To extend onto what YaLTeR said:
There are several scenarios that come to mind when imagining what runs would be like with fps_max banned:
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Scenario 1**: I decide to run Half-Life on WON so my FPS is capped to 100FPS, however my PC doesn’t get a rock solid 100FPS in areas where NPCs are present (the scientists letting you into the test chamber, for example).
This means that NPCs turn faster depending on how bad my PC is compared to someone who can achieve a guaranteed rock solid stable 100FPS throughout the entire run (pretty uncommon from what I’ve seen, especially with streaming software is running in the background).
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Scenario 2**: I decide to run Half-Life on WON so my FPS is capped to 100FPS and my PC achieves a rock solid 100FPS. I enter the room before the test chamber and whilst the scientists are talking, I tab out of the game which brings my FPS down to somewhere between 30-40 fps, then I open up ten instances of Adobe Photoshop which brings my FPS down significantly. This will make the NPCs turn faster.
Now, first of all we need to take into account how long Photoshop takes to load which is a hardware-dependency. Then we need to take into account how many instances of Photoshop I need to open so that the game will lower to the desired FPS which is another hardware-dependency. Heck, even if everyone had the exact same hardware, would you really want it to come down to this?
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Scenario 3: I decide to run Half-Life on Steam where FPS is unlimited (1000 is the maximum necessary for humans as far as I’m aware) and the FPS physics fix is applied, so I set my fps_max to 999.5 before the run so that my PC reaches whatever it’s capable of FPS-wise in every part of the game. I perform a run and noticed that on average I only get about 200-300FPS maximum.
This means that although I am at a disadvantage when it comes to movement (air accel, less jumps/ducks per second if I use the scroll wheel) which is already acknowledged as a sort of “necessary evil” if we want to be able to run the Steam version, I will also be at an advantage against someone who can achieve a rock solid 1000FPS throughout then entire run. NPCs will turn faster, I will be more immune to softlocking by getting stuck on slopes and other things that I walk into, not to mention that it’s highly unlikely either of us would even be able to push the cart into the anti-mass spectrometer as it would just get stuck.
“Implement an FPS cap” - This wouldn’t help either if you want Steam to be considered a legitimate version/category because you’ll be arbitrarily putting it at a disadvantage compared to it’s predecessor. If we take the cart problem into account, you’d need the limit to be set pretty low, let’s say 100FPS (fps_override 0 limit). Now you’ve made the Steam version obsolete. Can you see where this is going?
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The way I see it, even if you ban all console-exclusive commands, fps_max will always be a necessary double standard.
So yes, I agree with YaLTeR that if it wasn’t for ‘wait’ being allowed we would most likely not have this slippery slope, but you also have to take some time to think about what the consequences would be if you banned all console-exclusive commands.
If you implement a rule that bans *all *of them, then weapon_ commands won’t be allowed in Half-Life and Blue Shift (they’re bindable through the menu in Opposing Force and Gunman Chronicles) for example, meaning that you would have to select them through the slots instead. Some might say this is a minor issue, but I’m sure there are other examples that I can’t think of right now.
My main point is this:
In my view, the only way to go forward without grandfathering every run that already exists or disintegrating the community/scene via unnecessarily radical changes is to create either a blacklist or whitelist of commands, depending on the ratio of allowed/not allowed.