Defining GoldSRC Segmented Speedrun Category Standards and Rules

λ Half-Life
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Through many years of GoldSRC speedrunning, the scripted segmented run category has developed in such a way that it’s difficult to distinguish those speedruns between a proper human run and a TAS. In order to avoid going deeper into the “swamp”, we must define strict rules and standards for this category. The thing that needs to be discussed is what scripts and tools should be allowed (and to what extent) while making such speedruns.

There have been several attempts to do this in the past, but they all got heated pretty quickly and nothing has been decided because of that. If things get too passive-aggressive, the instigator and those who follow will receive a 2-day ban, so post intelligently and responsibly, try to stay on-topic.

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Personally, I think all scripts (listed here, including the gauss-boost alias) with the use of basic Bunnymod XT commands should be allowed in such speedruns.

A scripted segmented speedrun should NOT have completely scripted movement/airstrafing sequences in a segment, UNLESS it’s a triggerdelay or an instance of a trick that requires really precise inputs in a specific order (although nothing that a human couldn’t do), for example, a jumpbug segment.

I don’t really know what else to mention right now, if more interesting points get brought up I will post my opinion on them.

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This needs to be defined, BXT has many commands.

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I meant Bunnymod XT commands that replace the listed scripts, as well as some other commands that are not meant for TAS (if any).

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My theory is this:

It’s possible for a human to get frame perfect +jumps/+ducks as well as spam +use and wait at any framerate, regardless of what method they use; a key, a scroll wheel, whatever.

We have unlimited attempts to perform a segment, so in my opinion it doesn’t matter what method you use to get frame perfect +jumps/+ducks or spam +use/wait because they’ll all have the same result eventually.

So to conclude, my view is that any assistance giving frame perfect +jumps/+ducks (BXT being the best choice here) as well as spamming +use/wait (for +use just a simple spam script, for ‘wait’ just use the wait table aliases) should be allowed as this is all possible by human means. This means that I am not in favour of allowing stuff like gauss boosting scripts as for me that enters the “pseudo-TAS” zone where you’re getting frame perfect 180 turns etc, not even for triggerdelays (not a fan of double standards).

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I think we need a place to put all the rules that correspond to different versions in one place that isn’t speedrun.com, I find it pretty confusing sometimes.

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That’s half the point of this thread, we want to create a categories section for the Wiki but we’re missing rules for segmented runs.

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You’re really not going to be able to make a single category that satisfies the full scope of scripts, limited scripts, less scripts, no scripts, pseudo-TAS, auto-jump, mouse wheel, delay loads, ect. You’re going to need at least two to cover all that reasonably.

regarding jumping, hardware assistance vs software assistance, I’m with PJC, yalter, treetone, windedcone and some other that based informed opinions taking account the pros and cons and relivant information and how it effects the various aspects of speed running, community, competition, gameplay, fairness, essence of game.

That is, auto-jump/auto-duck is just the most logical and reasonable conclusion. It’s across the board the most fair perfectly and unequivocally. MAJOR PRO. no other solution can ever be as fair. It makes the most sense for gameplay, you move slightly faster in some instances compared to any other solution and the same speed for most instances. The solutions to work around this without going full auto, are just tedious nuisances, such as redoing segments over and over until you don’t get a frame of friction, buying better mousewheels/spamming hardware. Buying faster more consistent fps computers, trying various limited rendering settings to boost and stabilize fps, trying different frame rates for a particular jump hoping the heights match up to yield no friction. That’s all horse shit, that’s not why anyone gets into speedrunning, or does it, or wants to do it; thus we as community should to strive to stay away from a battle on this front, it just hurts everyone and everything.

Full auto is the only way to smite this bullshit completely and once and for all.

IE, it’s completely fool proof and future proof. So when Alfred Reynolds, after eating some donuts with Gaben for lunch in a Bellevue office building, sits back down at his desk and then takes a voluntary whim of discretion to spend 20s of his work day copying and pasting some Github fixes into the next SDK steam update, and the utility of the old WON DLLs thus diminishes. Then you don’t have to feel foolish while revamping an entire category, leader board, set of rules, instructions, wiki, ect, and grind out more late night twitch hours retrying to get similar times you already got. Mr Reynolds has you hostage so long as you put stock in official valve releases.

Furthermore, after much consideration, 10,000+ hours of competitive game play, about half without any scripts and later with, I can say mousewheels or other forms of hardware assistance for spamming are really the epitome and dogmatic, shortsighted horseshit if we’re still talking in this vein pardon my french. This false sense that hardware assistance is somehow more righteous than software is where everyone goes wrong, and there’s only about 6 people that have even somewhat formed their own calculated opinion on this that like mousewheels, the rest just follow blindly. And these 6 people really didn’t give other solutions a fair chance, like I did with 5,000+ hours over 6 years of the prime of gold source competitive league play and international competitions.

You come down to the one pro is “I like timing jumps”
Well guess what, once you introduce assisted spamming, you’re not timing, you’re disillusioning yourself, anyone with ZERO to a TINY bit practice can get either 1 or 0 frames of friction using a mousewheel or shotgun script every single time, (if not you not might need a better mousewheel or scripts, gee wiz) you’re just stamping ~3-25 (yes mouse wheels vary a lot) frame window over and over like a baby pushing a square blocks through a hole. You can’t treat jumping timing as a legitimate human skill anymore, it clearly isn’t, IT’S A MOOT POINT OF THE GAME, give the equally righteous solutions a fair chance and you’ll see, it was all the rouse in your mind, this aspect of the game is moot, there was nothing there all along, the pros outweight the cons, you’ll never go back.

So yes I’m moving to full-auto for everything. Using our own injection with prudent sensible changes, such as fixing crash bugs, or bugs code that only hurt game-play and Valve could/would fix if they ever had a clue or cared. Essential what every other related community has done. And completely against using mousewheels to spam, for anything ever, something no other community (related or not) to my knowledge has concluded was a good idea, and if there is some small fringe community that did, I’d be willing to be bet you could chalk it up to lack of alternatives or sheer apathy and laziness. Something we can’t do, at least the former, the majority pretty much do the later two, as well, they don’t have much vested or experience to go off of.

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nice

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No, but we need a standard. Without one we’re just admitting it’s a mess that’s impossible to standardize. Maybe we can’t determine a rule set that’s truly fair but we can reach a consensus that the community favors.

I see no reason to believe if such a eventuality occurred we would need to change anything.

I’ve no idea where the notion of hardware assistance being seen in a better light than software comes from.

I highly disagree with this. Unless you’ve got some kind of crazy freescrolling mouse the wheel isn’t as important as you’re making out. Does it have an influence? yes, probably a big one. But claiming it’s devoid of skill at all is false.

With those points in place, I agree autojump and autoduck should be allowed in segmented speedruns. I see segmented runs to demonstrate a theoretical best that you can achieve, I would feel it was just a waste of time if you were to manually time each jump in such a run. To me the skill derives from other areas such as planning and actual segment execution.

I think that’s everything I wanted to stay about this.

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The community is already using autojump/duck for segmented runs, we’re just asking what people think the limitations should be with scripts. We want to create category pages for the new Wiki for beginners to understand what is allowed and what isn’t when it comes to submitting runs to the SourceRuns YouTube channel as this has proved a large issue previously.

Nobody is using the mouse wheel for segmented runs.

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I highly disagree with this. Unless you've got some kind of crazy freescrolling mouse the wheel isn't as important as you're making out. Does it have an influence? yes, probably a big one. But claiming it's devoid of skill at all is false.

It’s reasonable for any decent gamer to time a button press within a 6 frame window, .06s at 100fps, over 99% of the time. With a mouse wheel you’re anywhere from 5 inputs per swipe to 16, that typically are roughly every other frame at 100fps, if not, you might need to get a different piece of hardware, adjust it or adjust how your swipping it. Regardless, you’re getting a window of 10 of 32 frames covered there. That’s just massive, up to 5 times already what was reasonable, there’s no skill in that, that makes it a moot aspect of gameplay and everyone needs to realize that. If you’re having trouble timing your jumps with a mouse wheel over 99% then either you’re really really really bad at games, probably not the case, or you just need a better mouse wheel and/or a longer finger. End of story.

I don’t argue this just for auto-jump/duck in segmented, the same arguments have bearing and direct carry over across the board into all categories. Hell, all games/computer use/electronic single input. There’s a reason you don’t see ANY other community making hardware assistance for electronic signal input a necessary standard. It’s quite frankly stupid admits the sea of better solutions.

I see no reason to believe if such a eventuality occurred we would need to change anything.
What happens when you have a faster, better version of the game available from steam to run on identical in all ways with no downsides?... You wouldn't necessarily NEED to do anything, sure, but most everyone certainly WOULD use the better version.

As far as a scripts category goes, I think it’s going to be hard get anything in there that uses commands that simulate mouse movement, such as +left +right, this is where you hedge into TAS area, and for a competitive grounds intended compare times and human skill over, this undermines everything.

I’d fully support a category that allowed gauss boost script, hell it’s only 1 wait, and is or is similar to scripts that are used throughout competitive gaming communities like TFC, AG, tribes, UT, ect. I find it makes the game quite a bit more enjoyable to play and never considered this a fundamental to what drives the gameplay. Furthermore, there’s shoddy ways to shortcut this with a few binds and no scripts, such as having your cl_pitchdown set to 270, or bind for this, and dpi change button your mouse to high sensitivity, or bind to sensitivity 99999.

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This thread is specifically for segmented runs though, so that’s off-topic.

Portal, Portal 2 and Mirror’s Edge are some speedrunning communities I can think of that use the scroll wheel for segmented runs.

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There increasingly growing community of runners of vastly varying skill levels clearly demonstrate this to be false. Some people time jumps better, some people time them worse. The reason is they are of different skill levels.

This standard makes no sense. The mouse wheel is merely inputs the same as any other key. Should we ban WSAD for movement? It sounds absurd but by your own standard we should.

Like PJC said, other communities make use of the mousewheel for this reason.

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Like PJC said, other communities make use of the mousewheel
right.
if there is some small fringe community that did, I'd be willing to be bet you could chalk it up to lack of alternatives or sheer apathy and laziness.
Some people time jumps better, some people time them worse. The reason is they are of different skill levels.

It’s much more because they have difference hardware. If you had those same people that actually struggle with this to use a shotgun spam script that used say 1/2 of what some runners get with a good mousewheel, I guarantee you they would be 99%+. go try it. It’s not the timing, it’s the hardware.

The mouse wheel is merely inputs the same as any other key.
No it's unequivocally different, they rapidly out put a series inputs with one human actuation, it's using a form hardware to assist in this. hardware that's not standardized. There's reason all e-sports have banned mouse wheels for spamming and not regular one input per actuation keys. There's nothing logically sound about making non-standarized hardware a standard.
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I wasn’t intending to wade in, but in case you haven’t noticed, there is no such thing as standardized hardware in speedrunning. The average PC gamer has about the same chance of not having a right click as they do of not having a mousewheel.

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Sure that’s a fair point, but there’s some key differences once you start bringing in further hardware assistance like wheels. Keyboards and mice buttons, while varying in quality, consistency and other various subtle parameters, they are all one human actuation per input. Where as wheels can vary from 3-4 on the low end to 16 inputs per actuation, there’s nothing subtle about this difference. Furthermore, due to the nature of the human’s interaction with a wheel, you bring further large differences you don’t find with basic buttons. If you have long fingers that hyper extend their first joint well, you’re going to get a lot more more contact time and distance than someone with shorter fingers that don’t hyper extend. Again, with the rest of the non-standardized PC hardware, you don’t have this issue.
Is this really what you want to set a fair playing field and encourage more people to join in?

Maybe mouse wheels should have there own thread. This is starting to get pretty far off topic, and it seems no one is in support of mouse wheels for segmented runs so far.

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So you’re saying some people are born with a biological advantage because their fingers are longer and have more contact with the mouse wheel, therefore more jumps? Therefore autojumping should be allowed because of this?
That’s like saying taller people have have a biological advantage in basketball because they can reach the hoop, because of this, shorter players should be allowed to use stilts.

What your saying is everyone should have exactly the same hands and mice in order to use scroll wheel in runs, and because that’s not possible, we should use autojumping.

This isn’t going to happen because you can just go out and get your own mouse with a low friction mouse wheel if you REALLY wanted to get good hops in HL, if you’re not going to get a new mouse, just practice the scroll timing (like maxam and his S-Tap AFHing because that shit does need good timing).

Why are the overwhelming majority of people on this forum are opposed to allowing autojumping to the official SS/RTA rules, yet you’re still trying to convince everybody that this is a good thing while not totally making sense?

If the so called “hundreds of TF/AG players” are willing to join in on HL speedrunning if autojumping were allowed, just make it it’s own category, HL Any% (autojump) or something, I don’t see any downsides to that.

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Like SpiderWaffle said, this is going off-topic. Unless you have something to contribute about category rules for segmented runs, do not post a response.

EDIT: I’ve spoken with other admins and we’ve come to a consensus that the next person to post something off-topic will receive a temporary ban. This applies to anyone.

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We’ve put together a poll for the current suggestions and parts that we haven’t come to an agreement on:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OEXUmWKDS4E6GKDswzWufwuDU9a-e2TV1c3ltucMVzU/edit everyone’s opinions can be found here