This 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 remember crafting something that allowed me to jump a long way on I think a Daedric mask in the game. I could literally jump across half the map when it was activated.
From memory it might have been similar to that spell you find at the early part of the game on the way to Balmora.
Morrowind was IMHO the perfect game. The fact that if you were lucky and skillful you could get the best weapons and spells early in the game, or be gutted in 3 seconds made it far more risky to pay but way more fun when you figured out how to overcome it.
I would dearly love to play it but with some decent physics to make the bows fun and with slightly upgraded graphics.
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.
I 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.
If 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.
I think you might be confused with something like 'mysteries laid bare'. Bare doesn't mean foundational and if mysteries were already bare, what kind of mysteries would they be?
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.
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.
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.
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