Might as well change sv_maxspeed because someone finds the game too slow :^)
My initial reaction when I heard this was a thing was “that sounds really stupid, and should not be allowed”. It just naturally felt like it would be wrong. Then I decided to introduce some logic into my decisions.
After spending a few minutes discussing with a few others and thinking about it, I realized that we basically already allow things like this, and more. The sore thumb here is fps_max. Using this command is allowed mid-run, and you can very much manipulate the game’s physics to your liking using this command. Of course, it’s limited to 100 FPS (for WON DLLs on steam), but it still gives you quite a degree of manipulation. So I kinda got to thinking “if we already allow this, then why not allow difficulty changing? It would open up more possibilities to save time, and it’s not outright cheating.” So I’ll just start by saying that I think that it should be permitted.
I’ve read most of this thread, and I’ve seen a lot of discussion about having most of the run on Easy being more “beginner-friendly” or “less fun”. I’m not sure whether to abstain from discussing the categories in this thread, but I feel that it’s related to the topic at hand, so screw it: I believe that there should be a category split / new category for “multiskill” or whatever you want to call it, but name it just “Any%”. If people so desire, they can still run Hard as their main category, as if nothing happened at all. I personally would rather not deal with doing runs on mixed difficulties just yet, but I see no reason in outright banning it from use in approved runs. Another thing is, while all the runs done on hard difficulty would all technically fit under “Any%”, I just don’t see why the same run should belong under two different categories. If someone ran on Hard, their intention is for it to be a Hard run, not an Any% run.
As of now, I’ve lost my train of thought, so I’ll leave it at that for now. Again, I’m not in favour of allowing it for the sake of my own "speed"runs being faster, but there is simply no logical reason to ban it.
(actually another solution would be to disallow changing framerate during the runs, which would eliminate any other such factors from coming into play. just a thought though.)
You cannot, because then you’ll have to ban anyone who has unstable 100 FPS.
In my opinion, it all began with wait, not fps_max.
People running on unstable fps would be at a disadvantage. It would be an advantage if they could control their fps_max without using the fps_max command. The only ways I can see to do that is to open up external programs in the background (which would be cheating?), change graphic settings, spam play “directory/soundfile” in-game and have a really shit computer and use r_drawentites 0/1.
But yeah, wait, fps_max and Skill all fall into the same category, they affect the game directly. fps_max is the only one that has to do anything with fairness. The only place where is can see this has a considerable effect is for segmented when different segments might have been done on different computers, thus different fps values.
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:
**
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).
[hr]
**
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?
[hr]
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?
[hr]
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.
I don’t think disallowing fps_max would lead to as big of consequences as you’re suggesting, you could just make a rule that you aren’t allowed to intentionally lower your fps by doing stupid shit. And about not being able to get 100 fps, honestly is there anyone who can’t reach 100/72 fps in goldsrc? I mean really, it’s a 17 year old game we’re talking about. In Antichamber you go faster at 20 FPS so there’s definitely potential for abuse there, but no one has bothered to abuse it, so I really doubt people in goldsrc would do that either.
But at this point banning it seems kinda late so I guess that’s whatever.
But on the multiskill thing, if you plan it to be a separate category I don’t see how anyone can prevent you from running that. Just do runs and if other people pick it up then I don’t see why it couldn’t be on the leaderboards. The only thing really that there is to debate is what is it going to be called, which doesn’t seem like a very big deal anyway.
There is no way of knowing for sure whether stable fps is faster than unstable fps or vice versa. My guess is that it would be a huge advantage to have stable fps because the only feasible advantage with unstable fps would be to make friendly NPCs turn faster, which matters very little at very few parts of the game and then it would also make enemy NPCs turn faster, which matters a bit more and happens at lots of different parts in the game. While stable fps would let you keep optimal air-acceleration at all times and also practically lead to better bhops.
In Scenario 2, I would label this as “external program assistance to intentionally gain a upper hand”. This should be disallowed if it isn’t already.
So if it were to be decided to ban all console-exclusive commands then there should be no exceptions for commands that directly affect how the game runs (server side I suppose I should say). But nobody wants to disallow fps_max because of the consequences to the community of doing that. But the consequences of doing that shouldn’t be considered when deciding about mid-run difficulty changing.
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I had a discussion with PJC and I don’t want it to go to waste so I’m going to post it down below. Having read through this whole topic and what I’m about to post I see no further discussion necessary as you should then be absolutely sure about your opinion by then. Here it goes (almost didn’t make a pastebin but it was ez so):
That’s pretty much the only thing this discussion has come down to, but apparently it’s a big deal because if “Half-Life Any%” came to be it would include Skill changing and RTA strats and this would make Half-Life Any% Hard less genuine/popular or something, because at the moment Half-Life Any% implies Half-Life Any% Hard Single-segment.
Yes, you could make a rule that you aren’t allowed to have higher **or **lower than , but I’m also talking about instability, not just intentional drops. I’m not suggesting that anyone in this day and age who is into speedrunning cannot reach 100/72fps in GoldSrc whatsoever, I’m suggesting that not everybody (in fact, most people if you pay attention to cl_showfps counter on people’s streams) can achieve that framerate completely rock-solid stable throughout the entire game 100%, *especially *for people who stream at the same time. This is why host_framerate is used in TASes, to guarantee a stable framerate which is not guaranteed in realtime runs.
On top of that, if you are to ban fps_max completely, as in not even allowing it to be changed before the run starts, everyone will be forced to use the default value which is 72 across all versions as far as I know. This means awfully timed bunnyhops, much less air accel and weird airtime. This is of course a subjective argument but there comes a point in doing what’s technically “right” where you have to take community preference into account. An example of this is the argument SpiderWaffle puts against using the scroll wheel; it is technically the least fair method of jumping/ducking compared to “no spam” or “full spam” due to hardware differences, but the community refuses to change the method because they don’t recognise it as an issue, hence community preference comes into play over what’s technically the most “right” thing to do.
This discussion is mainly about allowing skill changing mid-run as a general rule that applies to all games/categories. Personally I wouldn’t be against a miscellaneous “multi-skill” category existing on the leaderboards if there was an appeal for it.
EDIT:
As Airstrafers already pointed out, using this logic of “all commands should be allowed because it’s technically right without taking community consideration of what’s interesting into account”, “Half-Life Any%” would use notarget, sv_ commands, etc etc.
What is considered a “normal playthrough” is entirely subjective. Let’s be realistic; on someone’s first playthrough of the game, do you think they are likely to know what the skill command does, or for that matter any commands at all if even knowing what the console does? If by “normal playthrough” you don’t mean first playthrough, then how do you decide if a “normal player” knows about and chooses to use the skill command but doesn’t use notarget or sv_airaccelerate? Based on this, you can’t assume that “Valve intended for people to be able to change difficulty” if it is not available through the in-game menu.
I haven’t said anything else, I mentioned this to come exactly to the point you came to. We simply can’t know what Valve intended, not that we should care. I agree on that we should blacklist/whitelist all the commands.
I’ll quote myself from our discussion on Steam that I posted in this thread with this link: http://pastebin.com/uKgG4Utp
“Maxam: With current goldsrc ruleset, Half-Life Any% would include RTA strats and Skill change and anything else reasonable*. If any category is arbitrary then it is the current HL1 one as it disallows RTA strats (and mid-run difficulty changing). *What is considered reasonable is based on general peoples thoughts (not only within the community).”
Isn’t the point of a speedrun to complete the game as fast as possible in a reasonable fashion? Lets say you are starting to speedrun a new game. You realize that there is a thing you personally don’t like about the run/category but you know it’s completely reasonable (+ faster). Either you have to deal with it or you don’t play the game. Why should this situation be any different from our current one because we are HL1 “veterans”?
Why is Skill reasonable?
- fps_max and wait are allowed
- It is generally accepted in a “normal playthrough” to say you beat the game if you changed difficulty during it but not if you used something like notarget (or fps_max and wait tricks for that matter, or even just going above 72 fps to begin with).
- It is faster.
- Anything that speaks against it are just subjective ideas while it has it’s own subjective ideas speaking for it in addition to point 1-3 and 5.
- It can form a true “Half-Life Any%” that no other change could ever do (unless you decide that Easy and Medium categories must not ever be a thing).
^It’s not like it’s a cheat or anything. If it’s not a cheat and it makes the game easier AND faster, I’m all for it.
How do you intend to collect the general public’s thoughts outside of the community to prove that it’s reasonable? Otherwise this is once again an assumption without evidence.
Clearly these are both under dispute, as well as allowing console-exclusive commands whatsoever.
Again, how do you know it is generally accepted? Why is it unreasonable for a “normal player” to use fps_max if their only intention is to make the game visually smoother, likely not knowing about the speedrun-related advantages it provides because they are not speedrunners?
Neither is notarget, host_framerate, changing sv_maxspeed etc unless we specify ourselves that it is. This ignores what has already been mentioned.
wait is allowed in “scriptless” runs? This sounds like Bush league SDA shortsighted ignorance with hardware spamming assistance and wait commands. Christ, with the right hardware you could execute HL21 with only single binds and the push of a giant wheel with a few trees of gears an input signals.
If you really want to make a category, first you need multiple people that are using it and want to use it, ie prove that its worthwhile, and then settup a leader board and proof system.
I’d highly not recommend calling it any% as you’d be equivocating that establish speedrunning term, this would be confusing to anyone not in the direct center of the know. Names are meant to be descriptive and clear, not dubious and convoluted. Something like “Variable Difficulty Setting” would be about as descriptive and clear as you can get.
Response to PJC:
I’m pretty sure people with an unbiased opinion would see difficulty changing more reasonable than something that changes how the game’s engine runs to enable new tricks. Not a very serious thing I did but here is the poll I made on 4chan just as a joke that got archived after one reply: http://puu.sh/jsLc5/dc8c0c10e1.png Maybe we could just post a link to a poll on reddit or in some unrelated person’s twitch chat.
Clearly fps_max isn’t disputed as you’d never be able to convince the community to disallow it and as far as I’m concerned I would never play any Goldsrc game without fps_max changing. Although as long as fps_max stays, Skill should stay with it (as long as it is confirmed that the in-game effects of Skill are more reasonable/relatable than the in-game effects of fps_max).
Well I said “fps_max and wait tricks”, meaning fps_max tricks and wait tricks. Also say if you ran the game on 1000 fps, I don’t think most people would think that that would be legit seeing how very slowly NPCs turn (mainly enemy ones).
Notarget and sv_maxspeed needs to be researched whether the general people deem them reasonable or not. Host_framerate, I don’t know much of it, but seeing that it is very similar to fps_max and isn’t “breaking the speedrun” and is not too unreasonable[font=verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif] (as fps_max already exists). Host_framerate needs its own discussion and the decision to allow/disallow needs to be done within the community because fps_max already exists and people outside the community would very unlikely know about its effects.
I thought that maybe the any% category should have all console-exclusive stuff banned, and then have some “console-assisted” category where we allow fps_max, wait, etc. (of course additional sub-categories can be created as well)
I’d be in favour of this. The console-assisted category could be a legacy category where we place all the current runs and it could allow fps_max changing, wait and depending on how the vote adds up, maybe skill changing mid-run?
This way you don’t disintegrate the community by putting all the hard work and effort spent on their runs to waste whilst being able to implement a more logical/less messy category as the main one (after the discussion of the new rules is concluded of course) and allowing people who prefer the current setup to continue running on it.
I don’t see how that is anything but another option than to allow Skill change which would have the same consequences. Besides, I don’t know what everyone else thinks of it, but this wouldn’t be interesting to me at all.
Umm… what? Didn’t you just say…
Please tell me I missed something.
If you want to go nitpick something like this then consider mixing versions, binding your mousewheel to jump/duck, timing on the beginning and end. But this kinda off-topic but still…
*every possible *being the keywords here. Let’s have logical and diverse categories, not add ones that are virtually no different from eachother i.e pointless.
Trying to understand what you mean by this…
By “mixing versions” I’m assuming that you’re referring to using the WON DLLs in the Steam client, which is legit if you apply the 100FPS (99.5) limit, as in there are no differences other than better engine stability/optimization and continuous demo recording which is why we do this in the first place. In fact, version mixing was one of two main reasons why Bunnymod Pro is deemed illegitimate, so I’m not sure what your point is here.
I’ve already mentioned binding mousewheel to jump/duck; there’s already been discussion about this in the past. Spider-Waffle isn’t wrong that it’s technically the least fair, but it isn’t recognized as an issue. If you don’t allow some spam (scroll wheel) then you either have no spam whatsoever (manual timing with keys/buttons) or complete spam (external autojump/duck), neither of which are considered ideal community-wise.
No idea what you mean by timing on the beginning and the end. Timing starts on Chapter 1 Act 0 and ends on the blow to Nihilanth, which is the final moment you have control over how fast the game is completed. Seems pretty reasonable to me.
The concept of banning console-exclusive commands isn’t nitpicking, it’s avoiding a slippery slope. If there’s no justification for allowing them then why should they be allowed?
Let’s regroup.
What’s the plan? To make a decision based purely on the vote in this thread or base it on a vote/poll posted on reddit.com/r/speedrun or somewhere else? It appears to me that the only question that matters is if people find it reasonable or not. I’m not sure but I believe if we allow Skill the console-command question will end there. There is no new major thing that I can think of. Wait and fps_max are already allowed and I think these commands make the run more interesting as well as making it faster. But just in case:
Is there anything else that might be reasonable that I’m missing out on? I’d say Notarget, sv_, sk_, and map commands (enjoy tram ride, lol jk - or? I’m for map c1a0) and stuff not possible in original WON for WON category (like no more than 100 fps and maybe some commands, and like I believe you can’t bind capslock in orignal WON, maybe make some exceptions I dunno) are not reasonable (but I’m not sure about host_framerate but probably not, it needs to be discussed though, like don’t use it to slow down the game, but yeah, I know what you’re thinking). Maybe we should have a poll/vote about/including most of these commands and see what the general public think of them.
I think it should be made public as most people here just don’t want change. It’s OK to not want that but this community ≠ speedrun.com. Which is greater? HL1’s past or its future?