Half-Life 2 - Beginning Speedrunning
Examples and Saves
Intro
This information is all done on the Half-Life 2: 20th Anniversary edition on Steam. Most tricks that can be done in other versions (5288, Steampipe, Ghosting Mod, etc.) can be done on this version. I started learning to speedrun HL2 after the anniverary edition came out. It's just a matter of convienience to use that version. If you're someone super-serious about speedrunning this game, then you'd probably want to go with one of the other versions previously mentioned. There is also a "Fun %" version, which removes things like cutscenes and the entire Red Letter Day skip, that may be more to your liking.
Check out the YouTube Videos area below for detailed video instructions by Lyren, which is how I learned. This area provides some details and tips I feel may be quite helpful, and possibly some that aren't in any of the tutorial videos I could find.
Below are also bindings that are useful for HL2 speedrunning, but some that are a bit non-standard that I feel work a bit better and are more comfortable, especially for someone who normally doesn't run many FPS games via mouse and keyboard.
Speed Tech
What should I learn/practice first?
ABH, Accelerated Backwards Hop first, while crouching. It's the easiest to learn and to have fun messing around with right off the bat. Practice on flat ground. Start on the Highway 17 map. Hold Sprint, jump backwards, hold crouch, and as you land, let go of sprint, and hit jump (flick the scroll wheel up or down). Know that when you are doing the crouching hops, on your very first hop, you actually have to wait a little bit before hitting jump (maybe a quarter of a second?) because of the crouching animation, and then after that they are steady and the same cadence as the standing hops.
After getting this down, then practice doing ABHs standing instead of crouching. Get used to the fact that you don't have that extra pause on the first hop before hitting jump, as well as the fact that you don't accelerate as fast.
These are quite easy since you only have to hold down either crouch or walk, and you can just constantly flick the scroll wheel up/down the entire time without worrying about timing the jump when you hit the ground.
As a tip, holding down left or right while doing an ABH (as well as with AFH and Strafe hops) will actually accellerate you even faster, so use that to your advantage. You need to slightly adjust your mouse aim in the opposite direction slightly to complensate.
Circle-strafes. I actually neglected learning these properly right off the bat, but you should learn these early, they give you a really good boost of speed when starting any of the acclerated hops, making you go faster in a significantly shorter amount of time. Learn to do them for ABHs, and then learn "forward" circle-strafes for ABHs and ASHs.
Good spots to practice circle strafes: Route Kanal jump (where explosive barrels drop a water dock), or Prison Office.
ASHs, or Accelerated Side Hops. Boost forward with a circle-strafe, jump, turn and look 45 degrees right, and let go of sprint. Hold crouch or walk, left, and back before you hit the ground. As you hit the ground, flick the scroll wheel to jump. Continue using the same cadence of the ABHs. Again, if you do this while holding crouch instead of walk, it will be faster, and the first jump is slighly delayed. Since you can see where you're going unlike ABHs it will be much more useful, albeit a bit slower as you're holding back the entire time. To get more speed, try to learn to let go of holding down the back key if you're in the air for an extended period of time, and start holding it right before hitting the ground. Doing this on your very first hop, as in, only starting to hold back right before hitting the ground, will also make it easier to start to gain speed immediately.
+Strafe hops. This is quite difficult and will take a few days to get down to where it's muscle memory. You have to do quite a few things at once without thinking about them, like once every half-second. As well, you have a natural tendency to want to push the mouse forward when doing this, instead of pulling it back, so it's quite unintuitive and cumbersome at first. However these will get you moving forward faster than anything else, as well as being able to see exactly where you're going and being able to aim and control where you're going way better than with ASHs.
Hold boost and forward and then jump. About half-way through the jump, let go of boost and forward, and hold either crouch or walk. You will be holding either crouch or walk during the entire sequence of jumps. Right as you land, you need to be doing three more things: holding the +strafe key, pulling the mouse down (towards you), and scrolling the mousewheel (usually down). You should gain a bit of speed after the jump. In order to control your direction, you will need to let go of the +strafe key and move the mouse left or right in between jumps. When first learning, don't worry as much about that since it's a bit more difficult, just get used to doing all those four things at once for every jump. It takes a bit of time, so don't get discouraged, it's a lot to think about, and it gets much easier when it becomes muscle memory and you don't have to actively think about all those things every jump every half a second. Once you start getting it down, you can start to practice letting go of the +strafe key between jumps and moving your mouse left/right slightly to adjust your trajectory. Since you start going so fast, and you're holding down +strafe which locks out your left/right turning with the mouse, a lot of the time, you won't be able to turn like you will doing ASHs or ABHs.
The reason you scroll down as you pull the mouse down (and hold +strafe) is that it's easier to coordinate. Alternating up/down while just pulling the mouse down is actually quite difficult. You're welcome to try but you're not gaining anything trying to learn to do it that way.
A helpful tip is for longer, less-bumpy sections, it's easier to pull the mouse down (when holding the strafe key and scrolling the mousewheel down) a small amount, then push the mouse forward right after, and doing this back-forward motion with your mouse so you can keep your mouse in relatively the same position on your desk. However, I find it easier on sections where I only need to hop 5 or 6 times that are really bumpy to just pull the mouse down slowly the entire time while flicking the mouse wheel up and down quickly also during the entire time, holding the +strafe key when necessary.
Another tip as far as controlling your trajectory is that, as well as letting go of +strafe between jumps and looking left/right, you can also pull your mouse down and either to the left or the right to make you strafe left or right slightly. Doing this as well as tapping/holding left/right as necessary can be helpful for keeping you on a straight path with slight variations, like in the (CITY 17 car jump) or (BOATLESS 3 beginning tunnel jump)
I actually learned +strafe hops before ASHs, but they have their uses as well, so don't neglect them like I did at first. ASHs are easier to use on bumpy/non-uniform terrain; they are more forgiving if you don't get the timing right on the hops when hitting the ground, unlike with +strafe hops. With ASH's, if you mis-time the hop on when hitting the ground by a little, you'll still have a good amount of speed to where you can keep ASHing and gain speed. With +strafe hops, if you mess up even once, your speed is killed off immediately, and you have to completely start over - it feels like you hit a patch of tar (expect to do this quite a bit when first learning). Since it's easier to +strafe hop the faster you go, sometimes it's easier to ASH at first, get up to speed, then switch to doing +strafe hops. ASHs can be used to purposely go slower since that's actually necessary in some areas. They are also easier to cut turns with unlike +strafe hops, where you're just going way too fast be able to turn quickly in some spots.
AFHs, or Accelerated Forward Hops, are the same as back hops, except going forward, and right before you hit the ground, you tap the back key. I've never bothered with learning this since I learned +strafe hops right of the bat. There may be areas it's useful in ultra-competitive speedrunning, but so far I've gotten along fine without it.
Bindings
These are the binds that you should use for speedrunning the game, as some are required for certain parts. Some of these, in particular the "ESDF" movement keys are ones that work for me personally, for several reasons:
- Having the hands shifted over to the right is where your hands naturally rest on the keyboard if you touch-type. Finding the home row keys with the little tactile bumps on the "F" and "J" keys is easy. Whenever I'd play with "WASD", I'd always mess up initially because my hands aren't used to going there naturally.
- This also opens up more keys for your left pinky to hit. With WASD, you're already losing the CAPS LOCK key. This gives you easier access to extra keys. I put "pause" on Q, "crouch" on Z, "Save/Reload" on tab, "Sprint" on SHIFT.
- Z for crouch is much easier to hit for me, I feel like I'm straining trying to hold the CTRL key for that. Especially for areas like the RLD skip where you have to hold the key down for extended periods.
I have +strafe bound to SPACE, but some bind it to a mouse button. Do what works for you. I also have quick save/load on my normal page forward/back mouse buttons. I have jump bound to right mouse button, but again, that's what I've been used to from previous games so just kept that. Even though you can use the jump on the scroll wheel, some things, like sharking across water, require having to hold down the jump button for an extended time. I also find it easier to use a single button jump when having to do SMG grenade jumps, which require hitting alt-fire (scroll mouse button) and jump, or for when I have to specifically just do a single jump.
Again, since this is all completely configurable, do what works for you.
Have a save/reload key bound, and have a save/delete key bound. In order do some tricks, you'll need these.
Have weapons bound explicity with the binds below, and use them to select weapons. Reason is because once you do YesClip, your default key binds won't work anymore to select weapons.
Have a "r_portalsopenall 1" key bound. This will allow you to display parts of the map that are suddenly missing sometimes when going fast.
Have keys bound to show clip brushes and to toggle showing the triggers. These are helpful when first learning.
My autoexec.cfg: (Put this in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Half-Life 2\hl2\cfg\)
cl_showpos 1 // display player position and speed hud_fastswitch 3 save_history_count 10 // adds quick01, quick02, autosave01, autosave02, etc. bind e +forward bind d +back bind s +moveleft bind f +moveright bind shift +speed bind mouse2 +jump // this is what I use, use what works for you, could bind this to +strafe instead and spacebar to +jump bind mouse1 +attack bind mouse3 +attack2 bind t +reload bind r +use bind x +zoom bind alt "impulse 50" bind v "impulse 100" bind p lastinv bind a +walk bind space +strafe bind mwheelup +jump bind mwheeldown +jump bind mouse4 "load quick" bind mouse5 "save quick" bind F10 "load quick01" // loads previous quicksaves bind F11 "load quick02" bind F12 "load quick03" bind F2 "save hardsave" // needed when doing save-reloads or save-deletes since they will remove recent quick-saves bind F3 "load hardsave" bind c toggle_duck // Toggle Duck, useful for some jumps - does a perfect uncrouch-jump without losing speed) bind tab "save quick;load quick" // Save-Load - used in first trick to escape train car) bind b "save :;reload" // Save-Delete - used upon entering a new map after some tricks to get health and ammo back or reset things) bind F4 "r_portalsopenall 1" // Use this to draw all objects in distance, needed in some areas when going fast) // Weapon switching - These are necessary when doing yesclip) bind 1 "use weapon_physcannon" bind ctrl "use weapon_crowbar" bind 2 "use weapon_pistol" bind 3 "use weapon_shotgun" bind 4 "use weapon_ar2" bind w "use weapon_smg1" bind 5 "use weapon_rpg" bind g "use weapon_frag" bind 6 "use weapon_crossbow" // USE THESE FOR PRACTICING bind i "r_drawclipbrushes 2" // Show map brushes, 'i' to turn on, 'o' to turn off bind o "r_drawclipbrushes 0" bind / "showtriggers toggle" bind y "developer 1;ent_bbox player" // Turn on bounding box, helps while practicing BBT and RLD skip bind u "developer 0" // 'y' will turn on/off, 'u' will remove developer mode completely) bind n "sv_cheats 1; noclip" // Turn on noclip, again helps with RLD skip. bind m "sv_cheats 0" // Hit 'n' to turn on, 'm' to turn off. bind = "sv_cheats 1;host_timescale 10" // set game speed x10, to speed up cutscenes bind - "host_timescale 1;sv_cheats 0;r_portalsopenall 1" // put game back to normal speed
To make the font size larger of the player coordinates and velocity, edit C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Half-Life 2\hl2_complete\resource\sourcescheme.res, look for the "DefaultFixedOutline" entry, change the second "tall" value from "24" to something like "10" (around line 261):
"DefaultFixedOutline"
{
"1"
{
"name" "Droid Sans Mono" [$WINDOWS]
"name" "Lucida Console" [$X360]
"name" "Verdana" [$POSIX]
"tall" "11" [$POSIX]
"tall" "10"
"tall_lodef" "15"
"tall_hidef" "20"
"weight" "0"
"outline" "1"
}
}
(I also changed the font to "Droid Sans Mono" to make it even more readable)