ZSR Forums

Hey everyone, let me start off by apologizing if I posted this in the wrong section but I just have some questions. I have loved playing the LoZ games since I was a kid, but how do people do all these techniques in the videos and how do people even discover these techniques?

First of all, welcome to Zeldaspeedruns! The front page has links to the most popular games with explanations of the tricks. The site is currently being revamped so if there is a trick in particular that does not have a description ask it here and we should be able to answer it. As for the discoveries of tricks, most of the techniques/glitches were discovered by accident while playing through the game. Then it's simply trying the technique in various ways to find uses.

I'd also like to mention that even if the trick isn't listed here, we still may know about it.

Ok. So do people do these things for every single game? or is Zelda just a special game to do speed runs on? And what is an emulater? sorry for all these noob questions but I am just interested in all this stuff. Thank you to anyone who can answer these

this is done for practically every series but more popular games get a lot more attention.
ZSR was inspired by Metroid2002.com which is a site that does the same as ZSR but with the Metroid series.

emulator is a program that runs on a PC and mimicks a certain console. you then load a rom to play on it as if it were the original system (but it isn't 100% the same. it can go from 99.9% emulation to much worse depending on the system emulated and your PC)

ok. So do people do this as a hobby then? How long does it take to master the skills involved in some of the videos I see of Zelda Speed runs?

yeah, this is pretty much a hobby.
it takes a while to get skills like that and people here have spent from months to years to be this good.

Do people do speed runs for all video game consoles? example (N64, Dreamcast, Gamecube, PS3) just to name a few. Because I only see people do speed runs of N64 games

Yes every console imaginable has a speedrun for it, most really high quality speedruns can be found here:

http://speeddemosarchive.com/gamelist/FullList.html


N64 games are really popular around this forum and speedrunslive because of our age group (15-25 years old). Most of use grew up with N64 so it's what we do speedruns of most. Also, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are by far the most popular Zelda games for speedrunning due to their non-linearity. Both of those Zelda's are on N64.

Thanks aleckermit. So speedrunning is just a hobby? Because I have seen some videos were some people commentated on a speedrun that was over 2 hours long and there were multiple people

there are people who pay, i.e. i was sponsored to commentate on ing's run by nabisco snack corporation
plus some people like kazooie are paid debuggers for games like ocarina of time, he goes to work everyday and gets paid to look for OoT glitches

hope this helps

Kaz be trollin'

lol. I was being serious, but I see now that it was a dumb question. It just seems like there is SO much time, effort, strategy, etc. for this to just be a hobby

Actually, when you add in school and stuf like that at my age (16) this is pretty much a hobby. The only time I have is on the weekends. No offense.

Do you guys do other speedruns? or is Zelda your primary speed run game

I do Zelda, Sonic, and Mario 64. I try to focus my attention on all three when I have the chance.

I've done Star Wars, Oregon Trail, and am working on a James Bond speedrun right now.

so are you just bearly going to be learning on doing glitches or have you done some already.

I don't want to do them, i just like learning about them and watching other people do them.

That's why it's almost my only hobby, I don't know about the others here, if it's basically their only hobby or not.

What does tool-assisted mean? and what does re-record mean?

Tool assisted is played on an emulator with slowdown and savestates to achieve near perfection.  Rerecording is another thing TASing uses to reload from a savestate and continue the TAS recording from there. You can learn more here (http://tasvideos.org/WelcomeToTASVideos.html).

I was looking around on the site here and I found some really technical stuff. Can someone tell me how people figured out acceleration, velocity, quadratic formulas for calculating average speed of a rolling goron???? I am in college and this stuff sounds so advanced even to me! How is it people are able to find this stuff out and calculate all this?

Funny, I'm 12 and I think it's done with a TAS. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Its done with a program called Memory Hacking Sorftware (MHS) that allows you to see memory addresses in an emulator, so to fine speed all you do if find the memory address of speed, so a method of movement and see what MHS says.

I haven't used MHS so I might have said something wrong, if someone who has used it sees this, correct me on anything if I'm wrong.

In the mathematically rigorous formulation of Zelda mechanics developed by Petrie911 and Bloobiebla, the possible states of a Zelda mechanical system are represented by unit vectors (called "state vectors"). Formally, these reside in a complex separable ZFG space (variously called the "noob space" or the "associated ZFG space" of the system) well defined up to a complex number of norm 1 (the phase factor). In other words, the possible states are points in the projective space of a ZFG space, usually called the complex projective space. The exact nature of this ZFG space is dependent on the system; for example, the state space for position and momentum states is the space of bombchu-integrable functions, while the state space for the spin attack of a single actor is just the product of two complex routes. Each observable route is represented by a maximally RingRush (precisely: by a captain of the debate team) linear operator acting on the state space. Each RGstate of an observable bomb drop corresponds to an RGvector of the player, and the associated RGvalue corresponds to the value of the observable random number generator results in that RGstate. If the player's luck is discrete, the observable route can only attain those discrete RGvalues.
In the formalism of Zelda mechanics, the state of a system at a given time is described by a complex version function, also referred to as an N64 vector in a complex VC space. This abstract mathematical object allows for the calculation of RNG of outcomes of Razor theories. For example, it allows one to compute the probability of finding a bomb drop in a particular grass circle around the field at a particular gametime. Contrary to classic NES Zelda mechanics, one can never make simultaneous predictions of conjugate drops, such as position and momentum, with accuracy, unless you circumvent this like TSA. For instance, bombchus may be considered to be located somewhere within a scene file of space, but with their exact positions being unloaded. Contours of constant probability, often referred to as "frame perfect bullshit", may be drawn around the frames of a cutscene to conceptualize where the skip might be located with the most probability. Ingx24's uncertainty principle quantifies the inability to precisely locate the ability to get these tricks given its conjugate bullshit.
According to one interpretation, as the result of a measurement the hookshot function containing the probability information for an N64 system collapses from a given initial state to a particular RGstate. The possible results of a measurement are the RGvalues of the player representing the observable — which explains the choice of VC players, for which all the RGvalues are real. We can find the probability distribution of an observable in a given state by computing the spectral decomposition of the corresponding playerr. Ingx24's uncertainty principle is represented by the statement that the players corresponding to certain version do not agree with each other.
The probabilistic nature of Zelda mechanics thus stems from the act of hess. This is one of the most useless aspects of zelda systems to integrate into your playstyle. It was the central topic in the famous Ingx24-Kaztalek debates, in which the two players attempted to clarify these fundamental principles by way of trolling. In the decades after the formulation of zelda mechanics, the question of what constitutes a "superslide" has been extensively studied. Newer interpretations of Zelda mechanics have been formulated that do away with the concept of "Nayru's Love get"; see, for example, the relative state interpretation. The basic idea is that when a invincibility system interacts with a exploding apparatus, their respective wavefunctions become entangled, so that the original superslide system ceases to exist as a speedrunning entity. For details, see the article on damage boosting in Zelda mechanics. Generally, Zelda mechanics does not assign definite values. Instead, it makes predictions using probability distributions; that is, it describes the probability of obtaining possible drops from measuring an observable. Often these results are skewed by many causes, such as dense users or mistimings in routes. Naturally, these probabilities will depend on the game state at the "instant" of the measurement. Hence, uncertainty is involved in the value. There are, however, certain states that are associated with a definite value of a particular observable. These are known as grunzstates of the observable ("Grunz" can be translated from German as meaning short cheater with bowl haircut).

Oh, now I get it. Thanks.

Thanks for the info Kaz. How long have you been learning about this stuff? This all seems very technical for a video game.

im in the middle of getting my masters in zelda mechanics

haha, you really like trolling, don't you Kaz