Oblivion talk:Version 4

Need to find a good way to extensively document the intricacies of the route logic. Here are some misc. notes.

Logic Node Heirarchy

This is a general breakdown, not all objectives perfectly fit into this categorization.

There are several descriptors for objectives that change as the route logic evolves based on completion state:

• Available objectives have no prerequisites to complete them. Some small tasks like getting a skill book sitting in an immediately accessible area are available from the start of the game, while others become available later.
• Blocked objectives that have one or more prerequisites before they can be completed. All quests stages after the first one for example, or any quest that can't start before another ends, like guild quest lines.
• Bottleneck objectives are ones that are blocking one or more objectives from being available.
• Isolated objectives are ones that do not unlock other objectives upon completion.

Anything Blocked can't be considered yet. Available Bottlenecks are typically high priority to increase routing options and avoid route logic tunneling, and Available Isolated objectives are low priority.

Route Logic Tunneling is getting stuck with a large single chain of single Bottleneck Available objectives that have to be completed, either before new ones unlock or before the run can end. The worst example of this is having to linearly clear the remainder of a quest line without being able to overlap their logic with other quests that share locations.

Breakdown

1. Every objective is a node.
   • Quests are not a single node, but each stage is a node in a chain of Bottleneck nodes.
2. Every node requires the player to be at a specific location.
   • Some locations have multiple nodes from various objectives, such as multiple quests that have a stage that takes place in the same building.
   • Fast travel and player pathing redundancies can be reduced by visiting each location as few times as possible, ideally once to collect all logic nodes at once if possible.
3. Cities are clusters of locations.
   • Fast travel and player pathing redundancies within a city can be reduced by visiting several adjacent locations in a city at once, via circuits.

Route Logic

• The jumping off point for choosing available nodes is that we need spell effects to immediately do map exploration, so starting the mages guild nodes and their nearby logic is what kickstarts the whole process.