Extreme mountain diving.

The CEO of Terra Soft Solutions likes to go mountain climbing. He starts at the bottom and laboriously climbs to the top using all sorts of safety equipment. Wuss. I prefer to go the other way, start at the top and dive off. No parachute, bungee cord, or any other safety equipment. In fact, I prefer to do it naked. Very exhilarating.

OK, so I’m a fat, lazy, geek, and this is virtual mountain diving. It’s still good fun. In the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion game there is a place called Dive Rock. It’s high up in the mountains, overhangs a large cliff, and it’s shaped like a diving board. My theory is that it was designed as a diving platform. Just diving off in an act of virtual suicide is no fun, so my guess is that your are supposed to survive the dive. It’s not called “Suicide Leap” or “Lookout Point”, it’s called “Dive Rock”. It’s built for diving.

Sure, just plain diving off it is very likely to get yourself killed, but you can survive if you do it right. Sounds perfect for an extreme sport.

One of the ways you can train your acrobatics skill is to jump off things, the longer the distance you jump, the better (assuming you don’t kill yourself). Dotted all down the face of this cliff are small rocks, some are good for landing on then making your next dive. Just at the base of this cliff, directly under the diving platform, is a small camp, with one occupant, the master acrobats trainer. In this camp is also a bed. So you can jump as far as you like when you dive off Dive Rock, land on a small rock, heal yourself, and make the next dive. Eventually you get to the camp, where you can rest, heal, then travel back to the top to dive off again. If you get tired of jumping, the master trainer can train your acrobatics the easy way, for a price.

I suspect that Dive Rock was designed for speedy acrobatics training. It also has an awesome view, showing off some of the great graphics in Oblivion.

So the object of the Extreme Mountain Diving sport is to dive off Dive Rock, making as few dives as possible to reach the camp. There is a limit to how far you can dive and not kill yourself, but this limit depends on all sort of factors. The biggest factor is obviously how much health you have. Certain techniques allow you to take less damage when diving down cliffs. A high acrobatics skill slightly lessens the damage from a fall. There is armour you can wear that will fortify your health.

On the other hand, since the cliff under Dive Rock is sloped, there is also a limit to how far you can fall before you hit the cliff. It’s still enough to killl you, but it does mean you need to make more dives to reach the camp. Where this limit is also depends on a few things. You can take a running jump and try to leap off the furthest point of the dive platform, thus getting both higher up and further out to increase the length of the fall. Various factors are involved in how far out you can leap. This being a game, it has the usual falling physics, moving the joystick can move you around while falling, so if you keep moving the joystick further away from the cliff face, you can fall further before landing.

The rocks are small enough that it can be hard to see them in time to steer towards them. Some times it snows or is foggy, reducing visibility. So familiarity with the cliff face can help a lot.

Putting all this together, there are lots of things to tweak to make the difference between a deadly fall, a short fall, and a perfect “only one hit point left” dive. Making the perfect dive is the essence of the sport, and can involve hours of fun. Like all extreme sports, experience is the key. Lots of practice gives you the edge on performing the perfect dive.

It could even be possible to turn this into a competitive sport. Least dives needed to reach the camp fire in the camp below wins. A mod could be written by someone that records details and creates a leader board. The competition should be split into classes based on health, say 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, and Open. There could also be Naked and Assisted categories. Naked is where you dive wearing only painted on underwear and carrying no equipment. Assisted is where you can wear, carry, and use any amount of safety equipment. Wusses.

This competition should have rules to keep things fair and stop cheats. For instance, limits on how far you can travel downwards between dives. A certain amount of downwards travel between dives is very likely to happen unless you land perfectly on one of the rocks that stops you sliding. You will likely need to heal yourself between dives, this can take time, and there may be no convenient rock to stop you sliding slowly down hill.

Points can be given or taken away to help differentiate between competitors with the same number of dives. Award points for landing in the fire itself instead of just inside the marked area of the fire place. Deduct points for traveling too far down by means other than falling. Award points for perfect landings on rocks, the smaller the rock, the higher the points.

I’ll go back to diving off mountains now. See you at the bottom Kai.