posting on an ancient thread... but a speedrun for mario kart doesn't seem to have emerged and I have an idea of how to make one.
I don't have time to make it now, but might in the Summer, these are my ideas at the moment:
Find out in the RAM where the:
(speed, position, facing, height, vertical speed, number of coins)
for the player-kart are stored.
Divide the map into 'time-zones' each with a 'frames-to-cross' roughly along the route by hand:
Then have a bot brute force search (breadth first) all the input combinations, with some pruning. Prune a 'search node' if:
the kart in one of the other search nodes got to the next time zone less than 'frames-to-cross' frames ago -- prune out slow ones
the kart in another search node had roughly the same (speed, position, facing, height, vertical speed) currently or in some frame this lap, as these are sorta duplicates. Also, if the kart in the other search node and this one got to the same place at about the same frame, prune the one with less coins.
Choosing which power up to get can be done by hand, and a 'zone' similar to the 'time-zones' should be made, within which the bot can use the power up.
On a powerful computer left running for a week or so, this may produce good results.
What do people think? Am I crazy? ;-)