tef

bad poster & mediocre photographer

  • they/them

if you're sitting on the fence about the four hour long video about edge cases in super mario 64, i don't blame you. it took me several hours before i decided to dive in. i thought four hours was a long time to spend talking about "walls without textures", and thankfully there's way more to it than that.

sm64 contains several types of accidental walls, places where the collision mechanics just don't work right, and they're the sort of bizarre little edge cases we've come to expect from mr pancake.

that said, if you're just interested in the mechanics, rather than an encyclopaedic tour of bonkable places, there's a lot you can skip. it's also pretty watchable at 4x speed but that might just be me.

anyway, if you're still unconvinced, here's a spoiler ridden summary of what you can expect:


the video identifies eight types of invisible wall. the first is the one you're expecting. walls without texture. the second and third cover floors, ceilings, and out of bounds areas. these are the most boring kinds of walls, and the video doesn't spend too much time on them. it's more about introducing the collision mechanics on their own, before showing how things fuck up when combined.

the key point is that ceiling tiles extend up to infinity, or the next floor surface above. bad shit happens when a ceiling is meant to be covered by a floor, and invisible walls sprout from nowhere, up to the heavens.

this turns out to happen a lot of the time.

when you draw lines across a pixel grid, things don't always neatly align. if you're drawing more complex shapes, and meeting a line halfway, it might not be where you think it is. this causes floor and ceiling tiles to fall out of alignment, and weird things start happening. it also happens if a level designer made a mistake.

this gives four more types of invisible walls. "devs forgot to align the points" and "devs forgot to add a point where lines meet, and math is hard" for both floors and ceilings.

then comes the last type. the most fucked up one. a combination of "we avoided expensive checks by only checking one vertice" plus "we then forgot to sort the vertices so some checks are wrong" and "oh god this interacts with the infinite ceiling" and it's just complete whackytown frolics from then on.

A+ video


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