Visual time of 13:39.77, due to lag, again.
In the premieres of the Desert Bus 64 TASes I've made, many people have asked questions along the lines of "Are there any spots you can BLJ in?" or "How fast could this be done with BLJs?" among others. In the standard hack, unfortunately, no BLJ spots exist; the road is completely flat, and any off-road structures are inaccessible because of invisible walls on the sides. Despite this impossibility, I made a TAS that uses BLJs anyway, thanks to some lua scripting.
Unfortunately, even with access to unlimited negative speed, it's still not an instant-win as you'd expect. This is because the game doesn't actually render the entire length of the journey at once. Instead, the scope of the playing field is effectively a 7998 unit long, 1600 unit wide rectangle, centered at the origin. When Mario's X Coordinate reaches 3999, he's teleported back to X = 0, and a separate counter is incremented. When this counter reaches 10,053, you win.
Because of this bounding box and because of a separate out of bounds wall that appears to always be located about 2000 units away from Mario, trying to BLJ and conserve more than 2000 speed results in Mario's quarter frame movement being messed up, and outright killed if he tries doing movement in the air with this speed. So due to the design of this hack, -2000 speed or so is Mario's new limit, and I TASed with these limitations in mind.
Due to the TAS still taking 13 and a half minutes, repeatable movement was key for doing this without my hair going white. The best strategy I could come up with was starting a BLJ, getting about -2284 speed, walking backwards until the heat meter went to 100 and burned me, and jump kicking to conserve my speed afterwards (Now that my speed is low enough to not be blocked by the out of bound wall) until I need to do another BLJ. Mario's speed gradually decreases even with the best ways of conserving it, so it becomes a mathematical optimization problem of the best number of jump kicks per BLJ cycle; doing too many jump kicks means you're wasting time at lower speeds when you could be doing another BLJ to get back up to speed, and doing too few jump kicks means you're not using a BLJ cycle to its fullest extent before starting another one.
After bruteforcing different numbers of jump kicks over the course of two days, the final number I found before throwing in the towel was 39.5; one cycle of 39 followed by one cycle of 40, which saved a singular frame over doing cycles of 40 exclusively.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Become a member! (If you want): / @dyllonstejgaming
Check out my Patreon! / dyllonstej
My Discord Server: discordapp.com/invite/T7rZqbm
My Side Channel: / @dyllonstejstuff
Twitter: / dstejgaming
My Project M/Brawl Mods: www.dropbox.com/sh/67ce97vfa4...