Hi everyone. First of all, don’t understand for the life of me how there aren’t dozens of players speedrunning this game, its one of my top three favorite games of all time. Ok, here’s my question:

Has anyone figured out what the mechanic is behind the game making you instant fail the race when you make too big of a short cut? Does the game have set routes they anticipate players trying that could perhaps be worked around or is it triggered by a measurement of how far ahead of the closest player you are when you pop back onto the road? I could also picture a version of the mechanic where it times how long you’re off road and if you emerge in first after too long off road they fail you.

Right now im using trial and error to scout for shortcuts through level 3 race 2 Smack and Run. Ive only watched one or two of your guys’ speedruns, im guessing this isn’t uncharted territory, but i wanted the fun of exploring for myself however this would be a lot easier if i understood the mechanics behind when the game lets you use shortcuts and when it doesn’t.

My time on this game is miles behind what’s been done but this the smallest speedrunning community of the games i run and perhaps my best shot at finding uncharted territory in ways to beat the game faster and that kind of excites me. If no one knows how the shortcut mechanic works on this game perhaps ill look into finding someone who has experience looking into the game’s code to find out what it says. Thanks guys, have a good day.

One reason I ask is, if it’s just a matter of getting TOO far ahead, there are huge shortcuts that would be possible if you just wait a designated number of seconds before re-entering the road. Or if it’s a matter of the developers anticipating shortcut routes and programming an auto fail when you take that route there might be ways around it by taking a less intuitive or predictable route, maybe even doing a circle or something else peculiar in the middle of your shortcut to trick the programming. I’ll try to test these theories but if this information is known I’d love to hear it.

I got proof of concept now for a time save short cut on 3:2 smack and run. Was able to finish in 1:44 where the 1st place speedrun by joe that runs the level normally finishes in 2:00 or 2:01. It worked in thrash mode, gonna see if I can refine it anymore and then take it to big game for a real test.

It works in big game too. Ok, I don’t know exactly how the game determines whether or not you “cheated” when you take a short cut but I was able to figure out this much:

1. It only decides you’ve cheated when you renter (or just get too close to) a road that is apart of or very close to the races designated course and you are traveling in the direction the game expects you to be during the race. This means that you can renter roads that would normally trigger the cheat auto fail heading the WRONG DIRECTION and be fine but the second you start heading back toward the finish line on that road the cheater auto fail will be activated. You can use this to cross roads that would normally trigger the cheat fail and then once you are across the road you can turn back the right direction and continue the shortcut off road.

2. You do not need to be ON the road when you cross the finish line to trigger the end of the race, i haven’t tested to see how far off the road you can be and still trigger the end of the race but it is a bigger than the distance you need to stay away from the road to keep the cheater fail from triggering. This is the key to getting around the game’s anti cheat programming. You can’t renter the road during the shortcut (except heading the wrong direction) but you can trigger the end of the race by riding 50 or so feet off the road parallel when you cross the finish line. This will only be useful on certain maps where you can make a sort of worm hole from the start to the finish that cuts so much distance off the race that despite being limited to a lower speed than if you just ran the race on the road, you can still save enough time to make the shortcut attempt worth it. I say attempt because you can get too close to the road triggering cheat fail or have the wrong angle crossing certain roads or just loose the optimal path through the green abyss. I don’t think this would work too well for maps primarily in the city or especially not maps that the race is a fairly straight line. The maps that have “wormhole potential” would be curved and long enough (get your head out of the gutter lol) that the distance between the start and end points could cut at least a third of the distance of the race away if driven in a straight line through the grass. So far I’ve only confirmed this on 3:2 smack and run but will look into others next.

One last note. I like the way the game is played currently where we mostly race and fight the ai the way the developers intended but I had a lot of fun trying to test the rules of the game to see how they could be broken, someone else somewhere (or here) has likely figured those rules out before me but this is the closest to blank canvas I have for uncharted territory in trying to break a game and I’m excited to see what else can be came up with ✌️

Please let me know if there’s something you’ve found or know of I’ve missed in regards to these shortcuts. Thanks.

Found a route through 3:1 twisty land I finished in 1m43s. It’s more convoluted than 3:2 but currently saves 37 seconds. More optimization possible.

Ok, this game is about to get destroyed, decided to go for bigger fish and analyzed the level 5 maps for possible worm holes. I just beat marathon in 1m23s on my first try. It’s a different game beating levels this way and I love the old game so it may be time for a “no major shortcut” category or something. Gonna stop posting now and get to work preparing for runs tomorrow. I’m not the best player here but there are huge time saves here for the picking.

Ok… one last thing.. probably. If you crash your bike basically on the road super ahead of everyone cuz you just took a shortcut and you haven’t triggered the cheat fail, then apparently you can be respawned about where you crashed keeping your lead and allowing you to now drive the course road again without risking the cheat fail. Don’t know how consistent that is, learned it by accident but considering the alternative to a respawn is driving slowly on the dirt, might be another huge time save.

Looking forward to seeing videos of this

Interesting discoveries

Thank you for posing this information, this is pretty exciting and I look forward to the possibilities this could bring!

Hi guys, I go into more detail on these exploits on the thread “Open Season for Time Saves”

A RR64 Discord would be amazing