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Comment by shawnz | Hacker News Reader

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

For old 8-bit games with exploitable PRNG, an emulator with scripting support is sometimes used to determine exact movement patterns(see e.g. NESCardinality's Dragon Warrior).

Routing is not something that easily maps to application software, given that it can be deeply intertwined with game state. A spreadsheet suffices for the average case.

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 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

Hah, this glitch speed run is hilarious, love how then annotated it. https://youtu.be/gON5k2kw3as

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.

That sounds like a deeply boring speedrun. What's the time on a patched Morrowind?

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.

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