Movement strats

2013-04-11 04:19:22 am

YOLO

I was just wondering about movement strats. In games like Paper Mario, SM64, and most Zelda games, how optimized are travel and movement strats and techniques right now. I often see things in, for example, runs of Twilight Princess where the runner will either switch to Midna to travel, or will roll, or will use the spinner to move in certain situations. At this point in most games' speedrun optimization, how "final" are the movement styles like rolling in Zelda, dive-jumping in SM64 etc? Can a change in these strats, at this point, cause any major advantages in time?

Thread title:

Stormknight

2013-04-11 04:55:59 am

Now Reap The Whirlwind!

I think that games like SM64 and Zelda OoT have been played so often that the strats they have are the fastest no matter what. With other games, it might be that someone found a really good way to move fast and is just using that until something better is found.

UtterNutter

2013-04-11 05:48:34 am

How to run Space Marine: Run fast

As stormknight says, it depends on the game. In some it's blatantly obvious (Charging everywhere in spyro games), others have been worked out over time and are well regarded as the best way to travel (such as the zelda rolling) but in all games if a new faster method of travel is found by accident, we'll use it.

e.g. The spyro community used to do the Agent 9 levels normally until a zig-zag speedbost was found that reduced the level times by around 3/4s. If we found something faster than that, we'd use that instead.

As for whether they can cause major advantages in time... faster movement means you get from A->B faster. That's obvious.
In certain games, the time you hit certain obstacles may mean you can get across those obstacles quicker. The best example I know is in Crash bandicoot games. If you don't slide spin through certain levels, it would take a whole extra cycle of environment effects to finish the level.

So yeah, travel and movement is one of the things that is worked on initially when the first runs of a game are being performed. New strats can replace older ones, but in many games, the movements used are the fastest possible.

As stormknight says, it depends on the game. In some it's blatantly obvious (Charging everywhere in spyro games), others have been worked out over time and are well regarded as the best way to travel (such as the zelda rolling) but in all games if a new faster method of travel is found by accident, we'll use it.

e.g. The spyro community used to do the Agent 9 levels normally until a zig-zag speedbost was found that reduced the level times by around 3/4s. If we found something faster than that, we'd use that instead.

As for whether they can cause major advantages in time... faster movement means you get from A->B faster. That's obvious. 
In certain games, the time you hit certain obstacles may mean you can get across those obstacles quicker. The best example I know is in Crash bandicoot games. If you don't slide spin through certain levels, it would take a whole extra cycle of environment effects to finish the level.

So yeah, travel and movement is one of the things that is worked on initially when the first runs of a game are being performed. New strats can replace older ones, but in many games, the movements used are the fastest possible.

Neohart

Edit history:

Neohart: 2013-04-11 06:27:25 am

2013-04-11 06:19:34 am

Final Fantasy VII Fanatic

Another good examples are Final Fantasy games, Like in Final Fantasy VII: Step count = battle rate, messing up on your steps can give you more encounters or encounters in spots you may not want, so I'd say yes, it's very important.

Edit: Plus cutting corners and failing can always hurt Tongue

Rakuen

2013-04-11 11:01:31 pm

Weegee Time

Of course, always keep in mind it's possible to go too fast as well. In a good case you just have to wait a few moments to continue on. In a bad case you're playing a game where movement has acceleration and you have to get going again from a dead stop.

Paraxade

Edit history:

Paraxade: 2013-04-12 01:35:57 am

2013-04-12 01:34:59 am

I'm not sure if you're referring to my Twilight Princess run or someone else's, but in my run I pretty much timed every conceivable form of movement for each section of the game to see which was the fastest. Small optimizations like that are always subject to change if someone manages to figure out something faster, though, but you likely aren't going to see any major advantages, barring an entirely new method of movement being discovered... the majority of the time it's case by case which way is faster, which is why you rarely just see one method of movement being used through the entire game.

161803398874989

2013-04-12 02:25:56 am

MATHEMATICS

What Parax says rings true for a lot of games, but in Dishonored tons of time from the old 42:59 WR to the new sub-40 WR come from just using a ton of mana pots. So it's not always a minor advantage.