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.