Yo,

I'm in the process of working on a new segmented speedrun for Red Faction 1, played on the "Impossible" difficulty.

I've been planning on doing this for about a year now. I'll be playing using PureFaction. Since the retail releases of the game run faster than intended on modern hardware (thanks Nick/Digi for this info), the PureFaction launcher is, in my opinion, the most valid way to run the game according to SDA standards. (https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/Main_Page, if anyone is interested...)

As far as I know, there hasn't been a segmented run ever done on the game's hardest difficulty. I'm an active member over at www.speeddemosarchive.com, and the run they have listed is a segmented run done on easy that clocks in at roughly 1:02:00 (one hour, two minutes). Over in the forums at SDA, there's been a few people running the game in a single segment that have been getting below that time for at least a year now.

Right now I'm working on compiling a sort of list/knowledge base about the game's mechanics that would be beneficial to speedrunning. I know this isn't a speedrunning site, but after browsing around here and talking to Nick and Digi yesterday, it's clear that this community is the most knowledgeable when it comes to Red Faction 1.

Any info, ideas, and general help I could get would be greatly appreciated.



I'll probably be editing/updating this thread as the knowledge list changes--

Known

*FPS rate changes enemy AI behavior (accuracy/movement). Enemies shoot faster and more accurate at higher FPS.

*Jumping constantly, at least on inclines, is somewhat faster than regular movement

*The water is buggy, and using quicksave/loads when landing in water can produce some interesting results (http://youtu.be/ajX4Yb-Us4U)

*Player accuracy is highest while in a un-moving crouched position, goes down when standing, and falls off even more while moving.

*Enemies have higher HP on Impossible difficulty--Or weapons do less damage...not sure.



January 17 2015
Unknown?

*Do the German/French versions of the affect the speed of cutscenes/dialogue/NPC movement in-game? (even if they don't, I'd love to get my hands on European version just to mess around with it...) (Digi was saying something about a Russian fan-made version as well)

*More details on how Framerate affects enemy AI/accuracy/player movement

*Enemy HP on Impossible

*Weapon damage (body/headshot/etc)

*Fall damage calculations

*Oob (Out of bounds) spots

*Detailed mechanics/speculation on character velocity

*What, if any, other terrain can be messed with similar to water boosting?


My previous "work" can be found in the links given in my signature, particularly https://www.youtube.com/user/zachblasterson1
I'll be updating the SDA forum thread in a similar manner shortly.

I'll be streaming on twitch semi-regularly, hopefully, while I work on this.

Questions/comments/negative feedback are encouraged.

Thanks guys!

Played around with quicksave/load today for a few minutes and found a few things:

You can use it to clip through the forcefield in L1S2. Don't think it saves any time there though. Maybe only possible because the forcefield is a single face? Will need to check the rfl file. Possibilities with glass?

Usable to get a bounce off of movers (like the water thing). Good example (although not abusable) is in L1S3 at the big lift. Jump onto it, pressing the button to activate it as you fall, and quicksave before you come in contact with the lift surface. When you load it should bounce you up a few meters. Usable on other lifts in the game, not immediately obvious whether or not it's actually useful though.



I think there must be some geomod abuse possible too. Defining geomod areas in an RF map is done in three ways: level hardness, geo regions, and nongeo regions. Level hardness is a base default value (0-100, soft-hard, 100 = no geo) set on a per-rfl basis. Geo and non-geo regions will modify that hardness within a bounding box. The bounding boxes only check the source of the geomod and the crater is allowed to expand beyond it. There are probably some spots where geo regions extend through a wall or somewhere they shouldn't, and would be possible to geo if done carefully and potentially bypass areas.

There may also be places that technique can be used with triggers as they work in a similar manner.

First order of business will be to write something to adjust the autosave behavior as we discussed via PM. Next there will probably be something to enable displaying the trigger/geo region debug in-game.



Generic tips/advice regarding the game, to anyone interested...
Run the 3.0c beta from the Pure Faction site.
Enable "fix widescreen FOV" in the F1 menu if you are on a widescreen display.
"Fast Animations" in PFLauncher has no effect on a modern OS (XP +) and has no effect on timing anyway.
Enable "force HQ models" in the F1 menu. This should help with enemy visibility with very little framerate impact. Note that this seems to be broken on Windows 8 and newer.
Enable DirectInput in the F1 menu for optimal mouse responsiveness.

Something to enable displaying triggers/geo regions would be probably be more beneficial than the autosave modification. Just to put in my two cents. I didn't know something like that was a possible possibility.

There are already a few skips (some found just last year) using the geo-mod tech. I'm sure there are more that haven't been discovered.

All that sounds awesome.

I messed with that force field clip--I never would have thought to try that there. I'm hoping that there are several areas vulnerable to this save/load mechanic. I'll have to start trying it on pretty much everything that seems thin.

https://www.factionfiles.com/ff.php?action=file&id=2797

You'll want these to dig through the game's resource and map files. You can get the singleplayer maps from levels1-3.vpp and open them in RED to poke around. The resource tools work more or less the same as winrar.

Damage is pretty straightforward. In multiplayer...

Armor is 2:1 to health and is subtracted first e.g. 50 armor = 100 health.

Weapon damages and entity life values are in their respective tables (weapons.tbl and entity.tbl from tables.vpp).

I just tested in SP @ impossible difficulty and it's funky compared to multi.



This is after 1 hit from env_guard. Miner1 (the player character) and env_guard have identical values for

$Envirosuit: 100
$Life: 100
$Damage Type Factor: "armor piercing bullet" 1.5

Base (chest) pistol damage in the weapons.tbl is 40.

Guard only did 23 total dmg to me from one pistol shot. Armor penetration is actually calculated in singleplayer.

Tested 4 times. env_guard consistently kills player in 10 pistol shots from 100/100. I think the AI hits the same place every time.

Pistol kills env_guard in 4 shots to chest consistently. Seems to be the same in Easy, too. AI is remarkably different in Easy though.

Clearly damage is weird.

Some weapons scale damage for AI according to weapons.tbl. They also have "attack ranges". Not sure if that actually does anything.

Pistol has no AI damage scaling so it's probably the best to reverse from.

RF has locational damage multipliers. Chest = 1.0 Head = 2.0 Arms/legs .5

Weapon accuracy is based on the spread value of the weapon. AI has different spread values.

If you don't have armor in "outside" areas you'll get HP drain.

Character velocity values and stuff are in entity.tbl and game.tbl.

Weird shit seems to happen when you load back into a level you were previously in? It seemed like guards respawned or something. Also resurrected the dead miners one time.

It's possible to fire the pistol and PR at retarded speeds by alternating mouse clicks

http://a.pomf.se/afccuo.mp4

im bad at it though I haven't cheesed in multi since god knows how long

ask digi to show you proper example of bullshit clickwhoring

nothing else comes to mind atm

quicksave/load spam causes the apc to do retarded shit


http://a.pomf.se/ckuwgl.mp4

Oh damn, I'll have to download that tool kit and look at those files. I had no idea that I could get access to that kind of stuff.

And that APC...holy shit. Good shit.

As nick said, we've had looked into this a bit before just never really had the patience to do the whole thing.

Quick video I recorded this morning of a small shortcut in L4S3, should shave at least a few seconds off the current "official" SDA run.


I'll keep looking for other ways to shave off time. Will post some more videos shortly.

EDIT: Another one:

You obviously have to get up to this point before you can use this. In the video I cheated to get up there, but you should probably use the tunneling trick in the current speedrun video, unless anyone knows of a faster way.

Will you be putting a limit on the number segments? I ask because GeoMod randomly orients the blast crater (and randomly selects a blast crater from 5? (I think? can't remember the exact number) different crater meshes). If there's no segment limit, you should probably try it several times until you get the best crater "pattern" and don't miss any of the jumps when climbing up the geo tunnel.

Second edit: I'm not 100% sure either of these are actually quicker than defeating the drone and pressing the button, (haven't tested) but I'm fairly confident at least one of them is.

There's an invisible wall in the wall in this one, which is why I had to tunnel slightly to the side and then into the airlock.

No invisible wall, but I had to make a longer tunnel because the sideways shallow geo region which keeps you from tunneling into the airlock ends about right where I started geoing.

Third edit: Again I haven't tested to make sure this is quicker, but I expect it would be.

The bounding box of the trigger that retracts the bridge is very close to the side of the canyon, meaning you can geo a small hole in the wall and avoid the bridge ever retracting.


Another trigger bounding box "bug" - you can avoid the trigger that causes the metal panels to come down over the glass. This one definitely saves time, but you'll need a few very well placed shots on the guards and probably a full (or close to full) 100/100 to avoid dying on impossible mode.


So close
The trigger to open the airlock is only activated after the cutscene ends... for some weird reason.

I'll address the videos in order:

L4S3 shortcut: That one is in use in single segment, and I'll be using that in the run. Shortly after that (at the next fan) there's the only useful OOB skip so far in the game. I'll try and get a video of that up.

http://youtu.be/H9ACHWBC6ZE

L12S1: Yeah, that's the current strat for that part of the game. It's gonna be super difficult to geo-mod up there without dying from enemy damage, and saving enough rockets to make the geo-mod possible at all.

There will be no limit to the segments. If I had to guess...it's gonna be at least 100 segments.

Those skips around the security drone in L3S4 are probably faster than killing it, but, as far as I'm routing right now, I have to kill it the old fashioned way. I have to save rockets for some other skips coming up.

The shortcut in L10S2 is sick. The current strat involved shooting rockets at the wall next to the far end of the bridge and then jumping up the terrain to continue. I was thinking I'd have to mess with a new water boost there to save time. I will still test to see if a water boost is faster, but I'm like 95% this will be faster. Plus, the water boost involves taking damage, and this doesn't.

The L11S3 trigger skip is also something that will save several seconds. As I'm finding so far, testing, I'm going to have to save sniper ammo and basically 1-shot all the guards in the room prior to the trigger skip and the guards in the next room that have to be killed to trigger Capek.

Both those trigger skips are awesome. I didn't even know till last night that the game had skippable triggers.

I've been been messing with routing for the last two days, and it's gonna be quite the task as I figure out a precise route as far as health/ammo/armor etc. The first section of the game before you lose all your weapons isn't much of an issue so far. Right now the tough part is routing out the section from where you re-gain the enviro-suit to the capek fight.

Yeah, on impossible they kill you really quickly. Honestly I would expect on impossible it'd be better to just get in the jeep (it's really not very much quicker to go by foot, and the jeep takes the damage, not you) and use the jeep gun to kill everything around as opposed to your ammo.


In this video I kill almost every enemy with the jeep gun and preserve my health and ammo (I mess up killing the last guard, but finish him off with the assault rifle, you'd want to take him out with the jeep gun as well obviously). I also badly mess up making the tunnel, but well... that's what multiple segments are for

Awesome. I honestly haven't even tried using the jeep. That's gonna be much more efficient than on foot, possible not even a loss of time with how effectively it kills the enemies, even within multiple segments.

That last post you made, the one that disappeared?, in response to that, that route through there is either equal to or faster than the current route, both use grenades to get into that warehouse room sooner.

I probably spent 2 hours today messing with that room looking for the best way to optimize it on Impossible. Then I remembered that Digi had found that we can save/load our way through forcefields, skipping that area entirely

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsinUy0j4eI&feature=youtu.be

Hey guys, here's what I've got so far...

Impossible difficulty is...well...it's pretty hard.

What became even harder was finding the most efficient method for segmenting. At first, I thought it would be easy, but once I sat down to actually edit together the FRAPS files and encode them, things got sticky.

Here's a quick list of the problems I had with editing and how I'm choosing to deal with them going forward--(Note: Both quicksaving with a hotkey and using the save function from the main menu produce the exact same result. One of these days I'll do a stream of my editing process and save that as a record of the details of how this all goes down...)

*Character velocity is not saved
*When editing segments together, there is an inevitable loss of (at least) a single frame. Unless you want to see the words "saved" and "loading..." on the screen. No one wants to see that.

*small hiccups in the video (lights re-blooming, minor audio cuts, etc) are the result of:

1. Segmenting-- If the game is "quicksaved" the data is saved on the first frame that displays the word "saved" on the screen. This is cut out when editing segments together. If the game is saved from the main menu, the result is the same--there is no "saved" text to edit out of the video, but when the resulting saved file is loaded, it loads at the frame after the first frame instance where "saved" would appear on the screen if it had been quicksaved. (Phew.....)

2. In-game load points--i edit out the ingame loading screens. Sometimes it is seamless, other times there is a noticable hiccup.

Here's part one...


part 1

and part two...


Part 2


This is a rough edit so far. Right now I'm using Avidemux 2.6 to edit these huge-as-fuck FRAPS files. If someone knows of a better alternative, please let me know.

I spent too much time worrying about making these uploads high quality...once they are uploaded to youtube, they are just downscaled to 720p 30fps (from 1600x900 60fps) so...waste of my time there. Ha.

Also, I'm going to update the original post shortly to reflect all the info you guys have helped me out with so far, etc.


Also...am I just an idiot, or is there some special way to embed the youtube player?

You can replace the "saved" and "loadings" textures with an invisible texture

Also I see you using the scroll wheel to change weapons, you do know you can bind each weapon to a key in options, its gotta be a lot easier than using scroll wheel and messing up

Are you using OBS to stream? It has the ability to write to a file on disk and is pretty efficient. The hotkey options are limited IIRC.

You can embed youtube by placing the video id inside "youtube" tags.






Still on the hunt for Ger/FR releases.

Awesome. Right now I'm just cutting the frame out entirely. If you could give me some more info on how to replace that frame with the invisible texture, that would be awesome. Also, I'm not using the scroll wheel to select weapons, but I am using the game's default keybinds, which require a few key-presses to select weapons from pre-determined categories. I'll have to switch those to straight key-binds.



Thanks for the youtube embed info, Nick.

I do use OBS when I stream, but I don't use it to record. I've been using FRAPS to record, which I've previously used on my other speedruns. I've tried using OBS to record while not streaming, and even after a million different configurations, can't seem to get one that doesn't horribly impact my game performance. I'll mess with that more though. Shit, I might just do some testing at a different resolution and maybe I'll start the run over completely. I'm not super satisfied with the video quality right now (not just the youtube quality).

Will send a hud with the loading/saving textures removed tommorow

I deleted the rough draft videos I linked yesterday.

I'm starting the run over. I found a way to save 20 or so seconds before you enter the submersible by going out of the way for only a few seconds within the very first part of the game. Oh well.

I'll be recording at a more optimal resolution as well, so hopefully the videos will be as high quality as I planned on them being.


Here's a terrible quality video that gives an example of how I segment and how segments get edited together. It's an excerpt from a short twitch stream earlier tonight, hence the super low quality.



I'll hold off on posting again until I have something new to say.

Digi beat me to it,in case you haven't seen it already

https://www.factionfiles.com/ff.php?action=file&id=517311

Just put this in your rf folder and replace the ui