Yep, RL is still being developed and its installer can install to wherever including Steam.
GMC is as much of a mod as anything else in structure. The difference is that it comes with a Half-Life WON client without the valve folder, in case you didn’t own a copy of Half-Life when you purchased it.
Each mod is technically made to run on a specific client. If a mod doesen’t have a speed cap, it generally means that the mod is based off of an older WON client (ex. exceptions would be AG and Bunnymod). Mods should consequently not be treated any different, there’s nothing that justifies leniency towards them over GMC (other than the tacked on ‘standalone’ title that actually doesen’t mean anything).
I agree that no exceptions should be made, I just said that it’s arguable (from another person’s perspective) because with the retail games you are purchasing them on disc/online with a specific client whereas with mods it’s not always clear what client it should be run on until you look into the details, but yes I agree that research should be done to find out what client it should be run on and that’s how I would plan running a mod if I was going to.
This only contributes to my original points anyway, so?
I think the mod authors are not conserned with this stuff at all so it’s fine to run them on whatever engine turns out to be fastest.
It goes both ways. 
If running a mod originally developed for WON on steam is legit → running GMC on steam is legit.
I think the same assumption could be made for Rewolf.
By this I didn’t mean that research should be done to find out what client can be taken advantage of the most when running the mod, I meant that research should be done into finding out what client the mod was made and released on so that you can run it on that, the way that it was released (at least if your opinion is that mods should have no leniency over officially released games). Unless I’m misunderstanding your point here?
My point is that many mods provide installers that just install into whatever version of the game it can (the ones on ModDB usually default to the Steam version) and that if you ask a mod developer what version should you play the mod on he’ll most likely respond with “Whichever suits you best” thus making each engine version eligible.
Clearly there is no right or wrong in the case of mods then, but in the case that third-party mods are run on different clients to gain access to other features, I think that the ‘standalone’ part does matter.
As I said, the point of a legit speedrun is to show what is possible with a fresh install of the game. If someone went out and purchased GMC it would have to be on disc, running on the WON client once they have it installed. They cannot gain access to uncapped FPS right there and then, they have to move the files over to Steam and that’s the point where you’re running it as a mod and not a game.
Yes the game runs on the Half-Life WON engine originally, but it runs by itself standalone just like the original Blue Shift WON version, it doesn’t run as a mod under the Half-Life directory like Opposing Force does for example. It has it’s own directory. Not that I’m *that *knowledgeable of the rules in other speedrunning communities but I don’t know of any others that justify modifying the characteristics of a game to gain access to direct timesaves as a legit speedrun. Usually if there are problems with the later version of a game speedrunning-wise that the developer has caused then the community switches over to an older version where that problem isn’t there so that the legitimacy is kept whilst simultaneously solving the problem at hand.
Well, GMC probably falls under a “game” category here (since the only official version is that standalone (?)).
Yeah.
What you are trying to achieve with this threadI think that's pretty clear in the title and OP, there has never been an open discussion/debate as to what standard the community wants and why with weighing out he pros and cons. There's been a fair number of side topics on criteria which show a lot of debate and how hard a decision is to arrive at. Ultimately this is necessary to move forward grow and improve the community, and is a very important matter that needs fair and adequate community involvement and should be carefully and arduously done.
You are the only person to mention an “IRC chat” and provide no record of this, it seems to be clear most people left out of it and it was inadequate anyway. That’s not an open forum of discussion and debate. furthermore, the fact that you’re so opposed to open debate and want everyone to follow your website’s standards which you seemingly made up on your own more or less, even going so far as to request censorship of open debate, one is hard pressed not to question your intent here.
Also if you’re so sure that the community is largely in favor your website’s standards based on IRC chat then there should be no concern that an open forum debate by the same community would arrive at the same conclusion. Yet you seem to be extremely concerned requesting censorship of debate, this is not adding up. please voice your opinion and views but you can’t speak for the community as a whole or other people.
Ultimately we want as much of the community to weigh in and carefully arrive at the best solution. This hasn’t happen before, this happening now, please keep discussion civil and on track.
So far I’m seeing everyone is hugely in favor forgoing the 1.1.08 jump patch usually their top priority, I’m going to note that in topic header, but please still say if your for or opposed to it, reason are good too, some great input so far, thanks to everyone that’s doing their due diligence and helping the process.
I don’t know what I am in favor of, however I do know that I don’t want to play Half-life with a bunnyhop cap, nor do I want to play it at 83.33… fps. This essentially rules out every single official version.
Jukebox agrees on this point.
Adding that most people seems to agree to use the tas_autojump command for frame perfect jumps, so that means you could run it at 100fps. However, to me this is just another “swamp” thing. Quadrazid had to run at 83.33…fps in OF, I believe. If you’re running RTA/SS it is a straight up advantage since the normal scripts at 100fps would cause you to loose anything between 0 - 30~ units on every single jump, effectively making the hops as imperfect as the spam of a scroll wheel.
Well I mean in a way its kinda good to keep debate down to a bear min. The thing is that the standard is what ever is the fastest possible, which like 90% is Bunnymod on NGHL with uncapped BHOP and uncapped FPS (WON is only used if you have to). this isnt exactly the most legit method but it works and it works well, your coming in the fourms and trying to make this “legit” standard which isnt to much of a deal on these forums. this isnt SDA and as long as we arent using hacks (IE autostrafe, fps hacks (meaning host_Framerate not fucking uncapped)) its fine,
things like RTA/SS speedruning is different because people dicided to make it different and unless half the bloody people on this site want to run goldsrc @83.33333 FPS on won OR anyfps with a cap on steam then I guess changes can be made but its unlikely
very important matter that needs fair and adequate community involvement and should be carefully and arduously done
As I mentioned previously, only a handful of people from each game’s community actually have any involvement with this site, so a decision made here is not going to be representative of the majority of the community, we made that mistake already. It’s another reason why a separate IM chat is needed so that the people who actually do run the games can discuss stuff, instead of globalizing it through a site that is intended for all (Gold)Source communities to use.
You are the only person to mention an "IRC chat" and provide no record of this
What sort of a ‘record’ do you want? I provided you with the address. Screenshot:
That's not an open forum of discussion and debate
Has worked perfectly fine for the HL2, Portal and Portal 2 communities, and they even use closed off Skype groups, not sure why it wouldn’t work in this case.
your website's
Have you actually researched speedrun.com? It’s not my website, it’s made by a guy called Pac and is designed for *all *game communities to use, now has more games than SDA and is not comparable to SDA in the slightest.
EDIT: Also, do you think that 28 players overall would have submitted their times to the leaderboards if they didn’t agree with the rules/standards?
by the same community
Again, a debate on this forum will not represent the same community, it will represent a small portion of it as well as some others who aren’t actively involved in GoldSource running. It’s essentially the same thing as posting a poll on /r/speedrun and expecting the result to be suited to a single game’s community.
Must admit I’m a little disappointed that nobody has showed up to clarify or clear things up, especially when there are so many that share a similar view which even then can’t be proven until people actually voice their opinions here. You know what my opinion is and the reasoning for it so I don’t need to go into that any further.
Would it be too much hassle simply to have two leaderboards? One for strict vanilla, fresh install steam version. And then a modded version to remove the cap and to standardise the various other modding stuff already out there.
It doesn’t even matter if XYZ site doesn’t accept the modded version for not being legit, I’m sure many people would still enjoy seeing it run here and around the web generally. It would just mean people who do want to run without a cap and with autojump can all run the same mod, rather than the handful of alternatives out there. (I first started running with a metamod and amxx plugin to uncap the speed)
Gosh, you could potentially even just consider the modded version a completely separate mod along the lines of They Hunger or Wanted or something. Half-Life: Speedrun Edition. I know splits in the community are generally a bad thing, but this won’t end with any side ‘winning’. If vanilla is agreed upon, people will still run without the cap, and if a modded version is agreed upon, people will still seek to claim the fastest time on the official version. The best outcome I can see is having the vanilla game ran, and a standardised uncapped version ran. Just the right amount of diversity to make everyone happy.
only a handful of people from each game's community actually have any involvement with this site, so a decision made here is not going to be representative of the majority of the community
We need to reach out to everyone then that isn’t involved with this site to weigh in here. No one is trying to rush this, this is the best and most fair way to get the most community involvement. This is the longest running forum that represents this community well and was always the goal of the site since the beginning. I’m pretty sure it’s a majority of people in the community on this site, not a minority like you try to paint, and surely more than this new IRC channel. The roots of this community go way back to 1997 with many dedicated leagues and competitive man hours spent, many different mods, rules and standards were established. You can’t just undersell that all in a recent IRC channel which most don’t partake in or know of.
Please reach out to people known in the community weigh in. I’ll be contacting Quad, CK, Julian and some others. There’s no intention to short sell this, self serve, or serve a website. We need to do what is best for the community, that is all.
I was thinking such a type of solution along the same lines might be necessary. There really is a large problem with trying to run an official version of the game, the speed cap is horrendous for obvious reasons: Players hate, viewers hate it, runs are slower, it’s not nearly as fun to run (about half the reason and fun for me), and it’s reason for existing outside of CS is a mockery; it mostly serves as a bane the casual CS gamers left to mock of us with as the dawn of the casual gamer era and end of support for hardcore niche communities such as ourselves. Then the only official versions left undamaged are 1.00 through 1.07. These leave poor demo support, and very low fps cap along with more bugs and more prone to random crashes and no special command, and a lacking hud.
There’s really no good or adequate official versions. Yet there’s a fair number people that care about a claim to a record on an official valve released game.
I personally really couldn’t care less about the Title of “Official” for a crappy unsupported game that goes against everything the community was built on, much the same way the AG community feels about competing on said games.
If you want to be official, unmodded unscripted 1.07 with a good mouse wheel and healthy finger joint and good faith that none of your competitors are using turbo controllers, 3rd party scripts, ect. is probably the best option, and it does seem like a minority actually that care about this as opposed to just a fair reasonable standard to compete on even ground with game-play the community was built around. There’s plenty of Cons and not much Pro.
Problem is it’s not as simple as that. There’s already a vanilla version available without the bhop cap (WON version), that’s what the SS/RTA community are using/replicating (basically most players are using the server.dll from the most optimal WON versions for HL1 and OP4 and placing it in NGHL or Steam to get as close as possible to the original game but with the ability to record continuous demos and have better loading times which are currently needed due to lack of an in-game timer).
Nobody on the leaderboards uses the Steam version for HL1 + OP4, only BShift as the WON version is capped to 72fps which makes timing scriptless hops not really viable, but ducktapping to avoid the cap is perfectly feasible anyway (as proven by at least 6 different players). Also an important point to mention that Steam would be a different category to WON anyway as they both have enough differences to be interesting, much like how HL2 has New Engine and Old Engine but more suttle. Basically, it’s unnecessary to remove the bhop cap in Steam whilst keeping all of it’s differences as you can just swap out the files for the WON version’s and replicate the legit game (uncapped bhop, better crowbar damage etc) without any need for third-party modifications.
As a side note, the TASers (YaLTeR + Airstrafers/HLTAS) are using the Steam version because uncapped bhop is not a requirement as the cap is avoided via ducktapping, in fact I asked YaLTeR if he would test WON movement (100fps + uncapped bhop) versus Steam movement (1000fps for this specific case + capped bhop) on bhop.bsp and the result IIRC was that the Steam movement was roughly 1 second faster on the longest length of the map, so having both uncapped into a mod in this case is superfluous.
Gosh, you could potentially even just consider the modded version a completely separate mod along the lines of They Hunger or Wanted or something. Half-Life: Speedrun Edition. I know splits in the community are generally a bad thing, but this won't end with any side 'winning'.
You’ve pretty much hit the nail on the head here, if globalized rules are made then one half of the community is still going to be dissatisfied. As I said in one of my first posts, the scriptless SS/RTA and TAS parts of the community have already figured out their own standards/rules, so quite clearly it’s the segmented & scripted runners that need to figure out this stuff, so I won’t get involved with that as I’m mainly only a SS/RTA runner myself at the moment (though I have contributed to a number of segmented runs), only to say that even if you try to change the rules in SS/RTA it won’t happen because we already figured it out for ourselves.
We need to reach out to everyone then that isn't involved with this site to weigh in here.
Not that it even matters for the part of the community that I’m involved with but I’ll spread the word anyway for the sake of giving proof of the people that agree with me.
Then the only official versions left undamaged are 1.00 through 1.07. These leave poor demo support, and very low fps cap along with more bugs and more prone to random crashes and no special command, and a lacking hud.
The poor demo support can be fixed by copying literally two DLL files from a WON version to a better client like NGHL or Steam. The 100FPS cap is most likely needed in realtime runs even if the game is capable of reaching more due to the fact that it’s the only non-arbitrary value (developer 0/fps_override 0) when providing a fair and level playing field across player’s machines, even if you don’t think 100FPS is enough you’re going to have to limit it at some point otherwise you’ve left another argument to be dealt with, a pay to win/hardware war situation. Can’t say much for the bugs and crashes, more specifics needed on that. AFAIK no _special is needed as there are alternative loop scripts that seem to work just aswell, and I am still yet to discover what the actual difference is (?). Finally, lacking HUD is being solved by YaLTeR developing an external injection tool called Bunnymod XT, which will now aim to provide clientside features such as speedometer and in-game timer etc.
tl;dr - NGHL + WON DLLs + Bunnymod XT (optional) is the solution to everything you need, I don’t know what else you would want other than implementing features which aren’t there in the first place anyway. I have already provided a link to the DLLs and written a guide on how to install and use them, me and exec have talked about porting these over to the SR wiki which will happen when I’ve finished writing up the rest of the guide stuff (have been taking suggestions from runners).
NOTE: List of noted differences between WON and Steam can be found here, also showing what differences are stored in the DLLs and which are in the engine itself.
Sourceruns has traditionally been more interested in the segmented side of things and a lot of SS/RTA runners aren’t really active at all here. One example that comes into mind is that someone posted video of a faster barney clip on the HL2 forums and nobody in the community noticed it for months.
Correct me if I’m wrong here, but the only active SS/RTA runners I can see on this thread are sadf and PJC(maybe Treetoon, not sure). I can also confirm what PJC said about the decision to use WON dlls, he went to pretty great lengths to reach out to everyone in the scriptless SS/RTA community and as far as I know nobody opposed using them. Having a poll here would be dumb because then you’d have all of the people who have no involvement in the community(such as the people who only run Source games) voting, so it makes more sense to have it in a different place.(You can see the effect of people not having a clue voting for hard the HL2 Re-run poll’s difficulty) It’s not a closed community and the active SS/RTA runners are far better represented there.
In addition it’s pretty clear that the majority is in favor of scriptless, because the scriptless runs heavily outnumber the scripted runs. The fact that people used scripts in AG is irrelevant. The only scripted runs I can think of are quad’s and treeton’s. At least 24 people have done a scriptless hl1 run, as you can see at http://www.speedrun.com/hl1
This debate has been had, in the IRC. A far more suitable medium for discussion than this forum. Almost everyone in the IRC is there because they are actively involved with runs in some way.
Even if this debate hasn’t been had, for ss/rta runs this forum is simply not the place to have it. So few people here actively run goldsrc in comparison to the rest of the community, and even fewer run SS/RTA. Spiderwaffle is notably one of the least active runners and is even less present in the community. So why create this thread?
Nobody has had any problems with the standards established.
I don’t mean to come off as ranty, but this is creating an issue from nothing.