Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

kimonote.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 38 posts

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#21

Post by arctice »

hsljekskfh wrote: post #14
foota wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of speed run games are much more linear than this.

correct, but also this person gave themself a hard goal of beating 9 storylines, not one. this is essentially a traveling salesman problem where the salesman has to talk to 9 sets of ordered lists of 3-10 people, and can work on them simultaneously, along with a couple other things. the author quickly realized that brute force wouldn’t work and chose a genetic algorithm instead. the normal unpatched speed run of morr…

The Boots of Blinding Speed are not used in Morrowind speedruns. The high speed is achieved with a weapon swap glitch(only present in the 1.0 version of the game) where swapping between two weapons quickly will apply all of their buffs permanently to your character. This is done with two story related artifacts that happen to buff all sorts of useful stats, including movement speed.

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#22

Post by arctice »

shawnz wrote: post #10

What kind of software do speedrunners normally use for route planning? It seems like an underserved niche to me.

None, in nearly all cases it's unnecessary. The games that could make use of automated routing often involve complex logic which would make the implementation take more effort than it's worth it.

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#23

Post by shoo »

rav wrote: post #19

10 minutes for Dijkstra on a graph with only 6500 vertices and 16000 edges sounds fishy - I'd expect that to take way less than a second.

I agree. Maybe it was hand implemented in python with lots of memory allocation and a few defects that made it accidentally quadratic.

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#24

Post by Agentlien »

nsbq71 wrote: post #7
strken wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Morrowind is sufficiently broken, in the best possible and most fun way, that any character can become a god. Abusing alchemy, 1pt levitate spears, doors, the teleportation shrine in Vivec, or infinite potions can be done by any class. It's incredibly impressive that a game can have hundreds of hours of content, yet be speedran in 7 minutes.

I wouldn't call it broken. It's by design. Proof is that most of the "exploits" were carried over Oblivion and then Skyrim. For example, creating very very overpowered potions is possible in all games. It's your choice if you want to spoil the fun or not.

Unfortunately, one of the things from Morrowind which did not make it to Oblivion was the ability to make damage spells which target self. And in Skyrim they had removed the ability to make your own spells entirely.

In Morrowind I used this to create an extremely long-lasting fire spell dealing 0 damage to self. The result was a spell which cost barely any mana and resulted in you walking around engulfed in harmless flames. A really cool visual touch.

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#25

Post by Aenyn »

Agentlien wrote: post #24
nsbq71 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it broken. It's by design. Proof is that most of the "exploits" were carried over Oblivion and then Skyrim. For example, creating very very overpowered potions is possible in all games. It's your choice if you want to spoil the fun or not.

Unfortunately, one of the things from Morrowind which did not make it to Oblivion was the ability to make damage spells which target self. And in Skyrim they had removed the ability to make your own spells entirely. In Morrowind I used this to create an extremely long-lasting fire spell dealing 0 damage to self. The result was a spell which cost barely any mana and resulted in you walking around engulfed in harmless…

Are you sure? I have memories of making a spell that targetted myself and gave me 1pt of fire damage that I could spam to train my evocation skill (or whatever it was called).

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#26

Post by Agentlien »

Aenyn wrote: post #25
Agentlien wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, one of the things from Morrowind which did not make it to Oblivion was the ability to make damage spells which target self. And in Skyrim they had removed the ability to make your own spells entirely. In Morrowind I used this to create an extremely long-lasting fire spell dealing 0 damage to self. The result was a spell which cost barely any mana and resulted in you walking around engulfed in harmless…

Are you sure? I have memories of making a spell that targetted myself and gave me 1pt of fire damage that I could spam to train my evocation skill (or whatever it was called).

This was 12 years ago, so it's possible that I don't remember the details correctly. I thought that "self" could not be selected for fire damage, but looking up videos of spellmaking in Oblivion this seems to be possible.

I do distinctly remember being unable to recreate that one fire spell, though. Perhaps it was not possible to set damage to 0 in Oblivion? That was part of why the spell became so cheap and allowed for extreme duration.

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#27

Post by ball_of_lint »

Deestan wrote: post #20
rav wrote: post #19

10 minutes for Dijkstra on a graph with only 6500 vertices and 16000 edges sounds fishy - I'd expect that to take way less than a second.

> 16000 teleportation edges [...] doesn't include physical travel edges between the vertices

Even with 6500 vertices, you have a total max of 6500^2 edges (after filtering for minimum distance per edge, which is very fast). Using a performant language such as C++ and a priority queue there is no way that you would reach even 10s for a single djikstras.

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#28

Post by ionised »

nsbq71 wrote: post #4
LoSboccacc wrote: post #3

> marksman, mysticism and sneak secondary stealth archers best build confirmed empirically https://imgur.com/gallery/4xAA7

This is Morrowind, not Skyrim. Stealth archers are not a thing here. In fact I'd say magic-based characters are much, much better than combat or stealth-based ones.

Ey, you can definitely be a stealth archer in Morrowind. I did it myself.

It is very frustrating to start out that way though.

Re: Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2

#29

Post by JaiR8hiK »

nsbq71 wrote: post #4
LoSboccacc wrote: post #3

> marksman, mysticism and sneak secondary stealth archers best build confirmed empirically https://imgur.com/gallery/4xAA7

This is Morrowind, not Skyrim. Stealth archers are not a thing here. In fact I'd say magic-based characters are much, much better than combat or stealth-based ones.

This is morrowind, where there is not just invisibility but also chameleon. If you boosted it high enough you essentially were undetectable while stabbing someone in the face under the watch of an ordinator. (Invisibility wears off on actions; Chameleon is more expensive, but does not)

Not that you actually need it, since you can also be invulnerable, perma-healing, damage-to-health converting, flying, damage-reflecting one-hit-killing at the same time. But yes, stealth is an option.

Post reply on HN