• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.
  • Do you have audio editing experience and want to help out with the Famiboards Discussion Club Podcast? If so, we're looking for help and would love to have you on the team! Just let us know in the Podcast Thread if you are interested!

Retro SM64’s Invisible Walls Explained Once and for All - Pannenkoek2012

WestEgg

WestEgg

King of the Krocs
Administrator
Pronouns
he/him


In this nearly four hour analysis, Pannenkoek2012 breaks down the nature of walls, ceilings, out of bounds, and why Mario sometimes bonks against invisible walls.
 
I’m 50 minutes in and feel like I understand the logic of why the invisible walls exist…

Which means I likely understand nothing and will regret my hubris.
 
WestEgg said:
I’m 50 minutes in and feel like I understand the logic of why the invisible walls exist…

Which means I likely understand nothing and will regret my hubris.
Click to expand...

You know it's a slow time for us Nintendo fans when we watch four hour documentaries on invisible walls in Super Mario 64. :p
 
Hour and a half in and am reflecting on how the random and uncaring nature of our broken universe can unceremoniously snatch away your life faster than comprehension allows. Missteps into even well travelled paths roll the dice on our right to exist within them, and while the odds of catastrophe are low, they are never truly zero.
 
WestEgg said:
Hour and a half in and am reflecting on how the random and uncaring nature of our broken universe can unceremoniously snatch away your life faster than comprehension allows. Missteps into even well travelled paths roll the dice on our right to exist within them, and while the odds of catastrophe are low, they are never truly zero.
Click to expand...
pass that bong over here dude
 
Previously on Lost said:
pass that bong over here dude
Click to expand...
You don’t yet understand how the slight tilt of triangles is all that stands between the illusion of safety as we perceive it, the complete wresting of meaningful choice, or the cessation of existence. I envy you.
 
This thread reminded me of that one person that was so high, they thought they were deaf because they saw a movie with the TV on mute lol
 
You all laugh but watch the video and I swear you’ll see these are all perfectly reasonable observations.
 
WestEgg said:
It’s worse than you thought. The ceilings. Are. Leaking.

Upwards.
Click to expand...
tenor.gif
 
Ecliptor said:
Do I need to understand parallel universes to watch this?
Click to expand...
So far no, negative speed has only been brought up once, and just to explain how to reach the unloaded side of the second floor staircase to find an out of bounds invisible wall.
 
0
A gentle reminder that sometimes moving mounds of snow will decide that we deserve to die randomly.
 
SQUISH CANCEL GROUND POUND CHAIN IS A VIABLE WAY TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF LEAKS CAUSED BY TRIANGLE OVERLAPS TO PRESS THE A BUTTON FEWER TIMES FOR CERTAIN STARS.

It’s all come full circle.
 
I wasn’t intending to, but I ended up watching the whole thing in one go, and honestly it’s easily his best work. Nothing will ever be like learning about parallel universes in Watch for Rolling Rocks, but the pacing, explanations, clear knowledge of the game, and incorporating live examples from speed runners hitting these invisible walls made for a very entertaining video.

Highly recommend this one.
 
This sort of thing is why I say that Mario 64 interactions, especially involving Mario's speed and the geometry, are in comparison to even other games of its era, strange and mystifying, and not at all consistent and predictable unless you've been subconsciously trained by the game to fear and avoid these events as much as possible. Like how since childhood I always use side flips to turn around near a ledge because if I stop and turn Mario's speed setting might get confused and cause him to turn wide and walk off the edge. Its behavior is sometimes only "consistent" in the sense that it has an explanation. Which might take literal hours to explain and boil down to "it's essentially random" on the player's end, but it isn't cosmic rays. It works as you would expect most of the time, but then there are the many, many little moments shown throughout this video where it does something weird and completely unpredictable that might just kill you out of nowhere. This is by far the biggest way in which the game shows its age compared to later 3D platformers.
 
I literally, no hyperbole, have just fixed my sleep schedule and already have to offer Gamechamp my last video of the night, then I see this absolute supervillain
 
I wasn't strong enough to watch the whole thing but I think I gleaned a lot of the important chunks and tbh the finale was a work of art, but also terrifying - seeing all these opportunities for sudden unexpected death/disruption made visible is kind of cosmically unsettling, Mario 64 feels like a much less "safe" place seeing this truth lol
 
Amazing. Nothing on the internet is quite like an extensive Pannenkoek joint.

Here for the melt.
 
I am watching this video and I’m 5/8 invisible wall types in. Very cool to learn exactly why I’ve died to certain spots over the years. Particularly of note to me so far was the ceiling in Hazy Maze Cave you have to climb on over the big boulder pit that you can infuriatingly lose your grip on and all of the shenanigans near the big moving boxes surrounded by quick sand in Shifting Sand Land. I’ve definitely had shells cancel out, and I’m pretty sure I’ve had a wing cap not cooperate and have bonked there too.
 
I fell asleep watching this last night and my dreams have been extremely interesting.

That said, I finally have an explanation to why I kept bonking off the sides of the bridge in Cool Cool Mountain. This is a very cool video.
 
I didn't watch all of it but it was pretty interesting, and also gave me a few moments of "wait I smashed into that years ago and had no idea what happened!"

Also some of the tricks the devs used are hilarious. Poor Mario getting his hat taken away every frame.
 
0
I'm slowly working my way through this monster of a video. I'm maybe an hour in and I feel like I'm learning so much! This guy really did some work here.
 
0
I watched about 90 minutes of the video. I might finish the rest but I mostly understand the various ways the issues can happen. As cool as it is to see essentially every example in the game, it's almost too much. I say this as someone who loves 2-3 hour video essays.
 
0
Since SM64 is my favorite game (and as a fellow programmer and aspiring game dev), this was a joy to watch. It's crazy to me that there is still so much to learn about this game decades later.

I think this might be his best work yet, somehow even better than learning about how to traverse parallel universes in his other video.
 
As cool as reverse engineered source ports are, I think a really underrated part of them is being able to fully understand programming jank like this. Even with Pannenkoek's vast knowledge of this game that he's shown for years, I doubt the explanations here would be anywhere near as in depth and definitive if the source code was not reverse engineered.
 
0
Finally finished this beast of a video. I feel like I learned so very much about SM64, and now I find myself wondering how this game is even playable, what with all the literal death traps that are seemingly everywhere.

What a fantastic video.
 
I scrubbed around instead of watching the whole thing but, uh, wowie zowie. This is a wild video lol. And cheers to Pannenkoek2012 for breaking things down in a way even dumb-dumbs like me can understand
 
Garlic said:
We have the same feed it seems lol
Click to expand...
only if it also has Grimbeard and, for some reason, recent reuploads of video game osts with like, under 40 views, some of which are cool and new, but some are just like...Gerudo Desert.
no shade to gerudo desert its just why?????
 
0
He released a separate video that’s just the ending showing where all the walls are. Something about the Mario 64 credits roll music just feels so emotional to me.

 
Soul Skater said:
Why is this game the only one with its own theoretical physics classes
Click to expand...
As an early game pioneering the 3D platforming space, the team made a lot of decisions for which better solutions have since been found. Many of the more bonkers physics stuff also revolves around poorly chosen or mismatched data types, which was something more common on earlier hardware to conserve RAM (and integer math being more performant).

Nowadays, collision coordinates would just be some type of float, a way of storing numbers with a decimal value, which would instantly take care of a ton of these invisible walls. Similarly, parallel universes wouldn't exist as you wouldn't have the range mismatch between Mario's position and the map data.

TL;DR The theoretical physics stuff comes from computer science problems that the industry got better at avoiding after 1996.

Red Monster said:
Finally finished this beast of a video. I feel like I learned so very much about SM64, and now I find myself wondering how this game is even playable, what with all the literal death traps that are seemingly everywhere.

What a fantastic video.
Click to expand...
Watching the video highlight each wall and consistently show Mario bouncing off them, it's quite easy to forget the note at the beginning that many of these walls are rather easy to pass through if you're moving straight at them with reasonable speed. They're still hidden death traps, but you've probably passed through quite a lot without hitting them.
 
I wish the video would acknowledge Super Mario 64 DS in some way, because I’m curious to know if it has these same issues as well, or if things were fixed in that version. If the latter is true, that’d just be another reason why SM64DS is superior! =p
 
0
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top Bottom