How Walls, Floors, & Ceilings work in Super Mario 64

Don't forget the obligatory parallel universes shit

There are countless blog posts/talks on techniques people used when developing their game out there. GDC talks are probably a good place to start.

I love this, it's so rare to see this kind of information about how a game is built.

That's because you're not browsing websites used by actual game developers. If you want to learn how games work then just visit a forum used by developers, or try to make a game. There are lots of tutorials out there.

..or you could just rely on people who don't make games to butcher the facts because they don't know what they're talking about. The wast majority of the videos I see on here are pseudo-intellectual trash that's factually wrong most of the time, so I don't recommend it. Pannen is actually pretty good in my opinion, because he at least doesn't radiate an aura of egoism like some other tubers.

It's the File Select theme, and it's the greatest thing ever

It's not parallel universes, it's number overflow caused by converting one type of number to another. Other games have it, but not in the same occurrence as Mario 64. Another famous one is Gandhi's aggressiveness in Civilization. Since he was so much in the positive end of the spectrum, anything that pushed it towards more positive would cause his personality to overflow and wrap around to the most aggressive side. Most games do min/max checking on numbers so this wouldn't happen, and maybe Mario does, but the speed at which he moves probably messes up that check.

I have actually tried this out! It seems like Rayman 2 and Rayman Rush on the PS1 have parallel universes, although they are quite useless.

Actually, Paper Mario does, too.

If there is, we have no way of getting to it in other games unless if we can figure out ways to build up enough speed

In the original Metroid, you can glitch out the edge of the normal map in a few places, and you'll find yourself in pseudorandom extra areas; some people have tried extensively traversing and mapping them out. They look sort of like mishmashes of regular game geometry, a bit like Pac Man's kill screen but not AS garbagey, and somewhat traversable.

Presumably the game's code was written in a way where it looked up map assets based on Samus's X and Y coordinates, and if you plug in X,Y values outside the normal game map, it extrapolates new terrain. You can recognize pieces of regular game geometry....like a lot of early games, Metroid extensively re-uses certain room layouts with little tweaks.

The original Super Mario Bros technically has 256 worlds to it, owing to how the game stores the value of the world in an unsigned byte (8 bits, 2⁸ possible values). The unsigned part is strange considering that the most infamous of these is the "Minus World" which displays -1 as the level name, but this is because the sprite for the world name is actually a random transparent sprite, so it's more appropriate to think of it as "World Null-1".

Accessing all the other worlds is a bit complicated, as the easiest method requires a Japanese NES that loads games into the top as well as a cartridge of Tennis. This page explains the rest in succinct detail if you're interested.

Ratchet and Clank doesn't.

Swept volumes are quite expensive and usually require good precision floats to evaluate with predictable results. Hit boxes, evaluated in a 2D plane of the velocity vector is significantly cheaper and be done using fixed integer math. SM64 uses short ints for physics calculations.

Well, he released several videos. On one day even 4 at once which felt like Christmas.

The N64 / PS1 era was a turning point where game developers had to learn to think and design around a third dimension. Which was exceedingly difficult and led to many terrible games.

Nintendo didn't just knock it out of the park on the first try, Mario64 set the bar for years to come.

Technically the game is a treasure trove of creative problem solving.

Because he finds it fun? Obviously he loves the game and loves reverse engineering, so he reverse engineers the game he loves

It's among the first games of its type (3d platformer), combined with limitations of the N64 hardware meant the devs had to get really creative. He has an academic interest in understanding the challenges they faced, the solutions they devised, and how those solutions affect gameplay.

Good question.

To answer it, let's talk a bit about parallel universes...

Why not? SM64 is the most popular game in existence to speedrun.

Why are so many scholars obsessed with the literary works of Shakespeare? Maybe because they were masterpieces worthy of study? What makes video game classics less worthy of study?

They're a result of a glitch in collision detection. Positions in Mario 64 are stored as floats, but for some reason those are converted to shorts when checking collisions. Since there's more possible float values than there are short values, some positions are effectively equivalent to each other for the purposes of collision detection.

More people are interested in it. For me, I started getting interested in speedrunning because of siglemic’s marathon in 2012. So SM64 was the starting point for me and is still the game I know most about, even though I have only played it briefly in the 90s when it came out. I guess for many other people it is, because they played SM64 for their own when it came out and the have this fascination when they see videos about it and get started with TASing or speedrunning themselves so even more people get sucked in.

Pannenkoek said himself, that SM64 was his favorite game when he was younger and he wanted to know more about it, so he started exploring it. And now pannenkoek is investing a lot of his free time to this stuff and producing videos, while other people like Tyler Kehne or Peter Fedak do a lot of work in the background and their videos (like the moot door skip last year I believe) do not get that much attention. But it’s still SM64, yeah :D

So to get back to your question: Many more people are interested and running/TASing this game than other games. So that’s why there are so many videos about SM64.