Outrun was my first foray into the world of TAS. I did my first run of the game back in October of 2004 and uploaded it to these forums. Someone suggested to me that I should use a trick to drive off road without slowing down and I managed to chop over 20 seconds off my time with it. My time then was 3'51"89. After submitting my Mario Kart 64 TAS I decided to come back to this game. I used everything I had learned about TASing with Mario Kart 64 and applied it here. I managed to chop 1.76 seconds off of an attempt that I thought was nearly perfect at the time (but could not submit due to a nasty desync). This time came as a result of a whole lot of testing. There are 16 different paths that can be taken to beat this game and I had to test all of them. I had two paths that turned out to be nearly equal and clearly better than the others: LLLR and LLRL. It was not until I fully optimized the second level, "Gateway" that LLRL pulled ahead of LLLR ... by 9 frames (the in-game timer had them equal). Before then, LLLR had been faster every time I found an improvement in Gateway.
So, here is the fruits of that labor:
Outrun, LLRL strat, 15,944 frames in-game time of 3'50.13
Now, I would have submitted this run already if it had not been for the fact that I had, on a whim, tried something crazy on the RRRR path (which was obviously slower than LLRL). On the second course, "Devil's Canyon" I managed to dodge into the woods on a particularly nasty jog in the road where I could maintain my speed. Unfortunately, several bushes prevented me from staying there for very long. I had dismissed this and continued on with my testing of other paths. However, one day I came back to my file "Tree Dodge Success" and watched it again. I decided to play with it a bit and was lucky enough to pop out of the trees unscathed before the bushes blocked my path. As I have found out over the last month, I was VERY lucky to be able to do this. The terrain changes depending on many different factors and when I went back to clean up the beginning of the race and add in an extra off-road section I had missed, I was unable to perform the full tree dodge trick I had discovered earlier.
Here is the Tree Dodge done on a suboptimal test run: Note that I have to do another tree dodge on the last course as well. If I don't do this, I crash right as I finish and the game never has me progress ot the real goal. Oddly enough though, I managed to get the last tree to be retextured with the word "GOAL" all over it, that counts, right? hehe.... anyway, it's faster to dodge in at the end anyways, I can end input sooner.
Outrun, RRRR strat in 15988 frames, in game timer 3'50.09
Here is the file I have been working on for the last several weeks. This particular file has 5,000 re-records used to attempt this trick. As you can see in this particular attempt, I ALMOST make it, it's sooo close, but I can't get out of the woods. No matter what I do, even if I slam on the brakes to exit. I have tried entering the woods at so many different frames, with so many different strats preceeding it that I am officially sick of it. And so, I turn to the community. Please help me make this work. All told I estimate I have spent at least 20,000 re-records on this ONE trick! If someone can think of a type of bot that could help make this happen, please, please let me know. This game is very hard to manipulate because slowing down changes the steering, the locations of the other cars and (though it's exactly what I want) the obstacle positions (which makes some turns impossible to cut as the optimal strat would have).
Outrun, RRRR strat fast as possible
In this one, I'm trying to duplicate the tree cut in the 15988 frames run but I'm a bit too fast...
Of course, the ironic thing is that, though the ingame timer here has the potential to go low 3'49"XX, the frame count would only be in the 15,93X's. So it's possible that, if this succeeds, it will be longer in real time while ~.8 seconds faster in-game. So if, as a community, we cannot get this tree cut to work out for the RRRR strat, I actually feel comfortable submitting the LLRL run. Of course, I'd rather get the RRRR working after all this effort. Plus, I think it is a surprising and fun to watch strat.
Edit: Fixed link widths
