Does the unplug trick let the Tingle Tuner work anywhere else? For example, in Hyrule Castle, or in the exterior part of Ganon's tower (where trial skip is done)?
Also, I made a version of Lua that works on more modern builds of Dolphin, if that would help? (it's from about a year ago).
The Tingle Tuner exploit only works in all the Ganon's Tower stages (minus the Ganondorf stage being boss type), which includes where trials skip is done yes. It does not work anywhere else in the game with one exception being ADMumi (the stage with the bell after beating Tower of the Gods). So it does not work in Hyrule Castle, in caves or in houses for example.
If you have a link to your build with lua scripting I would be interested to take a look. TASing this game pretty much cannot be done decently well without scripts now really, as important things like superswimming and salvaging need scripts to be optimized. Last I tried newer dolphin builds were still more desync prone than the old dolphin 4 build we use but I'll gladly try again.
This went unnoticed here but a skyward sword any% TAS has been made this year:
Link to video
The route involves entering and leaving a grotto in eldin volcano early using a difficult trick known as lava hops consecutively. That grotto entrance is very specific (entrance 5 in room 2), and corresponds to the cutscene of opening the gate of time in the Sealed Temple. By using a Back in Time glitch called Cutscene Wrong Warping, and going to Faron in BiT, we get to use the entrance saved on our file in the area we are in Back in Time (the sealed temple) and activate that cutscene very early, giving us access to Hylia's Temple. To access the horde we do the same trick with a different entrance to wrong warp into the cutscene after beating Skykeep, which sets a layer where the door to the horde exists in the past and we can open it. The route is quite complicated and a lot of things just happen to work out quite nicely. Compared to the RTA route, Earth Temple and Lanayru are completely skipped.
Shoutouts to Darmabi for this great movie !
I don't really understand it. Going through "1 pixel" means the game only uses a point as a collision for Link. I always assumed the game used multiple points or a diamond shape or something. This is something that I quickly dismissed back in the early days of testing.
The game does several collision checks. It first does a pinpoint check by considering Link to be one point in space. So it checks whether there is any collision between Link's current position and where he should be on the next frame and stops him if there's any collision inbetween. So if you can cleanly squeeze inbetween two walls you have the potential of clipping through. This can happen if two walls or misaligned, but most of the time it happens we believe there's no real gap between walls, but there are rounding errors which does create this gap.
Once that collision check is done, then the game checks if Link's push collider intersects collision. If you don't get far enough past the wall in one frame, you are pushed back by it. A minimum displacement of at least 35 units is necessary to go through a seam (that's about the size of Link's push colliders radius). There are very few ways to get that much displacement in one frame without superswimming. One of them is getting pushed by an object (usually bombs), but the recent discovery is that you also barely get that displacement on the first frame of a running slash/stab.
About the tingle tuner exploit, it turns out it basically only works in Ganon's Tower because GT's stage type is set to dungeon type, and that seems to be a requirement. I remember trying this idea a long time ago in Gohdan's boss room but obviously it didn't work there as it's a boss type stage. The disconnect x2 exploit needed to be tested specifically in GT, luckily it's the best area for it to work lol.
The community is always thinking about what an any% TAS of this game would look like. The huge issue with TASing this game is the existance of actor unloading. Theoretically, the power of skipping the helmaroc cutscene and then the ganondorf cutscene at the end of the run is already very powerful, but also skipping the courtyard cutscene in Hyrule 2 can skip FF1 so it should be faster for a TAS. TASing Actor Unloading in general is a huge pain though as the old version of dolphin that we use with lua scripting support and basically no desync problems has issues with it: it's inaccurate with console + it creates a ton of desyncs. Also routing AU is basically all chance, we don't have a good way to make fragmentation routes but trial and error right now. Newer dolphin builds still emulate AU inaccurately to my knowledge. Loadings are faster on dolphin than on console, it could be related.