Deadpoint

Three days ago I released my first trick jumping video, entitled Deadpoint.  This video was of course a Halo: Combat Evolved (PC) video, as that’s pretty much the only Halo game I play actively.  The video was largely comprised of aided jumps, vertical and horizontal stacks, plus a little bit of mixup with launches and such things.  There wasn’t much unaided, as I personally find unaided jumps in Halo PC to be a bit dull.

If you haven’t already seen it, here’s a linky dink.

 

The Story

Deadpoint was inspired by slYnki’s Just Jump videos, primarily Just Jump 2.  If you haven’t seen these videos you really should check them out:

Just Jump 1

Just Jump 2

Upon seeing Just Jump 2 I thought slYnki was really onto something cool, and was amazed at how much was becoming possible in Halo 1, of all games!  I mean, I’d seen plenty of trick jumping videos from other games, but I had always thought Halo 1’s physics just didn’t support the kind of crazy map-crossing, rubble-jumping, teamwork-oriented jumps which made jumping in those games awesome.

This is when I started experimenting.  I basically just started looking for places where jumps could maybe be possible.  I’d find a spot and try to imagine a trick jump as if I was playing with Halo 3 physics, then try to make some variation of it practical with Halo 1 physics.  This was a great approach to get started with.  It allowed me to explore and begin to understand the limitations of Halo 1’s physics engine.  A few obstacles stood in my way:

When faced with obstacles, always bring extra explosives.

1. Upon touching the ground, even slightly, player velocity is lost extremely fast.  This meant that bouncing endlessly while maintaining velocity was impossible.
2. Explosives are relatively weak individually, and have to be combined in relatively larger stacks compared to other games.
3. Environments often felt cramped, or extremely basic and trimmed down.  There was a shortage of landing spots/starting spots.
4. Explosives are highly erratic in larger stacks, as they often affect each other, even when very closely timed.

Overall, Halo 1 is a much slower game with weaker explosives, higher friction, etc., making the large impressive trick jumps with slideramps and overslides galore much more difficult, at least until you figure them out.  😉

Once I identified these limitations it just became a matter of finding ways around them.  To keep a bounce going I learned to time an explosive perfectly upon touching the ground to lose no speed (See the Bounce Across the Map jump on Gephyrophobia).  To make my stacks more effective I put in a large number of attempts and used a timer (or counted) when first figuring a big stack out.  To take advantage of the more basic environments I did big jumps that involved covering large distances.  To make jumps bigger I used gravity (falling) to my advantage whenever possible.  Et cetera.  You get the jist.

So from here it became a matter of trying out things and seeing how they looked to the guys with the experience.  Who I mean by this is slYnki, ASP, Resix, and joshington.  I sent these guys all of my jumps on a few occasions, expecting positive reviews as I had already cut out many things I thought weren’t good enough, leaving what I thought were quality jumps.  I had to go through some difficult bouts of constructive criticism, which were quite frustrating, in order to realize I needed to get some better jumps.  This was quite difficult for me, as I was already so great at tricking, how could I be so bad at choosing good trick jumps?

So I ended up scrapping about half of what I thought would be my final set of jumps, and started landing new stuff again.  Interestingly, coming back to trying jumps made me feel so much more effective and capable.  Coming back to the jumps and doing things again it was like friction and all the resistance I was feeling before was gone.  I was taking advantage of gravity and using explosives like a drunken demoman.

Cheers mate!

I had some pretty crazy days too.  There’s one day in particular which I remember very clearly.  During the summer I had a day where I spent all day, viz., 11 hours, attempting jumps.  Two jumps, actually, on Hang ’em High, with 700 and 800 attempts, respectively.  Gotta love and hate Hang ’em High.  These are the same two jumps you see in the final video.  I know, they don’t look hard, but remember that appearances can be deceiving.  It often turns out that the hardest looking jumps are the easiest ones and easiest looking ones are the hardest ones, though not always.  Remember that.

I ended up with about 30 jumps in my final pot ‘o jumps.  I had slYnki re-review the stuff I landed, and got some advice from joshington as well on the subject of editing primarily.  It was now time to do some editing drafting and record angles.

And this is where the project gets painful.  So you see, every other Halo game except for Halo 2 has this really nifty thing called THEATER.  It features this amazing thing which we call “Recorded Games”.  And these recorded games, well, let’s just say they make it really easy to get really cool angles.  You can do your jump and come back and record it from above, below, sideways, first person, third person, whatever the heck you want!  You can even freeze the clip and get a mid-action shot to slowly pan around!  In Halo 1… we don’t have recorded games, instead we have Solstice.

Impressive huh?

Now don’t get me wrong, Solstice is  a cool program and I’m massively indebted to PatrickSSJ for making it.  Without it I wouldn’t have any angles at all!  But it was massively, and I mean MASSIVELY painful to use it to record my angles.  This is partly because I’m a perfectionist and always want to push the limits of what’s possible, so I suppose you could say I’m a bit masochistic when it comes to doing difficult things…  Yeah.

So why was this so difficult?  Alright, let me run you through it-

1. Make a camera track using points.  The camera track will go from point-to-point by traveling through a certain number of sub-points (steps) with a certain delay between each sub-step.  This means:
2. All points are sharp.  I mean they’re pointy enough to poke your eye out with them.  The camera won’t slow down/make a rounded corner when you change directions, instead it’ll snap onto the next “line” to the next point fast enough to break your neck.
3. Once started, the camera track cannot be stopped, so if you screw up you have to wait until it’s done.  That can take about a minute.

So these are the basic technical difficulties.  Now for what you have to do to record yourself doing a jump.  First off, you have to understand that because of lag in Halo 1, you can’t really have someone else record you.  Either you have to be on host or them, and if you’re on host they will just see you lag from one spot to another pretty much, which looks retarded on your “supposedly-awesome-flying-camera-footage”.  And if they’re on host you get the lag, and you can’t do any of your jumps because they require you to do really precise things with super-precise timing which you really can’t do when there’s a delay between you and the server and when doing anything that sends you through the air really just makes you lag everywhere.  Trust me, I tried.

All of the worlds problems can be traced back to lag.  Trust me.

So the only solution is to record yourself using a second computer over a LAN connection.  At least this way the lag is minimized, and less crippling.  It’s not gone though.  No sir.  You’ll still lag every-fricken-where if you do something complicated.  So that’s no fun, and an extra bit of difficulty to add to your recipe-for-disaster.

Anywho, so you’ve got your lan server going.  A laptop on your desk and your desktop computer running.  You set up the camera track on your desktop and host the server on it (no lag on the camera track bro).  Then you join the server from your laptop and get set up for you jump.  Then you go to your desktop, which is controlled by a different mouse and keyboard in the same general area as your laptop mouse and keyboard, minimize halo with alt+tab, click the “start camera track” button, restore halo with alt+tab, press your recording key, switch to your laptop, and execute a nearly-impossible-to-land-ridiculously-hard-jump-that-you’ve-only-done-once-in-your-entire-life-and-it-took-you-hundreds-of-attempts-to-do-when-you-were-completely-calm-and-not-under-a-lot-of-pressure.  Yep.  Piece of cake.  Yeah… NO.

Hahahahaha.  No pressure.  Right.  Check your barometer again bro.

Now imagine doing this for hours, waiting for the camera track to complete each time, failing miserably, and not doing your jump in sync with the camera track half the time so that when you do finally get it it’s a shitty clip.  You mad?  Hell I was.  Turns out you just have to keep pressing the relax button to keep getting shots of dopamine in your brain.  Eventually you land it and then you’re all anticlimactic as shit and move on with your useless life to the next wonderful angle.  (some actually felt kind of rewarding, but sometimes it was just so painful…)

Press it.  A lot.

Anywho, that was probably the most difficult part of the project.  After that it was just a matter of finding songs and taking a year or so to edit everything.  I actually finished the angles AFTER I had everything edited, because I hated recording those angles so much, but yeah.  Anywho.  That’s the story of Deadpoint.

Reflections/”So kids, what have we learned?”

• I really, REALLY want recorded games in Halo PC.  Seriously.
• Trick jumping in Halo PC is doable, albeit difficult, though that’s how it usually is in most games I suppose.
• Infected Mushroom is awesome.
• Music syncing > fancy smancy effects (although I kind of already knew this…)
• People like trick jumping.

So yeah.  More to come in the future doods.  Assuming I don’t commit suicide from Solstice-induced-schizophrenia.  >_>

Cheers mate!

-Mator