How Modders fight Mario 64's Biggest Problem

Since people keep suggesting to just put a death barrier under levels, here are 4 reasons why that's a bad idea: 1) You can now fall through the level into the death barrier when there would be holes. 2) Those holes are harder to detect and will be less likely to be caught before release. 3) Slanted walls/floors with vanilla physics can be clipped through pretty easily - the death barrier under the level would make this a lot easier and players would end up clipping into the level all the time. 4) It's more triangles = more RAM = less vroom vroom

Now we just need Tom Scott to make a video on Britain's oldest invisible wall and my invisible wall hunger will be complete

I was thinking of exactly this after the Pannen video. Then again, I've seen Simpleflips die to nothing enough times to know that invisible walls at the very least exist in some older ROMhacks.

"I'm sure people would love a patch that does nothing but remove this problem. Someone, get on that." 🗿

according to sm64 logic, the leaning tower of Pisa might be home to the largest and most famous invisible wall, as the wall that leans in doesn't stop the out of bounds hitbox from leaking through (spelling error, logic error check in progress)

As a hack creator, this is way more annoying for the creator to have invisivle wall in his level than for people who play it, the slopes invisible wall is the worst one definitly

Yeah, making an invisible wall free version of Mario 64 would be great, but y'know what would be better? Chaos Mario 64: Bonk Edition where practically every vertex in the game is misaligned just enough to make small 1-unit wide invisible walls EVERYWHERE. That would be a monumental task though.

The final boss is a convex corner between two walls in a wallkick section

First a pannen video on this now a kaze video on it, sm64 community eating good rn

I know I'm a huge nerd for pointing this out but the vertices aren't rounded, they're truncated. Rounding would set the value to the nearest whole number, but instead they convert it to an integer by just discarding everything after the decimal point. This means the vertice would always be set to the next-lowest coordinate value; for instance, 12.9 and 12.1 would both be converted to 12.

It would be cool to have a mod that helps modders see hitboxes like in pannens video, so you could see them leak out

It’s amazing the programmers decided it would be better to work around these bugs rather than fix them. Especially the floor overshadowing; imagine how many times the level designers had to reorder vertices to prevent the same bug over and over without ever realizing their job could be so much easier!

I wonder if at some point in development they planned Doom-like no-slopes geometry, because none of the errors would crop up with only perfect vertical walls.

I love how this game is actually a broken mess behind the scenes and still manages to feels almost bug free for the casual players.

seeing the awkward earliest solutions to problems that nobody really had much experience dealing with yet back then is always really interesting

this is EXACTLY the followup we needed after the inviswall video put the fear of an unjust god in our hearts

I just realized I’ve been misreading this channel name as “Kaze Emulator” for years

I don't understand how this is a problem specific to Mario 64 that we still haven't solved perfectly? I mean how do other games deal with floor gaps?

Would ALWAYS having a death barrier beneath the level (Even if you can't fall in it) fix ALL Out of Bounds invisible walls?

I'm surprised to hear that there isn't a standardized tool for the modding community to use of a visual debugger like in the pannenkoek video that makes it super obvious where the invisible walls are. Does that exist already? Is something like that feasible?