Oblivion talk:Movement Formulas

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Archive 1: Dec 2007 - Oct 2008

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Hasn't it already been established that these have nothing to do with movement? (see the Notes section on the original page).

   * fFatigueBase (Default 1.0)
   * fFatigueMult (Default 0.5)
   * fActorLuckSkillMult (Default 0.4)

And this is the number of lbs you can carry per point of Strength, and thus also nothing to do with movement.

   * fActorStrengthEncumberanceMult (Default 5.0)

It's complicated enough already - having completely unrelated things mixed in as well is only going to confuse people even more.  :) — Unsigned comment by 71.9.18.26 (talk) at 13:49 on 5 October 2008

Yes, you're definitely right about that. This page was put together over a year ago by Abo, and as you can see in the history, he basically just extracted any settings/variables he thought might be relevant and put them in tables. At this point, I think we have a fairly good idea of what's going on, though as you've noticed, there are still a few problems (i.e., the Height multiplier...or lack thereof). So yes, I would agree that those numbers can be removed.

It worked out for the best though: if I'd had to hunt all over the wiki for each piece of the puzzle, I'd never have bothered trying to solve it. :) Even though we can now prove they AREN'T relevant and just remove them, that's a lot better than having them come up after we think we've nailed it all. Given that nobody understood WHY Feather made such a difference, it's only reasonable that something with "Strength" and "Encumberance" ended up here - I was at least as surprised as anyone to discover that Strength had absolutely no impact on speed when I started testing.  :)

I'm expecting Lurlock will turn out to be right about the Height issue, also because my Altmer "felt" faster than my Breton at the start of game (before very long any difference will be subsumed by "genuine" speed differences from stats/skills/equipment) even though he "shouldn't" have been.

While we're on the topic of variables, experimentation suggests that the fMoveEncumEffect variable isn't used at all. As far as I can tell, it's always using fMoveEncumEffectNoWeap, regardless of whether a weapon is equipped or not. I have more testing to do on this, but since you seem to be taking an interest and doing your own testing, I thought I'd mention it so you can confirm/reject my findings. I was puzzled at first when testing this, since Quest Items produced a slight lowering of speed despite being weightless, but after doing the calculations in reverse, I realized that while they're weightless in your inventory for purposes of whether you can move at all, they do still count against your movement speed at their full normal weight, as long as you're not over-encumbered. --Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 19:09, 5 October 2008 (EDT)

I'm 100% sure it is used (though it's VERY confusingly named) - see the "Reworking" section for details on how, if you can stomach it. :P You'll be happy to know I've already looked into Quest Items, and they AREN'T actually weightless: they still have their "true" weight for every aspect of their BEHAVIOR, including Fatigue (or you could swing the "exploit" version of Umbra all day long without any discernable Fatigue loss, which you can't) - they simply aren't counted towards your INVENTORY weight, which is subtly different from being genuinely weightless. (I think someone mentioned this on the ?Arena? page, as distinct from Permanent Bound Items, which is what tipped me off).

Yeah, I only noticed all the notes you left now for some reason. Not sure how I missed them previously. Just glanced through them quickly and I think I got the gist of what you were saying. Certainly having a weapon drawn will slow you down, it's a very noticeable effect in-game at higher speeds, so it makes sense that that would be used there. I'll go over all the math more thoroughly later on. Once we've both had a chance to test and confirm our findings, we can work on fixing the page up some more. Here's a bullet list of things I can think of that we need to confirm and add or change on the page. Please feel free to add to it and we'll use it as a checklist.

• Check and explain Feather effects
• Introduce Armor perks into formulae
• Fix weight formula, if necessary (I think your formulae came out the same, but without the weight-min variable, not sure)
• Confirm if Luck plays a factor at all (may silently add to Athletics, as it silently adds to other skills...quick testing says it doesn't do anything, but I may have been at 100 Athletics already)

There's probably more than that, but that's all that's coming to mind right now. I'll sit down later and go through everything and see if the list doesn't get longer. ;) --Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 21:14, 5 October 2008 (EDT)

Is the Feather stuff clear enough? If not, you're probably going to have to rewrite it for me.

Luck doesn't affect Athletics (probably because Athletics isn't capped at 100, but the why isn't really important).

The weight formulas here are right beyond any reasonable doubt. I did simplify them a little and turned them into two trivial versions rather than a single one with an excessive number of substitution terms, but I don't think what I cut can be considered "important" or even meaningful as far as Normal Oblivion goes. If a mod decides to change everything that's up to them, and it's also up to them to document it: if we clutter the page with "and in OOO it's like THIS, and in some other random mod it's like THAT", it'll be completely unreadable. The perks can be summed up in a sentence or two at the end of that, hopefully.

Wrapping Up:

• First off, we need to start using terminology that is consistent and makes sense. At the moment, the page generally uses Encumbrance to mean Equipment Weight because of the names of the CS variables, but they're not remotely the same thing, and other parts of the page (and the wiki in general) use Encumbrance to mean "Total Inventory Weight". I'd go with EqWeight, since WornWeight implies that the weapon isn't part of it, which it is.
• "Modifier" implies additive or subtractive behavior, which none of these are. "Factor" is the standard math term for a multiplicative component, and this topic needs as little extra confusion as possible, because there's plenty already. :P
• The "Final Formula(s)" section above is as clear and concise as I can make it, aside from the "legacy" use of Encumbrance: if you can improve on it, please do. EqWeight, and specifically the "effective" EqWeight based on feather, perks, weapon, and weapon state, has (potentially) more of an impact on movement speed than Speed and Athletics combined, so it should be the focus of the "main" section.
• Having the "big" formula at the top of the page with none of its terms actually defined yet makes the article very awkward to read - you have to constantly look back and forth to see what fits in where because of all the substitutions. Define the terms first, THEN use them.
• Likewise, the CS variables just make everything ridiculously hard to deal with when you're trying to work out roughly what sort of impact a change in Factor X (stat, skill, or whatever) will have. We should certainly give the "full" version of each term once, but after that, "BaseSpeed = 90 + (Speed * 0.4)" is going to be a lot more understandable to someone who wants know what raising Speed with items / spells / at levelup translates to than "BaseSpeed = fMoveCharWalkMin + (fMoveCharWalkMax - fMoveCharWalkMin) * Speed / 100" where they have to keep looking away from the formula to see what these magic words actually mean. As far as we're concerned, these are constants, and they should be folded away whenever possible.
• Migrating this to the main page piece by piece probably isn't going to work, because we'll have sections and terminology etc that conflict or don't match up. We need to build a "complete" replacement here, make sure we're all happy with it, and then move it all in one chunk.

Aliana 21:03, 12 October 2008 (EDT)

• Feather - No, it's not clear. The little bit you mentioned doesn't explain where in the formula Feather values are taken into account.
• Luck - Agreed. I've tried altering Luck in a variety of ways and it appears to have no effect on speed, either visibly or behind the scenes like height.
• Weight - Agreed. Your formulae appear to be accurate according to all my calculations. I'd like to keep the WeightMin variables in there somewhere, but I'm thinking that perhaps we need to separate this into a "simple" and "full" version.
• Equipment Weight - Agreed again, though I'd actually refer to it as "Equipped Weight" to make it completely unambiguous that the only thing that counts is what you have equipped.
• Modifier/Factor - Again, good idea. I'd go either with Factor or Multiplier. Factor is shorter, but I think more people know what Multiplier means. Modifier is probably not the best choice of terms due to its vagueness, though I disagree with your assertion that it implies additive/subtractive.
• Final Formul(as/ae) - Need to clarify what "combat ready" means. As near as I can tell, having any armor or weapon equipped causes the less-desirable formula to be used. As for the focus of the main section, it really depends on your point of view. When I see "Movement Formula", I expect a technical discussion on the in-game formulae used. If I saw a title like "How Movement Works", I'd expect it to be more of a high-level overview.
• Big formula - Here, I have to disagree...though even looking at the current version, I think we should put the real formula at the top, then put BaseSpeed under it, since even though it's a "Base" in our minds, in reality, it's just multiplied in like anything else. I basically see it as "Here's the basic formula, now here's how each piece works." whereas doing it the way you suggest, I'd be afraid it might come out as "Here's a whole bunch of puzzle pieces, we'll show you the picture only after you've looked at each piece."
• CS variables - Yes, agreed, they do make it harder to understand, but at the same time, I think there should be somewhere that we include how they all fit in. As I suggested above, perhaps a section (or even an entire page) where we have the simpler version that assumes all CS variables are at default, as well as a separate section that details the nitty-gritty.
• Migration - It could go either way, really. If this were a frequently-referenced page, I'd say yes, let's make sure we have a full-fledged replacement before any migration. For something as esoteric as this is, however, I doubt very many people are going to care, particularly if we put a {{Wip}} tag at the top while we're "playing" with it. Still, there's no harm in creating a separate page, and we can ask for an admin to delete it once we're done. --Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 20:33, 13 October 2008 (EDT)

• "Equipped Weight" works for me.
• Feather: as part of Equipped Weight.
• "Need to clarify what "combat ready" means" - "Weapon drawn", but since it applies even if it's just fists, using "weapon" will confuse people.
• "As near as I can tell, having any armor or weapon equipped causes the less-desirable formula to be used" - that doesn't match my observations, but it's a fairly critical point to have different opinions on. :P I'll recheck since I did the initial testing with a mod that made them the same to simplify things, but I also made a point of them NOT being the same as either of the defaults, and to create and prove the final formulae those clearly have to have been at default for that stage.
• A separate "full version" page with the CS variables on it is fine if you want to do it for the sake of completeness: they're just of no use (or even interest) to players, only modders, so I don't think everyone should be forced to wade through them whether they want to or not. If you're dead set on it, that's probably the version to do FIRST, then substitute (and simplify where possible) for the "normal" version.

Aliana 21:24, 13 October 2008 (EDT)

related pages with misinformation

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Getting_Around has more of the "weight/strength is important" stuff in it -Aliana71.9.18.26 19:13, 7 October 2008 (EDT)

corrected - Aliana71.9.18.26 05:41, 9 October 2008 (EDT)

also http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Feather and http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Encumbrance (and I'm sure there are plenty more after 2 years, just fix them as you find them).

Movement Speed Penalties

(this belongs on http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Armor, but that's protected)

Until you have the Master perk or use the Feather trick mentioned above, each lb of armor reduces your movement speed by 0.2%. For a complete set, the maximum speed in each armor is:

Iron 83.8% Steel 81.1% Dwarven 78.4% Orcish 75.7% Ebony 71.6% Daedric 67.6%

These penalties are halved once you obtain the Expert perk. - Aliana71.9.18.26 05:28, 9 October 2008 (EDT)

(this belongs on http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Armor, but that's protected) So sign up for an account and it won't be an issue! :) --Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 15:45, 9 October 2008 (EDT)

it will. it needs an admin to change it. Aliana 08:06, 12 October 2008 (EDT)

No, it doesn't. That page is semi-protected. You've only just created your account and so some restrictions still apply. You'll be able to edit semi-protected pages in a few days. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 08:25, 12 October 2008 (EDT)

Actually, now that I *can* edit it, I'm not going to. :P I don't know if it makes more sense to put the values in the armor tables, or as a note at the bottom, or what, so I'm leaving it for one of you to do since your guess is probably better than mine.Aliana 04:36, 13 October 2008 (EDT)

Athletics vs. Speed

I think it would be very helpful to most players to include a discussion on whether increasing Athletics(skill) or Speed(attribute) is more beneficial in moving faster. Something a la the willpower vs intelligence discussion on the willpower page. SteviL 18:01, 13 November 2008 (EST)

It's mentioned in here. In summary, raising your armor skill and/or using feature affects your run speed far more significantly that speed/athletics. ZirePhoenix 21:34, 23 December 2008 (EST)

(pardon me for inevitably posting this wrong) i did a bit of math work and found out that any increase to speed would result in the same movement speed as if it was given to athletics. ex: +20 speed = + 20 athletics — Unsigned comment by 173.17.16.104 (talk) at 01:53 on 29 September 2009

I suspect that's just a fluke based on the speed you were at. If, for example, your Speed and Athletics were both 50, then assuming there were no other modifiers to your speed, you'd have a walking speed of 110, and a running speed of 3.5 times that (365). If you increase only your Speed by 20, your new movement speeds would be 130 and 425. If, however, you increased your Athletics by 20, your movement speeds would instead be 110 and 407. The difference between 407 and 425 is fairly negligible unless you're timing it very precisely, so the speeds might well have appeared the same.

As to the original question of which is better to increase, it'll depend on your specific stats, but typically Speed would be the better choice, since it's part of your base speed and will affect everything much more than Athletics would, not to mention that Athletics doesn't improve your walking or sneak-walking speed...though sneak-running is still affected. —Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 03:12, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

So I'm a-wondering whether I should go with Absorb Speed, or Absorb Athletics to make a quick excape from those inbred loons in Hackdirt. . .? 76.192.99.0 03:03, 17 November 2009 (UTC)

Assuming that the absorption level is the same between both spells, Speed is still the best way to go, though the difference is really minute. Once you factor in the cheaper cost and longer duration of Absorb Speed, though, the difference becomes clear (i.e., Absorb Speed is definitely the best way to go). —Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 21:50, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

How does speed affect Acrobatics?. I cant find anywhere in this article that explains this. eg If speed is increased by 50, how much higher can you jump?, is it better than increasing acrobatics by 50?. thanks 86.178.224.253 11:51, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Just to clarify, Speed only affects the length of your jumps, not the height of your jumps. 166.216.130.68 14:52, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

Follow-up

Despite the extensive testing done some time ago and posted here, nobody ever got around to changing the main page to reflect the results. I've decided to take an alternate route and look directly at Oblivion.exe to confirm what's going on. I will make changes as I'm able to confirm things and note below anything I'm unable to verify. So far, I've been able to confirm most of the basic formulae for the player, but creatures, feather effects and several other minor things have yet to be verified. —Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 09:18, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Hi Robin. It's been a while.  :)
I never had time, and just started playing again for the first time since then. I think the way I worked out Feather was by carrying absolutely nothing (i.e. if it was in my inventory at all, I was wearing / wielding it) and just using SDT ?6? and the IC bridge.
If you have loot as well as equipment, I have no idea which would be Feathered first, and since you can't tell it would almost certainly make any testing inconsistent. Remember that you also need to NOT have the Expert / Master perks for Feather to matter, so don't use a level 50 character to test with.  :) -- Ali 71.84.123.86 12:29, 10 March 2010 (UTC)

I think I'm going to try to tackle this. It's been 18 months, but it looks like you moved the majority of our work onto the article shortly after I left, and it's certainly in far better shape than I remember it being. The rest of the notes are still in the archive, I have a suitable (i.e. 50-ish HA and planning on Mastery) char to play with, and it seems a shame to have made it as far as we did but not quite finish it. Once I've refreshed my memory I'll set up a sandbox and see how far I can get.

I don't understand the VN on the article. If Feather affects WornWeight, which I'm fairly sure I proved it does, it will affect speed in exactly the same way that the Expert and Master perks do even if "maximum weight" is a constant, which we know it is.

re the very last comment in the archive, which, oddly, I remember you bringing up, I had a thought just the other day that "foot weight" may well just be the creature equivalent of weapon weight for Fatigue use.

--Aliana 06:54, 21 April 2010 (UTC)

maximum speed?

i was trying out the scroll dupe and duped around 2k skooma. problem is u can only drink 8 at a time. my speed was insane, around 700, but not out of this world. is there any way to get like 1000000 speed? im on 360 so cant mod the game files. plz help! — Unsigned comment by P90 user (talk • contribs) at 16:48 on 25 September 2009

I doubt you're going to get anything that high without the ability to cheat. I think the only way to really increase your speed would be through casting multiple spells with different names that all increase your speed. I've never been one to play with that sort of thing, so I can't guarantee that it works, but I think it should. —Robin Hood (Talk • E-mail • Contribs) 19:10, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

You can use the ring duplication glitch to fortify speed/athletics as high as you want to. And athletics does increase your speed past 255. A Method Do the mages guild untill you have access to an enchantment altar. Get a black soul gem or a grand one. Duplicate as many as you need. kill things to fill them with grand souls. Get any old ring, duplicate as many as you need. Buy any fortify attribute spell. Do the quest to get skeleton key(this gives you access to fortity skill enchantments.) At the altar, enchant a ring with athletics boost. give it a unique name. repeat until you have used up all your filled soul gems. then use the ring glitch to make the enhancments permanent.

Ring glitch procedure(ps3). Get 2 identicall scrolls. Click on them once in the menu.(i believe for pc you have to click twice) Drop one of the enchanted rings without leaving the menu, youll find 2 drop. Pick them up, equip one of them. Click on the scrolls again and then drop the UNequipped ring, both will fall to the floor, but the Athletics enhancment remains. Repeat procedure for each ring. For a 100 increase you'll need 10 enchanted rings if you have grand souls.

To duplicate soul gems , just dup scrolls untill you have for eg, 20 identical scrolls. Click on them, then drop a soul gem. 20 will fall to the floor. Some say it's cheating, but its just a bit of fun really :)

In Layman's Terms

To move as fast as possible in the game you have to:

• Increase the Speed Attribute
• Increase Athletics Skill
• Wear no armor (or increase Armor skill to Expert)
• Stay out of combat mode.

Is that how it works? If it is, let's put a list like this in the aritcle. No need to force readers to sit through algebra class, right? --Zander490 21:04, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Oh, Zander, if only every wiki were populated entirely by people like you. In other words, I support this approach. 81.178.142.134 21:14, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

It would probably be appropriate to add that as a summary to the beginning of the page. In regards to the content of the page, though, I take it as a given that anything that mentions the word "Formula" in the title and merits a page of its own is inherently going to be mathematical in nature. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 21:24, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Added. --Zander490 18:47, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

That's most of it, but IIRC you've got the order wrong: Heavy Armor has more of an impact than either Speed or Athletics alone. You also missed one thing that can have a huge impact and is never removed by perks / etc: using a 2H weapon like a Daedric Warhammer will do more damage to your movement speed than it does to enemies. :P If you use a 1H weapon and a shield, the shield's weight is reduced then removed by the Expert and Master perks, so although it's generally a slightly heavier (and thus slower) setup at early levels, it becomes quite noticeably faster than a 2H at higher ones. -- ali

Movement time

I understand the movement formulas, but does anyone know how it is actually applied? Some sort of, how fast it gets you from one end of the map to the other? Does it affect how fast you go when fast traveling? I understand that it does not overly matter, as day passage doesn't seem to effect quests or anything, but I am actually trying my hand at a "oblivion" role-play, and I am unsure of how to determine how long it takes the player to get from, say, bruma to chorrel. Thanks a bunch --Zefiewings 00:01, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

In terms of fast travelling, the time it takes you to get from any point to any other point is based on your current rate of speed when you fast travel. So if you're sneaking and walking, it'll probably take you a couple of days to get from Leyawiin to Anvil; if you're running (or at least, you would be running if you hit the forward key/button), you'll get there much faster. I don't recall what happens if you're on foot, but own a horse. I *think* it gets calculated with the horse's speed, but I'm not 100% sure. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 04:23, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I do understand that it is based on your rate of speed, but I'm just not positive on the number's use. After calculations, the players speed (while walking & weapon sheathed) is 119, but what is that? Miles per hour? I'm great at formulas, not so much at applying it '^-^ --Zefiewings 16:17, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it has any particular relevance to anything—it may just be arbitrary, at least in terms of what the user could relate to. The designers, on the other hand, might see more relevance, like pixels/second or something like that. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 16:32, 22 July 2010 (UTC)

As I said, I know that it is not really relivant to the game. I just am trying to make a role-playing-game, like D&D, in the oblivion world. It would simply help, a lot, if there was any good answer to this because I can't very well say to the player, "okay, so you move 119 and get to Chorell." I have to know how many hours it actually takes him. Understand? It's okay if there is no real answer, as there wouldn't need to be, I suppose I will have to work one out myself using good, old fashioned logic. ;)--Zefiewings 01:08, 15 August 2010 (UTC)

If there is one, I've never heard it. – Robin Hood↝talk 01:23, 15 August 2010 (UTC)