A new world record speedrun of Half-Life, completed in 6:26.133 by the SourceRuns team, done on Hard difficulty in 1226 segments, utilizing the save warping glitch.

On the 4th of May, 2016, 3 days after Half-Life 2 Done Quicker speedrun was released, Rama, a SourceRuns member, discovered a new game-breaking glitch, called “save warping”. 3 months later, when the use of this glitch in RTA speedruns became prominent, shar suggested to start a new segmented speedrun of Half-Life, that would differ from previous world record (Half-Life in 20:41) by abusing save warping. The estimated time was just below 20 minutes.

Right at the start of the project, a runner named hlstuff joined us. He wrote some handy tools that made finding potential skips with save warping and overall routing much easier and faster. Combining our ideas, we found more skips, which altogether saved several more minutes.

Later in August, a different kind of warping was discovered, called “wrong warping”. The discovery happened to be so huge, that with the help of the tools created and hard work put into routing we managed to break the game so much, that the vast majority of maps are instantly warped from the start straight to the level transition that takes us to the next map. The expected final time has dropped down to under 7 minutes, which is a shocking example of how easily we can manipulate the game nowadays.

Unfortunately, at the stage of performing the run itself, we ran into a big problem. Despite our early expectations of how extreme and how grand this speedrun would be, many people that had been excited to contribute to our run lost interest in it very quickly. Many runners were heavily demotivated; most of the segments were not fun to perfect, as they were either warping segments or very short; people expected this run, when it is finally released, to be completely unwatchable or even unenjoyable to viewers. Only a few of us were enthusiastic enough to put massive work and spend hours progressing trivial warping sections of the run.

As a result, in the middle of 2017, when we were at the last map of Lambda Core right before Xen, and the trailer had already been published, the project was inactive for about 7 months. In the trailer we announced that our run will come out in late 2017. So, we were late with our first deadline.

However, despite all difficulties, and almost 2 years later, we have finally managed to finish the project and we are happy to present it today!

Technical details

This run is done on clean, unmodded latest Steam version of Half-Life by the time we started the project in August, 2016 (6153 build) on default settings. This version has 170% speed cap, meaning that if the player tries to jump with his velocity exceed 544 ups (units per second), their speed resets back to 353 ups. To avoid the speed cap, instead of bunnyhopping with high velocity, we use scripted ducktapping technique.

This run heavily abuses the save warping glitch. A brief explanation of it is provided in the intro. For a more detailed explanation, check out this video.

This run uses scripting via in-game console. Most common scripts are: autojumping, ducktapping and duck spam, use spam, 180ยบ turn for quick gauss boosting and scripts providing warp chain execution.

For better segment recording functionality, autojumping and ducktapping scripts, additional HUD features and more accurate timing this run utilizes Bunnymod XT tool made by YaLTeR.

Downloads

FILE NAME SIZE FPS RESOLUTION
Half-Life DEW – 720p60 472.8MB 60 720p
Half-Life DEW – 720p120 583.8MB 120 720p
Half-Life DEW – 1080p60 851.6MB 60 1080p
Half-Life DEW – 1080p120 1.1GB 120 1080p
Half-Life DEW – 1440p60 1.3GB 60 1440p
Half-Life DEW – 1440p120 1.6GB 120 1440p
Half-Life DEW – 4K60 2.4GB 60 4K
Half-Life DEW – 4K120 3.0GB 120 4K

 

Temporary live commentary available here.

Runners, in order of total amount of completed segments: