GermanyIn case anyone is still interested, this ScummVM commit provides more information on what the "Lab Door Mod" is.
Long story short: The digital release from 2017, that comes pre-configured with ScummVM 2.0.0, was shipped with a way to remove the copy protection, that had bad side-effects. Years later in 2021, the ScummVM devs themselves fixed the issue. So if you want to run the "Lab Door Mod" category nowadays, you need to use the version of ScummVM that comes with the game (or at least one that is older than 2.4.0).
Did a bit of testing and I'm afraid it has to do with the framerate. If I run the game normally I get around 90fps and the above-mentioned ~4.4s. If I use a tool to restrict the framerate to 60fps, I get ~4.8s.
The game doesn't seem to run at a consistent speed for different people. @LizJoon mentioned it and I timed how long it takes from the first click on the dead body until the screen changes to the close-up view.
- mikethev's run: 4.36s
- Fisottis' run: 4.73s
- LizJoon's run: 4.93s
- PitufoTilteado's run: 4.93s
We really need to figure out what causes this.
Haven't used Windows in many years. So, no clue.
I played around with it a little more, but I only managed to do it in one other place once. I got on top of some useless object inside Graham's apartment building.
No clue how it works, honestly. Maybe you need to walk into a corner? I'm just trying to stop in front of the rail and sometimes it works.
Only played around with it for a couple of minutes, but it probably has the potential to save minutes. You can cut all kinds of screen transitions short. You're playing a very different game when you are typing blam multiple times per minute, I'll say.
Thanks! Not sure, I haven't watched your run.
For the moment I am done running this game. Happy with my run for now, though it still has big mistakes to make sure I come back to the game later.
I've decided on these opinions regarding the rules questions:
- For key remapping, I would prefer if only one input per key/button is allowed, but I'm also ok with multi-input rebinds.
- I would prefer if no autoclicker/turbo buttons are allowed, but if it is allowed, that's also ok with me.
- What would make me lose interest in this speedrun is, if only the very old version of ScummVM that is shipped with the game were to be allowed. Or if debug mode and therefore the walk skips weren't allowed on the new ScummVM version.
Either way I think it's pretty important that there are rules written down for these issues.
You can do that in the ScummVM options under Keymaps.
I don't know what to do about the autoclicker situation either... on the one hand all the text mashing really is not pleasant, on the other hand it would change the game completely. I've been using "XClicker" during testing to figure out all the animation skips and they basically all become "free". At that point the game is only about putting your cursor in the right positions. Maybe allow autoclickers, but only for the right mouse button. But maybe it's also getting too complicated then...
Another kind of big change is, that in the future the animation skips will only be possible, if you run the game in debug mode. That is how it worked on the original game. Obviously we don't want to miss out on those skips for speedruns, so I think the rules need to state that debug mode is allowed (and basically required). The problem here is, that debug mode also allows you to enable fast mode (enable by pressing 4 on the keyboard) and slow mode (1 on the keyboard). So we'd need a rule that disallows that as well. Although you could also have a whole "fast mode" category, could be fun 🙃️
Key remapping is something else that needs clear rules. In theory you can just make a hotkey on your keyboard, that does both left click + right click, which would make animation skips a lot easier. You could even make 5 of those hotkeys and swipe your hand across them for rapid presses. Turbo/autoclicker is a topic for this game as well, because it is so incredibly mashing-heavy. A discussion is necessary.
Broken Sword 1 is getting a lot of development attention @ ScummVM recently. You can try out the newest changes by using the daily build: https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#daily
The changes aim to make the game work as close to the original as possible. The most important change when it comes to speedruns is the following: all these years BS1 ran at 12fps on ScummVM, whereas the original played at 12.5fps. ScummVM BS was literally playing slower than the original (DOS/Windows) game. 0.5fps might not sound like a big difference, but it adds up to minutes over such a long run.
There are various small changes to make the game resemble the original more closely, but most are not important for speedruns. One nice thing is, that now you can skip text with the right mouse button as well again. Helps with the mashing. Using animation skips in the wrong place should no longer crash the game.
In the demo, ctrl-i makes the screen reposition instantly instead of scrolling. It saves a bunch of seconds when talking to the fortune teller. For some reason you need to wait until the Lucasfilm Games logo to turn it on or it won't stick.
I forgot: Dying resets the RNG to value 0. You can take a death at the beginning of 3-2 and then kill 2 enemies to guarantee a fire drop. Probably wastes over 15 seconds that way though. Maybe someone has a better idea for a manipulation of that kind.
I stared at memory watch for a while and found an address that seems to be the RNG value at 0646.
After a hard reset the value starts at 0 at the beginning of the first level, after a soft reset it starts at 65 - so hard vs soft reset does matter in theory.
If you don't kill any enemies up to the weapon drop and do the boss fight in 1-1 perfectly*, you are guaranteed a wheel drop in 1-2. After both hard and soft reset, coincidentally.
Things that cause the RNG to change up to the weapon drop in 1-2:
- killing an enemy (probably because of the chance to drop food)
- letting the 1-1 boss get to its attack animation (I'm guessing it's a 50-50 chance whether it shoots a rock or not when it opens its mouth)
- the smoke clouds that appear when the boss "explodes" (these seem to always be the same though, so not relevant)
A fully RNG-manipulated run should be possible, but seems hard, because some boss fights are chaotic and change the RNG a lot.
I've been casually speeding through the Archibald campaign on fheroes2 a few times lately and it's been fun.
With combat auto-resolve there's less sitting around for 7 days to wait for an enemy faction to be vanquished, since you might as well hunt them down real quick. There are now hotkeys for pretty much everything and they can be configured, but I haven't touched that yet. You can see enemy heroes on the mini-map, which might be my favorite addition.
The AI is much smarter in some situations, but still very much exploitable. The "Slay the Dwarves" mission for example is way less of a hassle, because the cpu plays pretty defensively and stays close to its towns. Similar situation in "Country Lords". I was honestly worried that the better AI would make this really annoying to run, but it looks like it'll be fun.
