Rule changes regarding HL2 and the episodes

Hello everyone!

As you might have heard there has been quite a bit of discussion about the rules for speedrunning Half-Life 2 and the episodes. This led to numerous arguments which didn’t end up in any sort of consensus, so to solve these issues we held a poll about various things between the people who have done RTA runs in the past 6 months. The games that are affected are HL2 New Engine, HL2 Old Engine, HL2:EP1 and HL2:EP2. We’re going to go through a transition period of two weeks after which these rules will go into effect on the speedrun.com leaderboards. If you know any active runners who are using the leaderboards then please let them know.

The changes to the rules are following:

  • Menuing and pauses are counted towards the final time. As of right now the Livesplit timer doesn’t automatically count these in so you will have to time these manually from the video and add that to the Livesplit game time if you want to submit a loadless time.Just upgrade to Livesplit 1.6 and the menus should be timed automatically! No manual timing needed.
  • You can no longer use modifications to your HUD that give you some sort of an advantage. The most common of these was disabling the white flashing while taking damage, which is no longer allowed. Modifications that clearly give you no benefit at all, like changing the font or altering the credits text are allowed.

For HL2 New Engine specifically:

  • You can no longer use maps from different versions. Most commonly this was being used in HL2 for using steampipe maps in the new engine unpack. So if you are using the Ghosting Mod or the Source Unpack you’re going to have to update your maps. Here’s a link to download the maps, optionally you can also get the newest version of the unpack as that has this issue fixed. To update your maps just copy and paste the map files to your maps folder.

This means that the following things are still allowed:

  • save deletion
  • reload/kill commands
  • cl_showpos
  • r_portalsopenall
  • save/load bind
  • Ghosting mod(provided that you use the 5135 maps)
  • anything else that was allowed before that wasn’t listed above as banned

What hasn’t been decided yet is what effect this will have on the runs that are currently on the leaderboards, so if you have any thoughts on that or any questions on the specifics of the rules then feel free to post in this thread.

Interview with LambdaGeneration on HL2EP2: Done Quick

posted in: Episode Two, News | 0

Hello everyone!

Recently, we’ve been interviewed by the Valve community news site LambdaGeneration on the Half-Life 2: Episode Two Done Quick speedrun we’ve done just a few weeks ago. In the interview, we talk about some general speedrun-related stuff, background info on the run creation process and a few other things.

The interview is now published and can be read here:http://lambdageneration.com/community/half-life/ep2dq-interview/

Huge thanks to Jeff @ LambdaGen for making this happen! 😀
We hope you enjoy the interview!

Half Life 2: Episode Two – Done Quick

posted in: Episode Two | 26

It’s been a long wait, 5 years to be precise, but it’s finally here;

Presenting Half Life 2: Episode Two Done Quick in 30:36.705

Development of the run started immediately after SourceRuns released Episode One speedrun back in 2010, a small group of runners started routing Episode Two’s maps and eventually doing segments. The run has been in progress for a very long time, lots of game-breaking tricks were discovered that forced the run to be restarted 3 times until being finally finished, saving more than 6 minutes from previous time estimates.

Completed on the initial Orange Box release, Engine 14; Protocol 4104 of EP2 in 441 segments (out of which 194 are save/load segments) by:
Jukspa, Matmo, Elgu, S., BitRain, Blizik, Valvinraim and Eidgod

Timesheet: https://goo.gl/wbh8wJ
Thorough explanation of the run: http://bit.ly/ep2dqwrittenexplanation

Watch it on YouTube!


(All videos come with commentary as a second track)

Person of Interest – EP2 Mod Speedrun

posted in: Episode Two | 4

Here at SourceRuns, as you might already know, we’ve started taking speedrun submissions. Almost three weeks later, we’ve finally got our first submission – a segmented speedrun of a Half-Life 2: Episode Two mod “Person of Interest”, beaten in 2:23 by Rama! Congratulations!

Done in 54 segments, this run is a lot more than you’d expect! Tons of ABH launches, damage boosts and even going Out of Bounds!

http://youtu.be/EK3PEJ2oOXM

Enjoy, and keep submitting your runs!