SiN and SiN: Wages of Sin/Game Mechanics and Glitches

If a trick applies to only some versions of the game, note which ones that is.

SiN runs on id tech 2, i.e. the Quake II engine. There are some differences but many tricks work just the same. Read below for a detailed explanation of how the physics work.

General Movement

• Movement symmetry: In SiN the physics have no inherent differences based on which of the four cardinal or diagonal directions you're moving in relative to your facing. For this reason you can perform any basic technique in any of the eight directions, not just forwards or backwards. Sometimes you might actually want to do this too in order to, e.g., be able to aim in a given direction while moving or because it requires less mouse movement.

• Movement speed: The base movement speed in SiN along both axes and diagonals, and also with movement up and down ladders is 320 in-game units (UPS). With most movement, the fastest way to accelerate from 0 to 320 is by just accelerating in a straight line. This should ALWAYS be done before starting to trill, wall strafe, or circle jump.

• Trilling: This is a basic movement technique where instead of just holding down one movement key you move in a given direction and tap the perpendicular direction keys rapidly to increase the base speed by a noticable amount (up to about 370 UPS) although lesser than wall strafing and circle jumping. You're thus accelerating alternately at 45 degrees on both sides of the main direction of movement. The advantage is you can perform this technique in close quarters without relying on walls. You can do trilling on the ground or underwater. It doesn't increase your speed in the air.

• Wall strafing: This is a basic movement technique where you hug a wall while running and accelerate at an angle that faces the wall itself at about 40 degrees to increase your speed to around 480 UPS. This means if you're using forwards and right to strafe against a wall on your right, you need to face an angle of about 5 degrees to the left of what would be parallel to the wall. Remember to first get to your base movement speed by accelerating parallel to the wall.

Notice this only works against vertical-ish walls. You cannot wall strafe in the air but you can underwater if you find suitable surfaces.

• Circle jumping: This is a basic movement technique where you accelerate on the ground in a circle as if slinging yourself to temporarily exceed the base speed. The technique gives you around the same boost as wall strafing (480 UPS) but can be performed anywhere where there's a little bit of space for the circling and starts a series of hops in any direction including not parallel to walls.

The fastest way to perform a circle jump in SiN is probably to move forwards until hitting 320, then holding down +left or +right while rotating in the same direction through an arc of around 45 degrees (maybe even less). Practise this in open areas to get the feel for it.

Wall strafing might be better if you are okay to move parallel to the wall because of its lesser setup time. It's also more resilient against incoming fire and may make it easier to dodge enemies.

• PRESERVING YOUR MOMENTUM: After gaining extra speed, you can keep the speed across gaps or without having to continue trilling/wall strafing/circling by FIRST releasing all movement keys (!) and THEN jumping a microsecond after. This is because air strafing will instantly reset your speed to 320. If you need to shoot at something on the side, or just rotate around, you can also do that during the jumping without losing time.

Because the game buffers one jump you can just hold the jump button down between hops. It's a good habit to get into to re-depress it soon after hopping so you will never fail hopping up stairs/ramps etc.

• Air strafing: You can strafe in a circle in the air. This won't increase your speed (and will reset it to the current base speed in fact) but will at least enable you to get around corners while airborne. Extra useful when on adrenaline when normal air movement is made clumsier. You can also use this ability when on adrenaline to increase your travel distance by "wiggling" left and right after you jump so you don't overshoot it.

• Adrenaline/mutagen: When on either adrenaline or the mutagen, your base movement speed along both axes is approximately doubled. The downside is you lose the ability to slow down during leaps (once attained a higher speed) and can only air strafe to control your movement. You can only ever hold one of each, and the mutagen injector is only found in one level, whereas adrenaline is found in multiple levels.

• Ramp jumping: This is a basic movement technique that arises from the way jumping is handled by the engine. Every time you jump off a surface, the jump adds to rather than replaces your current upwards velocity. Because of this, if you can jump twice or more times in rapid succession, you'll be able to get a much higher jump in total. In practise surfaces that are lower than the lowest crates are very difficult to ramp jump off, and objects that you can just barely reach are the same, because you've already lost all your momentum when you land on them.

You don't actually have to jump, you can just slam against the surface without doing anything and get carried along, but you don't actually seem to be boosted by doing it that way.

• Bumping (IS THIS A THING IN SIN?): When you hit a slanted surface at a speed, some of your horizontal velocity is converted into vertical momentum, thus allowing you to reach somewhere slightly higher up. In practise you still always want to jump off the base of the slope whether or not you have extra speed.

• Rotating at high speeds: if you've obtained a high amount of speed and want to keep it while adjusting your movement direction, look for walls that you could aim at to get bumped in the right direction by. Otherwise try NPCs, objects or anything. Enemies could shoot you to give you the boost you need. Weapon boosting off walls is another idea.

• Crouch Jumping: In SiN, crouching in the air pulls your head down more so than your legs up. Because of this it isn't useful for reaching higher ledges but can be used to not get stuck jumping through gaps or into ducts. May also allow keeping full momentum going into such places.

• Crouch Falling: If you crouch before falling off, you avoid some fall damage. (works even when already jumped?)

Crouching can give you extra traction in some situations (observed in some places with water running down a pipe)

• Water movement: It might be fastest to use both jump and trilling while facing slightly lower than the direction of movement if you're generally moving upwards, or the same with crouch if moving downwards. Note that it's never fastest to use just jump or crouch by themselves. Wall strafing also works underwater though is less likely to see as much use.

• Swimming upstream: You can usually just swim right up cascading water. It might help to save spam. If there's a current resisting your motion, save spamming helps you pass through.

• Jesus walking: Probably depending on your angle of incidence, you might be able to avoid sinking into water completely just skimming across the surface instead. Just hold down jump.

• Getting out of water: Build up speed to make it possible to exit water in more places.

I've seen at least one spot where I couldn't get the character to jump out of the water until I crouched, presumably giving him the foothold he needed.

• Getting on crate-height things: By crate-height we mean the height that most typical crates have that makes it difficult but not impossible to jump onto them. The more speed you have the easier it is to get on the object. That's why if you're running parallel to the thing, you can try to wallstrafe along it (at the usual 40 degrees off the parallel) and jump. Suddenly switching your angle to face the thing more directly might also help. If you approach it perpendicularly try trilling before jumping but with this approach you can't help having to just time it well. Otherwise doing a kind of "bounce" jump (jump right as you've landed right next to something) also feels like it sometimes works.

• Trees: Trees have strange hitboxes. Some of them extend most of the way up, some end only a little ways above where you can jump to without parkouring. Some of them don't even have hitboxes at all. You should look into possibilities of using trees and other unusual entities for parkour.

Boosts

Weapon boosts: useful - pulse rifle, spider mines, rockets, destabilizer useless: grenades

Use the explosive type weapons for gaining up to a lot of height. The Quantum Destabilizer is useful because it's scalable. It needs to be figured out which ones have the best health economy.

Spider mines can be stacked but using even just one comes at a delay compared to the instant boost from other explosives. Remember to switch to them as early as you're able to start planting them down.

WHAT IS THE BEST PLACEMENT OF SPIDER MINES for max vertical boost?

You can also get extra horizontal boosts or a change in movement direction by shooting at a wall, floor, or even ceiling while moving at increased speeds.

• Explosive objects: Exploding barrels, trucks etc. can also be used for extra speed and height.

• Ramp boosting: When you fall on a slanted surface of any kind, you automatically gain a boost off it, making you save time if the boost is in the direction you were going. This is why you should try to time all jumps so you land them on suitable ramps. On long downwards inclines (like the escalators in level one) you can gather ENORMOUS amounts of speed.

Hopping up a slope or a set of stairs doesn't cause you to lose any speed.

• Enemy boost: Getting hit by any enemy fire will propulse you. The effect starts to get pretty significant pretty quickly so try to get enemies to do this a lot.

• Object boosts: When you brush against things like barrels, doors, or any object, you get stuck for a little bit until you're ejected again. When this happens you temporarily gain a fairly high speed which you can preserve by starting to hop. Think about combining this with a ramp jump off the same or an adjacent object.

The timing on the first hop is tricky: you have to jump a little bit before actually getting the boost, while being stuck.

There's a chance the object boost is really just a wall strafe. In either case it seems to work best if you also are treating it as a wall strafe.

SAVE/LOADING

Saving and loading mostly preserves the game state intact without a lot of ways having been found for how to abuse it. Here's the few exceptions.

Save pushing: You can spam saving (use your quicksave or bind a key to save into a specific dummy file) to counter the effects of conveyor belts and water currents, enabling you to access areas you other couldn't.

Save/Load fall damage cancel: just s/l before hitting the ground to cancel any fall damage. Doesn't cancel the effect of kill planes if present.

NPCs

Infighting: You can sometimes get enemies to fight each other. Seen a guard attack a turret (in bank) after being hurt by it. May require their A.I. to be alerted by something first.

Spawning: In some sequences (e.g. bank when you enter the fountain room) where the guards will spawn depends on where you're stood - it's probably always somewhere some distance away or behind the corner where you can't see them spawning in. Use this to manipulate getting better enemy boosts etc.

You can "push" NPCs that are moving about (like the civilians you rescue in mission 1) by just standing in the their way. Maybe you could get them somewhere useful? To get an idea of how they might move about try using ai_showroutes 1 (but it just approximate).

GENERAL

Patches: There should be no significant changes affecting speedrunning between v. 1.11 (GOG) and 1.12 (Steam) although you never know if there's some small thing somewhere.

To get rid of the mouse acceleration, just change the "mouse filter" option in the menus to a different setting.

Command buffering: the game will always buffer one command if you hold the button down, meaning you could use it to time finicky actions by e.g. switching between weapons or shooting a certain number of times.

Weapons: Fists, Magnum, Shotgun, AssaultRifle, Chaingun, SpiderMine, RocketLauncher, PulseRifle, QuantumDestabilizer, Sniperrifle, SpearGun

Binds: To change weapon binds through the console just type in the following command - "bind x use fists", replacing x and fists with the correct things.

Check out the default.cfg in the "base" folder to see what the other actions are called. For some reason you can't bind +moveup on the mousewheel, but you can +use.

Key Names: ESCAPE, F1-F12, PAUSE, BACKSPACE, TAB, SEMICOLON, ENTER, SHIFT, CTRL, ALT, SPACE, INS, HOME, PGUP, DEL, END, PGDN, UPARROW, DOWNARROW, LEFTARROW, RIGHTARROW, KP_SLASH, KP_MINUS, KP_PLUS, KP_ENTER, KP_5, KP_UPARROW, KP_LEFTARROW, KP_RIGHTARROW, KP_DOWNARROW, KP_HOME, KP_END, KP_PGUP, KP_PGDN, KP_INS, KP_DEL, MOUSE1-MOUSE3, AUX1-AUX32, JOY1-JOY4, MWHEELUP, MWHEELDOWN

Console: To activate the console, hit the § key (to the left of the 1 key). Commands don't require a prefix in this game and will be interpreted as chat messages only if the given command doesn't exist.

Console Commands/Cheats: To enable cheats for experimentation, first type in the console "cheats 1", then start a new game. To get the default value for any variable, just type it into console without parameters.

It might be wise to use a separate file for running and one for testing things so you don't accidentally leave some setting or bind in that's not supposed to be used.

https://www.eecis.udel.edu/~portnoi/quake/quakeiicom.html QII console commands with explanations, lots of which apply to SiN. Some variables seem to be ignored for single player games though.

use the pgup and pgdn keys to scroll text in the console

Some commands and cvars:

bind - create binds, e.g. "bind space noclip"

alias - creates complex binds, e.g. this creates a timer key (you can't reset the timer except by loading a save)

alias time "set gl_showents 1; wait; wait; set gl_showents 0"

bind x time

cvarlist - prints a full list of cvars and their values bindlist - displays all binds clear - clears the console

god - godmode noclip - also gives you flight use gl_clear 1 to get rid of hall of mirrors while noclipping notarget - enemies ignore you exit - exit game if hanging save X - saves in file X load X - loads file X health X - sets your hp between 0 and 999 wuss - all weapons except spider mines

timescale - you can use this to speed the game up or slow it down, default 1: consider using this to practise difficult tricks or just to see if something is possible to do at all record X - use to record demos with filename X: useful for studying tricks in detail if played back with low timescale stop - stop recording demomap X - play back demo X

r_drawentities 0 disable drawing entities, i.e. objects - useful combined with sv_showbboxes 1 to clearly see the bboxes r_drawworld 0 disable drawing world - useful to see bboxes clearly and to see through walls in general gl_clear 1 to get rid of hall of mirrors effect

spawn X - used to spawn items in front of you give X - used to place items directly into inventory

some stuff you can "spawn" or "give": -adrenaline, mutagen, pulsepart1 (means secret weapon part #1), pulsepart2, pulsepart3, reactiveshields (aka bioshield), scubagear -enemies/NPCs -plot items

see the FAQ for a full listing of what you can spawn or give http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/39787-sin/faqs/15778

map X - puts you on a given level, which are training intro bank abandon csite subway chem1 chem2 whouse1 whouse2 biomecha biomechb silo sewera aq1 sewerb dam wworks1 wworks2 oilrig uwpass1 uwpass2 docks1 geo1 geo2 docks2 jungle jungle2 gorge area57 biomass xeno1 xeno2 mansion1 mansion2 phoenix thrall paradox (bonus level)

Peaking: by hitting an object above with enough speed, it will look like you're pushing through for a little while. However if you record a demo with you doing this, the demo might show that you never did that, it was just an artifact caused by latency and predictions. It's unknown if it's actually doable (frame-rate?)

Trucks: to destroy a truck you have to shoot the main body, not the bed. This might be a useful way to clear enemies quickly or to get a speed boost off the explosions.

Center view: you might sometimes find a use for this command if you know you need to be aiming at a spot exactly horizontally ahead or a little above or below.

Shooting through glass: With correct angles, you can get projectiles to spawn on the other side of glass panes. This works with at least grenades, but possibly also rockets. It's the easiest if the pane is slanted.

Shooting through rails: You can sometimes shoot at your enemies through thin rails.

Planting spider mines: you can plant a spider mind from a distance. If you time it right, you should be able to send out multiple mines ahead of you and have all of them converge on the right spot as soon as the last one has landed. Another thing you can do is make them collide into each other so they don't move around at all.

Planting grenades: you can "plant" a chaingun grenade by crouching and shooting it low. This sometimes causes it to disappear into the ground. No known uses.

Door crushing: You can actually get enemies to get crushed in opening and closing doors. This also completely hitstuns them.

Picking things up: Remember that you can just "use" a collectable item to pick it up instead of having to run over it.

Using things through thin walls: You can sometimes use things through thin walls, or possibly just objects. E.g. picking something out of a locker without having to open it. May also work to open doors from the wrong side, which works at least with doors with valves.

Vehicle OOB: when you exit a vehicle, it places you behind it. If there happens to be a piece of floor OOB right behind the wall behind you, it can place you OOB. If the side behind you is blocked, it puts you on the left, then right, and then presumably in front of the vehicle. Sometimes you may have to park the vehicle so its left side is closest the wall with behind it being blocked.

Spawn OOB: if you stand where something else is about to spawn, when it does, it might push you through the floor into the OOB. I currently know one spot where this can happen and I'll point it out in these notes.

OOB: OOB is kinda weird in this game. If you get a position above the void, you can just fall right through and wrap back around. It doesn't, however, keep doing this - instead for some really strange reason you get bounced back up when you fall below the level again. The bounce gets you nearly as high up as you started. Every subsequent bounce loses a bit of height. If you bump on a floor on your way up, it kills your momentum and you start falling again, but again for some really strange reason it treats you as having reset the whole thing. You'll see what I'm talking about. I'll point out spots where I managed to get OOB and whether I found a use for it. The adrenaline makes it easier to move around OOB but I'm not sure it's worth using it there despite that.

I don't think you can use objects through the walls from OOB. I couldn't ever get back in the vehicle I'd used to vehicle OOB out.

Moving crates (and other objects): any object that's on top of another object or generally airborne it seems you can hit or shoot far away. This could enable you to get a crate or even an NPC into position for some parkour somewhere.

I've also seen a crate get blasted right through a wall when I shot at a large stack of them.

Level-specific (but not category-specific) notes:

Side notes