Dirty Swamp Speedrun in 6:31
43Yesterday I finished the Gothic 2 mod 'Dirty Swamp' and I have to say it's at least one of the top 3 Gothic mods for me. Afterwards I checked whether I could glitch to the end and I could and I made this speedrun today.
Some technical explanations about what is happening and how I routed it:
When I first finished the game I saw that the ending trigger is a teleporter in the modified Irdorath map. You get to the Irdorath map by going through a portal that two mages create for you.
Now the portal is in a normally accessible place and nothing happens if you go there before the portal is created, so I checked how they implemented the loading zone there. I used the tool 'DecDat' to decompile the scripts and after some digging noticed that when you go into the portal it really teleports you to a location that is normally inaccessible to the player and that location just has a normal levelchange trigger placed on it (That is the same as when you enter the Old Mine for example.). I checked what happens if I just go there right after the start of the game and it did put me in Irdorath. That is the spot where I go at the start of the run. (I need to clip out of the temple to avoid an instant death trigger placed before the temple entrance.)
Then in Irdorath I checked what happens if I go all the way to the teleporter at the end of the map and it works just fine.
Now as for how to actually get through Irdorath that proved to be quite troublesome. Two spots were especially problematic:
1) The gap
Where in the original you shoot two towers to extend a bridge, you're supposed to use a Levitate scroll here. Getting that scroll is pretty much out of the question as it's a quest reward. So I tried catapulting over it, which worked fine. But there is a problem with that which has to do with the dialogue glitch:
When you open the menu just as an NPC talks to you and load a save, you are in a glitched state where you are recognized by the game as being in a dialogue but you can still walk around freely. In this mod this especially powerful since you are immortal while in a dialogue and that is the reason why I can just tank those hordes of monsters attacking me.
There is a second part to the dialogue glitch where if another NPC tries to talk to you after you load the save monsters will now ignore you completely. (This is what happens when the templar after the stone gate tries to talk to me.)
So at first I set up both parts of the catapult glitch and failed to do any catapults across the gap because apparently the catapult glitch just doesn't work with the status screen or diary pause screen and it needs to be the ESC menu, which you cannot open while in a dialogue.
Then I thought just run through the monsters and catapult and then set up the dialogue glitch, but that was a totally hopeless plan...
Finally I noticed that the mod gives invincibility in dialogues and did the troll punch strat.
2) The stone gate
The devs placed a stone gate in the way and you are not supposed to pass it at all but get teleported somewhere else by a quest NPC. I tried clipping at many different places and it looked completely hopeless because of the huge Out of Bounds gaps you'd need to cross and the way the added stone gate extends past the level bounds. I experimented a lot with dropping mushrooms and the armor to try to climb to the arch above the stone gate which is the only place where I could clip through, but it remained just a bit out of reach every time.
Then randomly I clipped out of bounds and stood on the armor that was partly reaching out of the game world. And then I checked a different corner that seemed impossible to clip through and with the help of the armor in the corner it actually worked. And the jump just so happens to barely make it back into the world...
I'm curious whether that "drop item in corner" strat is useful elsewhere, where clips seemed impossible so far?
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