Red Ball Tool-Assisted Speedrun World Record Explained

A Video by Maximum - A TAS or Tool-assisted speedrun is a demonstration of the best theoretical completion of a video game, where a sequence of inputs are programmed ahead of time are read by the game. Thanks to the immense dedication of a select group of individuals, Red Ball’s nature as a physics sandbox has been thoroughly exploited in order to produce a TAS speedrun of just 2 minutes and 28 seconds. In this video, we will go level by level through the current Red Ball TAS, thoroughly analyzing every single glitch, strategy, and technique that is used, which will include a detailed, technical explanation of why the infamous spike glitch works, a glitch that can seemingly grant Red Ball invincibility to spikes just by briefly pausing the game. This is the Red Ball Tool Assisted Speedrun World Record fully explained.
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Maximum Personal Links:
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0:00 - Introduction
1:44 - Background
4:20 - Level 1
7:53 - Level 2
9:20 - Level 3 Part 1
10:16 - Spike Glitch Explanation
18:36 - Level 3 Part 2
19:33 - Level 4
21:53 - Level 5
22:36 - Level 6
24:05 - Level 7
25:34 - Level 8
27:31 - Level 9
28:57 - Level 10
30:12 - Level 11
33:28 - Level 12
34:58 - Level 13
36:19 - Level 14
37:07 - Level 15
37:46 - Level 16
38:33 - Level 17
39:42 - Conclusion
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#maximum #speedrun #tas

[Vertic]

The fact that red ball experienced such pressure from the car tells us a lot about the role of technological industry in the wellbeing of the society

[ExplodingWaffle]

i can’t believe spike glitch is so scuffed under the hood. what a world

[__]

"one would probably expect the TAS to be just a moderate improvement"
*Anyone who has seen a TAS before:* yeah no I wouldn't really expect that

[declanquintanilla]

I love how it’s become a staple when explaining video game physics to play the SM64 file select song

[coolssh]

Only recently have I truly learned how useful TAS's are for speedrunning. They break down the game in question, sometimes in ways that most humans cannot achieve, in order to discover what the fastest methods of completing said game are. And seeing one broken down like this makes them even more awe-inspiring.

[orangepaprika]

I remember playing this game many many years when I was younger, wow didn't expect people to do a complicated tas on this

[BradenBest]

19:12 "note that down is the positive y direction in flash"

This is actually true of all 2D game engines. It's just simpler to set the origin at the top left since that's the direction that raster/framebuffer rendering goes in. You'll generally only see Y+ pointing upwards in 3D engines where the 1:1 render-area-to-screen relationship ceases to exist (example: in minecraft, Y+ is up).

The reason more specifically has to do with framebuffers, which are a software representation of the pixels on a screen, where coordinates are actually 1D (an offset into the buffer) rather than 2D (an X and Y value). The transformation function from (X, Y) to an offset is `(width * y) + x`, where width is the number of pixels that make up a full row before it wraps back to the other side of the screen, one pixel lower. So "one Y" is worth "width Xes". This can be further extrapolated to 3D ((X, Y, Z) => ZHW + YW + X) but that's not really how 3D rendering works and is more something you would do to manage a 3D grid of data with a 1D array when a 3D array is insufficient performance-wise (rare but not impossible). 3D rendering involves using several transformation functions to simulate a camera looking at the scene, painting what the camera "sees" to a virtual canvas, and then 2D-rendering the canvas (and then there's things like raycasting which is the same thing but done on a 2D scene to make it look 3D, which is why games like Doom are said to be 2.5D--a typically top-down 2D scene rendered to look 3D, which is distinct from taking a 3D scene and rendering it to look 3D). Graphics libraries tend to allow you to use framebuffers directly (even the HTML5 canvas 2D rendering context provides an "image data" object that lets you "skip the middle man" for more efficient rendering), though it's rarely seen in practice because the increase in complexity isn't usually warranted.

[notverygood]

:) pleasure helping you with this max! thank you for you and the rest of the team's work on this!

[broran_]

That was a fast 40 minutes, wow.

10/10 🔴

[haniyasu]

I don't think I've ever played this game before, but as someone who has made a physics engine before, it is _incredibly_ amusing to see this game's engine be _completely_ abused.

[matthewfanous]

10:16 the sudden pannenkoek music really got me. It’s so ingrained into my brain that I’m about to have a long complicated minut detail of a video game explained to me whenever I hear this song. It’s so fitting.

[CactusStrike]

NINE NINE NINE NINE NINE NIEN NINE (my favorite part)

[EliteElite]

These videos are so well made man keep it up and you may grow way bigger!

[GJDZ]

I want to tell you that I truly appreciate this video... It's long, and I can see it has a lot of careful editing behind it... That is not to mention the in-depth explanations that made me understand so much of a game I never played and didn't know existed until last year.

Thank you for putting so much effort into this video and all the others, mad respect to you.

[Zebo]

I love how it doesn't even matter what game we're talking about. Whenever a TAS has an in-depth explanation of an unintuitive trick, ya gotta play the SM64 file select music, to honor the greatest TAS maker, Pannenkoek.

[NickAndriadze]

It's crazy just how complex the mechanics of this seemingly simple physics game are and how dedicated it's small but faithful community is.

[kingofgrim]

YESSS A NEW VIDEO TO WATCH love these commentarys

[Abyssoft]

This was a really good video, I didn't even think there would be a barrier to TASing Flash games

[InsaneJetman]

Nice work Maximum. Seeing the TAS is all the more impressive when it's understood!

[soildarr]

I love how he fully explains how the TAS did the spike glitch instead of giving a general half assed explanation