Trackmania Nations Forever combined TAS breaks the 1-hour barrier
Really big achievement!
TMNF (2008) lost a huge chunk of player when TM2020 released and finally replaced it as the "default" TM game.
Not long after this, a Tool-Assisted Speedrunning tool was released that allowed tick-precise input manipulation with full analogue steering to create theoretically perfect replays, and it revitalised the game into one of experimentation and scientific dismantling of an already well-understood engine.
Over the last couple of years an enormous community effort has resulted in this - a sub 1-hour TAS of all 65 campaign tracks. (WARNING - SOME FLASHING LIGHTS AND RAPID CAMERA MOVEMENT): link
When you consider that the human WR for the final 60-lap track E05 is 53 minutes, you can appreciate how much went into this. Some "been watching this develop for years" commentary under the cut.
There's still a minute or two to be shaved off, but they're into extremely grindy work now - the E05 TAS is where most of that can be found.
The Current strat is to 10x repeat a 6-lap block of highly optimised bouncing followed by a hard-reset that costs ~10s each time, but each time they extend the length of the block they get less time-save from it. Making it a 7-lap block would reduce it to 8 resets from 9 (as you can't avoid the first lap being slow), saving ~10s, but beyond that things get Sisyphean - to go from 5 resets to 4 requires going from a 10-lap block to a 12-lap one, and the effort to add each new lap is like starting from scratch as the techniques used are extremely chaotic.
You might attempt to make a consistent copy-pasteable lap, but you'd need to start and finish with float-precise identical position and velocity otherwise the various bugs and bounces won't line up - it's just not happening.
At that point, you may well be better off optimising what you've already got - you could TAS a whole new lap to perfection to save 10s, or you could improve the existing 6 laps by 1s overall and save 10s over the many repeats. I don't blame the TASers for calling it done at 6 laps for now.
Very cool achievement overall, wild to see how far TM-TAS has come.