6 ms·
Planning a Morrowind all-faction speedrun with simulated annealing, part 2
- JasonSage 8y agoThis was a blast to read! I enjoyed both parts, and I'm really looking forward to the next. Reflecting on the pieces, the author is pretty talented at communicating effectively—I found the material interesting, the writing style lively enough to enjoy, and the presentation to have just the right balance of explanation and example. It's so well done I didn't think of any of these things as I read. The author's bio is also a standout piece of writing to me: http://mildbyte.xyz/about.html http://mildbyte.xyz/about.html
- MrBuddyCasino 8y agoThis guy can write. Another good one: https://kimonote.com/@mildbyte/starving-children-or-the-fallacy-of-relative-privation-32827/ https://kimonote.com/@mildbyte/starving-children-or-the-fall...
- LoSboccacc 8y ago> marksman, mysticism and sneak secondary stealth archers best build confirmed empirically https://imgur.com/gallery/4xAA7 https://imgur.com/gallery/4xAA7
- nsbq71 8y agoThis 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.
- LoSboccacc 8y agodon't morrowind archers get the 3x and 5x damage bonuses too on sneak attack? I played heavily modded a lot of time ago so I might be mistaken
- hsljekskfh 8y agoi think its double, and it ends up doing so little damage that you really don’t get the experience you want
- strken 8y agoMorrowind 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.
- nsbq71 8y agoI 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.
- shakna 8y agoI wouldn't call it "spoiling the fun", half the fun of Elder Scrolls games is that you can become transcendent. In Arena, you start humbly, but rise high enough that you destroy Jagar Tharn, one of the most powerful mages in the whole of the history of the Elder Scrolls games. In Daggerfall, you're the right-hand man of the Emperor, and seek out a world-ending superweapon, and may just take it for yourself. In Morrowind, you are a god, or very close to. The reincarnation of the Nevarine. That you can become overpowered makes sense. Bandits should fear you. Ordinary people should. In Oblivion, you're the right-hand man of someone who ascends. You walk into literal Hell and fight demons. The bare mysteries of the world are laid clear by you. You steal the book of spells of immortal characters. In Skyrim, you're descendant from a man who became a god. You have a gift that can shatter the heavens, and break open portals between worlds. You kill the son of Akatosh. You're right, it is design, because it makes sense.
- maxpupmax 8y agoIf anyone else here on HN is a fan of talking about what "makes sense" in the context of elder scrolls, I'm a big fan of /r/TESlore on reddit. Everything from explanations like the above, to how specific enemy groups became the way they were (e.g. the falmer in Skyrim), to theories of the economics underlying the games.
- ionised 8y agoEy, you can definitely be a stealth archer in Morrowind. I did it myself. It is very frustrating to start out that way though.
- JaiR8hiK 8y agoThis 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.
- shawnz 8y agoWhat kind of software do speedrunners normally use for route planning? It seems like an underserved niche to me.
- foota 8y agoI think a lot of speed run games are much more linear than this.
- hsljekskfh 8y agocorrect, 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 morrowind basically involves gaining the ability to run at hundreds of miles per hour, getting two items, getting to the final boss and killing him in one hit. takes about 5 minutes. hilariously the item is called the “boots of blinding speed” and let’s you run incredibly fast but turns your screen black while equipped
- foota 8y agoHah, this glitch speed run is hilarious, love how then annotated it. https://youtu.be/gON5k2kw3as https://youtu.be/gON5k2kw3as
- arctice 8y agoThe 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.
- Mithaldu 8y ago
- rav 8y ago10 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.
- Deestan 8y ago> 16000 teleportation edges [...] doesn't include physical travel edges between the vertices
- ball_of_lint 8y agoEven 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.
- shoo 8y agoI agree. Maybe it was hand implemented in python with lots of memory allocation and a few defects that made it accidentally quadratic.
- amichal 8y agoor some IO/parsing got mixed into the processing of each node. big-o is one problem. Forgetting or not noticing the constants is another
- skocznymroczny 8y agoNow do it with blockchain.