, but here, there is no meaningful way to reactivate it other than a pause exit.

Note 19 (37:39): In fact, it's even more annoying than that. The elevator moves down, so at the peak of Mario's height relative to the elevator, Mario is moving down as well. Since the elevator moves in full steps and Mario moves in quartersteps, Mario does have the height to clear the wall for one quarterstep. But on the second quarterstep, he moves down and can no longer clear it. The wall is 50 units thick, which means it takes 100 speed to reach the outer wall hitbox.

BONUS NOTE (40:28): The rundown of how it works can be found here: https://pastebin.com/TiCGb954