Visual time of 6:32:22.33 due to lag and other things. The input file itself saves just over nine seconds in comparison to the previous TAS I made a few years ago, by hyperoptimizing the slidekick movement down to exact floating point numbers.

Desert Mario 64 is a Super Mario 64 ROM Hack created by Kaze Emanuar that replicates the gameplay of Desert Bus in the style of Super Mario 64. In this, Mario travels from Tucson, Arizona to Las Vegas, Nevada on foot, similar to the original game, with other elements added to spice up the experience, including a heat meter and (more pressingly) a speed limit of 58 ingame units per frame, which becomes a notable issue with TAS and being able to chain frame perfect slidekicks.

To remain right under the 58 speed limit when necessary (Only breaking it in short bursts when Mario's HP is back to full), control stick inputs that change Mario's horizontal position are needed for more precision; this brings an unavoidable amount of drift (Due to the control stick's asymmetrical effect on Mario's movement), that leads to Mario bonking on the side of the road if left unchecked.

Thus, being able to repeat entire sets of inputs over and over to reduce the amount of realtime spent TASing brings two issues: The speed limit (Keeping right under the limit while healing, and breaking it in very occasional bursts) and drift (So Mario doesn't hit the edge of the road).

SuperDavo0001, who made the first TAS of this hack, opted to get as much repeatability out of one single slidekick, and copied that small set of inputs across the entire run (Alongside the limitbreaks mentioned before). In my own first attempt, I noted several key patterns including the number of slide kicks needed to get back to full HP and key control stick values that keep Mario's speed right under the speed limit, which allowed me to make an initial 15 second timesave.

This time, I pushed everything to its limit. By angling the camera diagonally, I now have access to control stick values that are unavailable with a purely frontfacing one (Due to the control stick's deadzones from 7 to +,7 all acting as a value of 0) which crucially allows me to decrease my speed by incredibly miniscule amounts. After enough testing, I was able to find a set of inputs that start and end a cycle with the exact same speed, down to the individual floating point, which means there's absolutely zero variation in speed across the entire run (To be more exact, each cycle starts with 57.9999961853 speed, one floating point below 58.0 exactly which triggers the speed limit). I need to occasionally change the camera angle back to frontfacing in order to do speedkicks with maximum magnitude, but this fortunately doesn't incur any variation.

The first three speed bursts are also slightly different in terms of control stick values to give a slight boost over the previous attempt, which has the side effect of changing what Mario's HP is at when starting a new cycle (Which means large sets of inputs could only be copied after the third burst).

I suspect there might be extra timesave if all the speed boost sections were manually TASed in this manner, but that (almost) removes the convenience of entirely repeated inputs.

Regardless, I'm proud that I was able to find a way to legitimately max the slidekick sections down to the ingame equivalent of the Planck Length. I was also able to mute the ingame Boomer Tunes Copyright Radio™ (Which required me to mute the last video completely), so I put the Mario 64 OST on repeat in its place.

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