[TAS] Mystery of the Monkey Cage 0xA - 5400

Thanks to pannenkoek2012 ( /user/pannenkoek2012 ) for doing the star cloning, tjk ( /c/SuperMario142MC ) for work on the initial Ukiki chase, Tyler Kehne ( /c/TylerKehne ) for the idea of cloning the star for DSG, and nim ( /c/nim64 ) for the idea of manipulating object slots using a bowling ball. This strat saves time using a Death Star Glitch, in which Mario dies in one of a couple of ways (in this case, using the death barrier) and then collects a star. Mario doesn't have to do the star dance animation or decide whether to save after exiting the painting, so DSG saves a lot of animation time and can save time overall if it can be done without adding too much time inside the level. Tyler Kehne originally proposed this idea in May 2021. In this case, the Death Star Glitch uses a clone of the star: Mario can bring the clone down with him to the death barrier and then groundpound to collect it. My initial instinct was that the bob-omb would be too far from Ukiki to talk to Ukiki and then grab the bob-omb fake before the star spawned (note that the fake star in the cage is a different object than the actual star that gets spawned, so we can clone the actual star). I realized that it was possible to conserve speed using Ukiki's text, though, and Mario is able to grab the bob-omb fake with a few frames to spare. At this point, I was feeling pretty optimistic about the strategy. What I didn't realize, though, is that the cage creates a bunch of objects when it breaks. Mario needs to be holding a very high VS before the cage breaks to be able to get the star. After trying to optimize things to squeeze out more frames to make dust, I still couldn't do it, so I gave up for the time being. nim had the idea of using a bowling ball to manipulate object slots when the strat was originally discussed. The bowling ball timing would change as the TTM climb got optimized, and I didn't look into it at that time. Now that we're optimizing TTM stars, I started investigating the idea in earnest. It turns out that a bowling ball creates a bunch of objects when it breaks. Bowling balls only spawn when Mario is lower than the bowling ball spawner, though, so I took Mario down to the goomba area while waiting for Ukiki to run through his path. This allowed a bowling ball to spawn in at a pretty good time. Bowling balls can come on any multiple of 64 frames from level load. To get the bowling ball objects to help, they have to despawn at the right time, so I talked to Ukiki 16f later than the earliest possible frame. This let the bowling ball break relative to the star spawn time in such a way that Mario gets a really high VS, which we need to clone the star. I was having trouble getting the cloning working, so pannenkoek2012 did the cloning. I then imitated what pannenkoek2012 did while getting Mario as close to the edge as possible so that he can drop off the ledge in 1f. Note: This star uses DSG timing ("?" has become the notation for this), which is from level entry to the first frame of the death fadeout. In this star, DSG saves 1.15s over a normal non-cloning finish assuming Mupen lag emulation is correct and assuming the DSG doesn't affect the reentry time (both false assumptions, I'm afraid, but I think it saves at least 1s.) At some point, I'll upload a comparison of how the end of the star looks with each approach.

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