A Thousand Tiny Optimisations
14 comments
·June 8, 2025Noumenon72
> absurd examples like a player completing Final Fantasy VII in less time than the sum of the requisite unskippable content[1].
How is this possible? I didn't want to watch the whole video since I've never played the game.
cchianel
Games on old consoles such as Nintendo 64 and the Playstation One use a variety of tricks to be playable on limited hardware. For the specific example of Final Fantasy VII, there is one trick that allows you to skip almost the entirely of Disk 1 once you reach the open world. In particular, the trick involves a use-after-free in the world collision cache (fun fact: a lot of speedrun techniques are security flaws!). This video explains it without spoilers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llQnrUHS0yA ; a better video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHn6jpKsYCk, but that might have minor spoilers IIRC (Note: this trick is relatively new, and probably not used in that video).
mkfs
> the trick involves a use-after-free in the world collision cache (fun fact: a lot of speedrun techniques are security flaws!
In other words:
> Hey, you know those super difficult parts from games of your childhood that you're probably curious to see how we, the supposed speediest of gamers, swiftly navigate? Well, guess what? We just skip them altogether by glitching! Any% new record!
That's why no one cares about this. These people will play the same game or level thousands of times to trigger 1/1,000,000 glitches to skip huge swaths of games, then claim some made-up "record."
This is not skill. Even the non-glitch speedruns are more down to persistence (if not mental illness) than skill--which is a result of deliberate practice--like one sees in competitive shooters or fighting games. And these people throw tantrums constantly, like children, and curse the "RNG" (an admission this isn't about skill) the way a primitive tribesman might damn the gods for a prolonged drought.
ohdeargodno
If only speed running communities existed, where they made different categories like any%, any% No major glitches/skips, all with varying prestige and competitiveness, as well as agreed upon which skips are so soul crushingly shit to do that they're excluded from every category aside from any% :(
You might consider therapy, if playing games fast makes you angry.
null
curtisszmania
[dead]
Related: Archipelago (https://archipelago.gg/), a framework that randomizes multiple games, across multiple clients. For example, Player A is playing Mario 64, and Player B is playing Pokemon Red. Some items from Player B's Pokemon Red (such as the Rock Smash HM) would be in Player A's Mario 64 world (for example, from collecting a Star). As a result, the two players need to coordinate and help each other progress.
Archipelago GitHub: https://github.com/ArchipelagoMW/Archipelago