Saturday, August 22, 2020

An interview with the Half-Life VR speedrunner (he uses a lot of real world physical tricks to exploit the game)



From Brian Feldman's consistently excellent blog:
How long did it take to figure that out?

Right when the game came out, there was a bunch of us working together to find a bunch of different things. The height adjust was actually a pretty early find. There have been a couple of newer things, like the extended jump, which is basically: during teleport*, if you pause it at a very specific time during the teleport, then if you move in real life while you’re paused, and then when you unpause, you’ll go way further and then lets you clip through walls.

*VR games let users move by instantly “teleporting” them between where they are standing and another point in the virtual environment.

Is running the game tough on you physically?

Um, yeah, I mean, it definitely is. If you watch like the webcam, I’m doing a lot of crouching, a lot of laying down, popping back up, and just moving around – all that stuff. Even if you’re not doing that, you’re standing up for this extended amount of time with something heaviy on your head. I’m sort of used to it, I’m pretty into fitness. Before the pandemic, I would go to the gym very often. If you do multiple runs back to back, you will be physically tired.