Ways to troll speedrunners
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@cheong said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Nothing annoy them more than a random hit-tester.
Just make the hit-testing result of object random, so something you can pass through an object, and another time you're blocked. Sometimes your bullet can hit enemy, the other time it'll just pass through without damage. And when you move, sometime you'll fall into "hole of non-existent" and have no way to come out.
They'll decide they would rather play other games in no time.
But this is counter-productive if your objective is to specifically troll speedrunners. If you want normal people to be able to complete the game rather than throw their controller in disgust, you need to add a test that only enables RNG behavior when the player is going "too fast".
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@gąska Or buy a $10,000 CPU just so they can get through the game in a reasonable time without despawning anything.
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@gąska said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@ben_lubar said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
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Make actions that despawn objects take time to perform.
Speedrunners will ignore anything they don't need to do and end up lagging the game to oblivion.
They'll be just counting frames. Or find the optimal set of actions that let you complete the game without crashing.
This thread is about trolling speedrunners, not making speedrunning impossible.
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@ben_lubar a good troll makes you ragequit.
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@pie_flavor said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make a special 'speedrunner mode' which removes cutscenes and some of the annoying animations. Unbeknownst to anyone, bump up the difficulty but in a way that is not easily realized.
This isn't really that different from normal speedrunning.
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@pie_flavor Make a way to skip cutscenes, but make its difficulty proportional to the cutscene length. So if there's a 30 second cutscene, you can instead go through a corridor full of monsters that would ordinarily take around 60 seconds to beat, meaning you can shorten the time, but you have to be really good.
Of course, that would be the exact opposite of trolling, so it's a bit off-topic.
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@ben_lubar said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
This thread is about trolling speedrunners, not making speedrunning impossible.
Oh, well in that case just make the fastest movement be dependent on using gesture casting like in the Black & White games, with the gesture for accelerating the player being both undocumented and shaped a lot like… well, use your imagination.
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@dkf Motion controls in any capacity are a great speedrunner troll.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@anotherusername said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Or just write code that doesn't have wall/floor clipping bugs.
If you can do this I'd kiss your face. Shit falling through things is apparently a very difficult glitch to get rid of, been trying it for years...
Physics engines are quirky and a world of hurt. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
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@groaner said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@tsaukpaetra said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@anotherusername said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Or just write code that doesn't have wall/floor clipping bugs.
If you can do this I'd kiss your face. Shit falling through things is apparently a very difficult glitch to get rid of, been trying it for years...
Physics
engines areis quirky and a world of hurt. I don't see this changing anytime soon.FTFM.
Physics engines are a pain because doing realistic physics is hard. And super counter-intuitive. And doing it in real-time is even harder. Our brains are quirky-sensitive to strange things that you wouldn't (naively) think are important. And there're massive feedback loops trying to simulate these things quickly, even on decent hardware.
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@benjamin-hall said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Physics engines are a pain because doing realistic physics is hard.
If the game detects a speedrun, switch to a really realistic physics engine — meshes have billions of vertices, collision detection occurs on nanometer scale, and projectile weapons are affected by real aerodynamic forces. Move too fast for too long — 0.00001 FPS.
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@hardwaregeek said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@benjamin-hall said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Physics engines are a pain because doing realistic physics is hard.
If the game detects a speedrun, switch to a really realistic physics engine — meshes have billions of vertices, collision detection occurs on nanometer scale, and projectile weapons are affected by real aerodynamic forces. Move too fast for too long — 0.00001 FPS.
Ouch. Detecting a speed-run might be difficult though.
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@benjamin-hall said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@hardwaregeek said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@benjamin-hall said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Physics engines are a pain because doing realistic physics is hard.
If the game detects a speedrun, switch to a really realistic physics engine — meshes have billions of vertices, collision detection occurs on nanometer scale, and projectile weapons are affected by real aerodynamic forces. Move too fast for too long — 0.00001 FPS.
Ouch. Detecting a speed-run might be difficult though.
It's easier than finding a thing that doesn't crash Paper Mario.
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@ben_lubar Crashing the game seems like an idea.
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@zecc said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@ben_lubar Crashing the game seems like an idea.
Detect the player is trying to speedrun, speed up the game by disabling non-essential code — like error checking. Or garbage collection.
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@benjamin-hall said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@hardwaregeek said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@benjamin-hall said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Physics engines are a pain because doing realistic physics is hard.
If the game detects a speedrun, switch to a really realistic physics engine — meshes have billions of vertices, collision detection occurs on nanometer scale, and projectile weapons are affected by real aerodynamic forces. Move too fast for too long — 0.00001 FPS.
Ouch. Detecting a speed-run might be difficult though.
Well, once you're in realistic physics mode, yes, it might be a bit problematic. But several proposals already on the table are predicated on detecting a speed run to switch into troll mode.
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@hardwaregeek said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@zecc said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@ben_lubar Crashing the game seems like an idea.
Detect the player is trying to speedrun, speed up the game by disabling non-essential code — like error checking. Or garbage collection.
Run garbage collection on a schedule and only collect a maximum amount of memory per cycle. Tune it to only clean up as much memory as the game would normally use up during gameplay.
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If a speed run is detected, vary the floatiness of the jumps and gravity during a very tricky jumping puzzle when the nearest checkpoint is aways back. But only sometimes. Make it seem like there's a pattern, and then change it.
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Include a special “Speedrun Mode” on the main menu, labelled as turning off inessential operations to let things go faster. Have it disable the graphics and sound. (Or maybe leave the graphics on, but not with as many updates a second and all done with flat featureless textures with no shaders.)
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@dkf said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
flat featureless textures with no shaders
I enjoyed Antichamber.
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@dkf said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Include a special “Speedrun Mode” on the main menu, labelled as turning off inessential operations to let things go faster. Have it disable the graphics and sound. (Or maybe leave the graphics on, but not with as many updates a second and all done with flat featureless textures with no shaders.)
Speedrun mode should activate about halfway through the story and consist of reversing the z-sorting when rendering in 3D.
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@pie_flavor said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Make a special 'speedrunner mode' which removes cutscenes and some of the annoying animations. Unbeknownst to anyone, bump up the difficulty but in a way that is not easily realized.
In some ways, it's pretty much what the ALTTP randomizer does. Except for the "unbeknownst" part.
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Another idea would be to have a level shortly before the end with enemy snipers. Normally it's about sneaking about and trying to not draw their attention and so on, but in speedrun mode the snipers can see infinitely far with infinite sharpness (trivial to make the bots do), are totally aware of where you are, have hitscan weapons, and those weapons are set to oneshot kill.
It'd take the speedrunners ages to figure out that the game was behaving nastily different for them.
Bonus: create an achievement for successfully speedrunning the game in hardcore mode.
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@ben_lubar said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
reversing the z-sorting when rendering in 3D.
There's so much wrong with this.
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@dkf said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
It'd take the speedrunners ages to figure out that the game was behaving nastily different for them.
Again, you underestimate their dedication. Still, good troll.
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@zecc said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@dkf said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
flat featureless textures with no shaders
I enjoyed Antichamber.
God dammit I was just about to say that.
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@zecc said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
@dkf said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
flat featureless textures with no shaders
I enjoyed Antichamber.
Parallax, was the name of the other game I was trying to remember.
That is all.
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@zecc said in Ways to troll speedrunners:
Parallax
Parallax Title Theme – 11:24
— cheetahman91Good theme song.
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@blakeyrat yes, that's the joke you made when I mentioned it as well.
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@pie_flavor I fucking love Parallax.
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@blakeyrat Me too, though we're talking about different games.
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@hardwaregeek If that were easy to do, (some) games would already do it, to adjust for future hardware 10,000 times better than the one available at launch.