The latest version of ScummVM added support for variable animation speeds. First, download from ScummVM's website.

Install, run, then click "Add Game." Navigate to the "Data" folder where you have the game installed, then click "Choose." You should see this:

Click "OK."

Start the game, then go to Settings, and you'll see an "Animations speed" option. Press "+" to increase.

The rule states "Timer starts as soon as inputs are possible." I did some testing, and inputs don't register until about .75 seconds after the walk cursor shows up, slightly after the first screen loads in. (There seems to be some variability to within a tenth of a second.)

Was the intent of the rule to be when the walk cursor appears? If so, then I think that ought to be clarified. If the rule was meant as written, then SantaClaus may want to retime his run, as I think it would be faster than what's currently noted.

Here's a faster way to sneak past the droid at the end of the run. Credit goes to SantaClaus for pointing this out to me.

I found two small time saves that the existing runs don't use:

1. On the beginning of the Third Day, click on the door to exit instead of talking to Stanley. You have to walk a little bit farther, but this skips Stanley's cleaning animation, so it saves about a second.

2. When you leave Leonard Shoulder's house, tell Father Roache to go ahead instead of leaving together. (He'll ask you the Shakespeare question before he leaves.) This is faster because 1) you can double-click the exit to leave a little bit faster and 2) you don't have to watch Roache walk off the next screen to the left.

MusicallyInspired (Brandon Blume) mentioned this to me. Space Quest V "allows you to skip the crest-cleaning sequence when playing with the EGA driver."

To enable EGA, go into "resource.cfg" and change the video driver from "VGA320.DRV" to "EGA640.DRV".

The cleaning sequence in QuanVM only takes a couple of seconds, so this doesn't really save that much time. Also, to my understanding, this only works in DOSBox. However, DOSBox max cycles is still pretty zippy, and this may be worth looking into.

Someone in the comments of my YouTube videos mentioned a faster way to evade the sheriff's men during the chase sequences. if you go to the blackberry grove up and right of camp, you can use the hand code there. instead of turning into a tree, the blackberries part and you can walk away to the right. you don't have to wait for the sheriff's man to walk slowly across the screen. This was the first iteration:

Then the same commenter sent me this, which uses the screen down and right from the Willow Grove, and is even faster:

A few tidbits from alxpnv, who did a lot (most?) of the work on making Sanitarium compatible with ScummVM.

There is another easter egg in Chapter 7 i.e. "The Morgue and Cemetery" found while poking at the disassembly: in the Aztec temple, click 20 (!) times on the statue of an Aztec Warrior. The angelic statue on the roof will start "breathing."

Out of bounds hack: The whole scene can be explored by entering the scrolling mode: in the ScummVM Debug Console (invoked by hitting Ctrl-Alt-d), type use_scrolling 1 and hit Enter. Now you can scroll through the map by moving a mouse and position the player character by left-clicking.

Another useful addition of the engine is the resource viewer: in the Debug Console, type view # [optional resource id], where # is the chapter number + 4. Space/Backspace are used for navigation. I've found some unused graphics in this mode, e.g. view 7 12.

In which I dump information, mainly from sluicebox, so that it doesn't get lost in Discord.

"in act 2 there are 14 conversations to spy on, but you only need to do the first 13 so you can skip the yvette/steve one, not that it takes much time working backwards from the end of act 2... you can start exploring the museum once you've spied on the 13 conversations and met with steve you can meet with steve once you've looked at the dagger and the current conversation isn't in the center rotunda room i think if there's any time to be saved, the party route would be... center, left, center, right, gift shop, center, (so far this is what you do now) then go left, but instead of spying on the gals, immediately return to center room to meet steve. then resume the normal pattern but go on to the rest of the museum instead of spying on steve/yvette" - sluicebox, 12/11/2022

skips: "1. skip olympia; instead of getting the snake oil in her office, get it in the basement in act 4 when you're down there anyway to advance the clock and get ernie's stuff. this is a bug. 2. skip tut; when entering the egypt room after rubbing the notepad, immediately go back down to the armor room before he shows up. you have a second or two before the clock advances so just wait by the pterodactyl door and then see ziggy. speaking of ziggy... 3. skip ziggy in the life mask room. it doesn't affect the run that's one two three cut-scenes with slow walkers you can skip!" - 12/09/2022

"bonus that's probably useless: there is an alternate way to trigger act 5: look at countess close-up a second time instead of walking out of olympia's office. this is a bug. it's technically faster than walking to the bottom of the screen, but that's so blisteringly fast i doubt it matters, and it's easier to walk. countess is a smaller hotspot instead of screen edge, and you can't spam her because each Look will start the egypt music over again (lol)" - sluicebox 12/09/2022

#Text Mashing Fastest way to skip dialogue is mash space + spam click the top left Skip button. So that comes with some interesting choices on when to corner skip and when to instead space/double click skip + mouse prep dialogue.

Source: hyperformance

#Saving the Game

The game will save:

• every time you change scenes (with a couple exceptions)
• every time a conversation ends (and during some conversations)
• every time your inventory changes in any way

Source: Voodoo Detective developers

#Victor Fight

Victor won't have any weaknesses during the final fight until Private Eye is called. So you definitely cannot randomly pick a weakness just like you suspected. After that, it picks from a semi-random list of weaknesses. Any weakness you exploit will result in 25 damage. Any standard attack that's not a weakness will result in 7 damage. If you attack while he's blocking, it does 3 damage. If you attack using one of his weaknesses while he's blocking, it does 10 damage. Finally, if you attack him using a weakness while he's "in love," it does 34 damage.

Source: Voodoo Detective developers

Voodoo Detective only allows one save per playthrough, and is constantly autosaving. You cannot create manual saves.

This might be understandable for casual play, but is frustrating when routing a speedrun.

To get around this, first find the saves folder. For me, it was:

C:\Users<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Short Sleeve Studio\Voodoo Detective

You'll see the saves listed as "save_1.dat", "save_2.dat", etc.

When you get to a point that you want to save, copy the save file to a different directory and rename it something useful. When you want to load it, copy that save file back to the saves directory, and rename it to what it was originally.

Then, in the game, just go to the menu and click "Load." You do not need to restart the game.

Interestingly, the save files are in plaintext, so I believe you could edit those values directly and produce some interesting results.

A lot of these percentages are rounded. For example, a line of code might say "Choose a number between (and including) 0 to 100. If it's over 50, do something." Well, if you include 0, that's 101 numbers. So instead of being 50 / 50, it's actually 51 / 50.

Also, whenever I mention time, I'm taking the seconds listed explicitly in the game scripts. However, there's a bug with the timer that makes this inaccurate.

In short, whenever a script sets seconds, you lose the first second instantly and if you're lucky with the system clock subsecond, you'll lose another second very quickly. So, every time I mention "seconds," real time will actually be between one and (almost) two seconds faster.

Here are some script comments from ScummVM with technical details.

When Script:seconds is set, the first second is deducted on the next doit except in some cases when there are stale values from a previous delay. A one second delay is usually no delay at all. Subsequent seconds are deducted whenever the seconds value of the system clock changes. This means that the duration of the 2nd "second" depends on the system clock's subsecond value when the delay was requested. A script that requests a two second delay usually gets a random delay between zero and one second.

COPY PROTECTION (Floppy Only) At the bandit camp, the witch's house, and the mountain path, there's a 25% chance of getting copy protection. These rolls are independent from each other.

If you get to the boat and haven't had any copy protection, you automatically get it here. Otherwise, you don't get it here. There is no dice roll.

WITCH There's a 50% chance of her appearing on any screen (other than the first when you enter the forest). If you manage to get in front of her house, she will automatically show up there.

THE CASTLE Cassie will show up somewhere between 20 and 40 seconds. It's unclear to me whether this is from the time the room loads or whether it's when you get control of Graham.

If you're in a room where the blue beast can show up, the following will happen:

1. Make a random roll to see if the blue beast appears.

2. If that roll fails, and you're in a room where the cat can show up, then it will do another roll to see if the cat appears. This second roll is always 80% in favor of the cat appearing. (The overall chance of the cat appearing is less than 80%, because we have to take the first roll into account.)

3. If the blue beast roll from step 1 succeeds, then the game picks a random wait time.

4. After that time, it checks to see if Graham is within certain x-y coordinates. If Graham's in the right spot, then the blue beast appears. If not, then the game goes back to step 3, picks another random wait time, checks again, and so on, until either the blue beast appears or Graham leaves the room.

Blue beast wait times are written as inclusive.

Organ Room 50% chance of blue beast 2-4 seconds Need to be between the two red lines

North Dining room 75% chance of blue beast 4-10 seconds Need to be above the red line

South dining room 75% chance of blue beast when entering from the north 20% chance of cat when entering from the north 50% chance of blue beast when entering from the left 40% chance of cat when entering from the left 4-10 seconds Need to be to the right of the red line

Bottom of stairs 50% chance of blue beast There are no x/y coordinate requirements for the beast appearing 4-10 seconds Under certain conditions that I can't decipher, the cat has a 60% chance of appearing (these conditions involve global variables and I don't know what they refer to)

Bedroom 10% chance of Mordack 56% chance of cat. This one is odd because there are actually three dice rolls. Roll to see if Mordack is there. If not, roll to see if we do another dice roll. If that succeeds, roll to see if the cat shows up.

Video proof must include the restart or the selection of a new game after a fresh start.

Within the last year, it was discovered that the RNG for the game (the order and selection of riddles, the password Marian gives you, the solution to Fulk's puzzle box, etc.) gets set on game start. This is either when you select a new game after a fresh start, or when selecting Restart from the game menu.

If you save on the very first screen and restore to that for new runs, then every run would have the exact same RNG. So, a rule was added that runs must begin after a restart, and not a restore.

However, without the restart being present in the submitted video, there was no way to verify this. This was my fault for not being clearer, and, to be fair, I wasn't consistent with it myself.

All existing runs on the boards will stay. Going forward, future runs will need to have the restart included in the video.

Congrats @dethwing on your 100% run! I look forward to watching it much more closely later to pick up on tips. I only ever did one run of it.

Just one thing I thought I'd mention that's not in the Any% world record: after you go to the shooting grove, a quicker way to get to the overlook is to click on Watling Street on the map, then walk right. You can see this in the Low% world record.

Also, if you'd rather use discord to talk about the game, here's the link to the Speedy Adventures discord: https://discord.gg/kAPTPTR

On the cliffs of logic, there's a random chance for Alex to lose his balance and wobble. He also says the line "Whoa, wait a minute," so these wobbles have come to be known as WWAMs. These break your rhythm and take a moment (sometimes several seconds) to recover from.

The WWAMs work like this: every time you get on a rock, or after a WWAM happens, a counter gets set to a random number between 500 and 1000. Every RockStep subtracts one from that counter every game cycle until the counter hits zero, which triggers a WWAM. The faster your game cycles, the faster it goes down.

You can hold Enter while climbing the rocks, and this will avoid the WWAMs completely. However, we eventually found that people with faster CPUs will get WWAMs no matter what. So, in a practical sense, some people get none, others get a few each cliff climb, and some unfortunate souls get WWAMs constantly.

So, how have we tried solve this issue?

This behavior first came to our attention when we started using UrQuan's ScummVM, which runs closer to native DOS (and thus faster) than DOSBox or the official ScummVM. At first, we banned UrQuan's ScummVM and used DOSBox, which seemed to solve the problem for a while. Over time, however, as people with newer CPUs starting running the game, the WWAMs came back. DOSBox had slowed the game down just enough to fix it temporarily.

You might think to have everyone adjust the cycles setting in DOSBox to what their own computer can handle. However, setting the cycles to a specific number instead of max will give an audio initialization error at sufficiently high amounts. Setting it low enough to where the error doesn't happen means that the zips are significantly slower.

Some runners have addressed the problem by slowing their machines down, for instance by opening up a number of browser tabs or streaming while doing attempts (since OBS eats up CPU cycles). Another solution would be to track down older hardware specifically for the purpose of running the game.

The moderators and many runners of KQVI feel that these kinds of measures create an unnecessary barrier to entry.

In July of 2021, the community worked to create a patch that prevents the WWAMs from ever happening. (Credit to davidtki, DrD2k9, and Sluicebox.) You can find this patch in the resources section. If you do use this patch, simply indicate so on your run submission.

The patch doesn't eliminate anything critical to game progression, nor does it make the game any easier. It only makes it so that players potentially don't have to wait as long for Alex to move to the next step. Since some player's computers make the WWAMs a lesser possibility than other players, the patch eliminates an inherent unfair advantage without changing what actions are actually necessary to complete the game.

While patching out a game feature may seem extreme, it's the best solution we have to create a level playing field.

(Credit to DrD2k9 and Sluicebox for some explanations and wording.)

You can download this patch here: https://www.speedrun.com/kings_quest_vi_heir_today_gone_tomorrow/resources

Simply extract into the game folder.

Two glitches from my latest round of Ben Jordan runs, neither of them useful.

For the first, I was trying to use the hand on the arrowhead display case. I accidentally talked to it instead. The next time I tried opening inventory, the game softlocked.

The second happens near the end of the game, after Ranger Rick is torn apart. Try as I might, I could not get Ben to walk north towards the cabin. It was only after I switched to another icon (the Eye) and clicked that the screen transitioned. I believe this has something to do with holding Esc beforehand, as this behavior doesn't happen if I don't hold Esc.

In future runs, I was able to avoid this by repeatedly left-clicking Walk down lower, on top of the bushes, but it still feels clunky.

A thread for strats and optimizations that would otherwise be lost in Discord.

Here's something I've been playing with on recent PBs. On the first book skip in catacombs, keep holding Enter into the first room as you're zipping from the tile room down. Keep your mouse on the bottom of the screen. Quickly flick the mouse right, let go of Enter. Slam the mouse left and do the book skip like normal, though you may have to cycle the frame forward once to get Alex in his turn.

This has the advantage of not having to reposition the mouse next to Alex to get him turned right. The frame cycling is a disadvantage. Even with that, however, with practice (and better execution than what I show in this example), it MIGHT be marginally faster than repositioning the mouse.

Making this to post general strategies and glitches that would otherwise be lost in Discord.

Here's how to do grate skip:

Start walking towards the screen where the grate is. Pull out the crowbar before the screen transition and hold Enter. (It's important that you hold Enter before the screen transition and keep holding it through the transition as well.) Hold Enter over the grate so you get the input on the first frame possible. Let go of Enter, then right click to get to the hand, left click.

Hi there! I'm starting to speedrun this game, and I was wondering if there were any tips on doing the stutter-stepping to avoid cut scene triggers? I've been spamming Esc+W+Left click, and that works, but feels slower than what existing runs do.

Also, in the skip for the fight with Kian at the Journeyman Inn, sometimes I can get past the guy on the stairs, but most of the time I get stuck on him and can't get around. Does anyone know why this is? Thanks!

Wherein we keep random knowledge that might otherwise be lost in the murky sea of Discord comments.

"rng trivia for 100% runs: there are random pauses that you have to sit through when spying on the vizier writing his letter. while he's a quillin' between messages, there's two delays that are each randomly between 3 and 5 seconds. so if it seems like sometimes it goes faster than others, it does.

other than upstairs guard dogs, i don't see any other straight random delays like that which affect play time"

-sluicebox 07/16/2020

--

WWAMs ("Whoa, wait a minute...") explained:

so every time you get on a rock, or after a WWAM happens, a counter gets set to a random number between 500 and 1000

so far pretty normal, it's random, so they probably just count down from there... but instead...

every RockStep subtracts one from that counter every game cycle until zero, then WWAM

so the more RockSteps that exist, the faster the counter goes down

and the faster your game cycles (different from DOSBox cycles but still a fast DOSBox affects that) the faster it goes down

but i think a consequence of that scheme might be that RockSteps from a previous screen that haven't been completely destroyed yet are still contriburing to that too?

haven't tested that, just seemed like when i went down from the 2nd cliff room to the beach, it was going really fast from those ones too

and i wondered "wow how are speedrunners not just getting pummeled with these all the time" and maybe the answer is that you are and that's another motivation to move really fast on those rocks?

also that's why WWAMs happen less frequently on scummvm since the throttling keeps the cycle frequency to something closer to the original game speed

-sluicebox 06/30/2020

There are some things I did in my run that maybe not every runner is aware of so for the sake of transparency I'm listing those strats here:

1. Don't ever get the boring book. It wastes time on so many levels. Gnome skip with map is just as easy to pull off and the animation to get to swamp screen is much faster. Advance a frame in the menu bar if you have to, its still worth it. Click-cancel on map, click-cancel on isle of wonder to put it away quickly. DON'T HOLD ENTER OR SPAM CLICK after click-canceling Wonder, you will get extra unnecessary narrator dialogue that you have to skip through.

2. ONLY hold enter while waiting for red and white queens to arrive. Don't hold enter AND spam clicks - if you do, the animation of the horses bouncing the queens towards each other takes an extra half second. Holding enter alone makes this animation instantaneous. I don't know why this is but I can confirm this after testing in several failed runs. This may hold a clue to making other "delayed" animations happen or not happen as well... pawn shop owner standing up, pawn shop owner dumping contents into pot, genie's eyes in Beast, first step emerging on cliffs after first puzzle solved, etc. I haven't tested all of this thoroughly yet, just going by what I've personally witnessed.

3. There are cursor shenanigans that happen after solving the first puzzle on cliffs and after the narrator does his dialogue that says "Alexander stares in amazement blah blah" or whatever... the cursor defaults to the waiting crown rather than a normal swappable cursor like walk or touch. As a result, this may cause Alex to encounter a WWAM after stepping onto the first step if handled poorly, as a few people also experienced. Each step has a 1-2-3 motion of appearing, sliding, and stopping. After the 1-2-3 animation of the last step, quickly right-click, insert, enter on first step and continue holding enter for each step as normal, you will not get WWAM.

4. On the clifftop, there is a zip you can get to gate. It's on the pointy spire to the right of the catacombs entrance, about halfway up. As soon as the genie starts to land from his fakeberry flight, and as you begin to hear the breath of the genie's dialogue about to happen, click-cancel on that spire spot. You CAN hold enter here to skip dialogue and make Alex move, but you gotta release it at juuust the right time or you end up not getting the zip (only managed to pull this off once during my runs.) The safer strat is to click-cancel and then right-click to skip the genie's "ALL RIGHT THEN" post-dialogue.

5. TopBrickShrek = as you walk into the descending ceiling trap, before Alex enters that room, go to your inventory and get the brick ready. Holding the brick on the gears as the doors close skips narrator dialogue "AND THE CEILING IS COMING DOWN!" and Alex will toss the brick in the gears almost immediately. This is faster than pulling brick out in this room because you don't get that extra dialogue.

6. This one y'all probs already know and do but I don't watch every stream and every run so idk. After you shield the archer in the garden and the rose bushes block your path, click hand on rose to get it. As Alex starts walking, pull out the scythe and have it ready hovered over the hedges. If you time this correctly, Alex will pick up the rose and immediately zip over and start hacking the hedges, skipping all narrator dialogue and saving a little time.

7. As Jaki has demonstrated in her runs and Shorty has stated on here, get the nightingale after Beast business is done. This will save time by skipping the genie's candy dish tantrum and storming out.

8. Faster Pillar = after you place the nightingale in the hallway for the guards, put the walk icon just sitting on top of the bottom of the alcove pillar and click. Alex will walk to the RIGHT of the pillar rather than the left and the animation for hiding is quicker, plus you get to the portrait faster.

-topkekshrek, 11/16/2020

Mint OOB:

Catacombs Lingering Text Box:

Catacombs Lingering Text Box 2:

Beast Dialog Softlock

Vizier's Chest Softlock:

Shopkeeper Crash: https://www.twitch.tv/jakijo/clip/PrettiestRelentlessTortoisePupper

Isle of Beast Genie Softlock: