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 is 320 in-game units (Units Per Second or 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.

• PRESERVING YOUR MOMENTUM: After gaining extra speed with any of the tricks mentioned below, you can keep almost all of 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 - the amount of speed lost is proportional to the number of frames in between these actions, but they must be done in that order. This is because air strafing will instantly or almost 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.

• Trilling: This is a basic movement technique where instead of just holding down one movement key you move in a given direction and then start tapping other keys so you're accelerating alternately at 45 degrees on both sides of the main direction of movement. Tapping at the right pace should increase the base speed by a noticeable amount (going up to about 370 UPS) although less than wall strafing or circle jumping. The advantage is you can perform this technique in close quarters without relying on walls or whenever jumping is awkward. You can do trilling on the ground or underwater.

• 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 from the parallel 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 while on the ground. You cannot wall strafe in the air but you can underwater.

• 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 executed well gives you the same boost as wall strafing (480 UPS) but can be performed anywhere where jumping isn't awkward and gets you moving in any direction including not parallel to walls. It's a bit difficult to describe and so self-sufficiency is called for in learning what works best.

The fastest way to perform a circle jump in SiN (and related games) is to accelerate linearly in whichever direction until hitting 320 UPS, then swinging the mouse to the side to cover a small arc where the mouse movement is fastest at first and slows down a little bit towards the end. If you want more insight into the mechanics, study the Quake 3 movement guides by injx: the basic principles are the same in SiN. In practice, and especially because the time to reach the maximum circling speed (presumably either because of more rapid physics checks and/or a lower friction) is very short in SiN, you will not lose a lot of time if you just move forwards (in a direction somewhat off to the side of where you're headed) until hitting 320, then holding down +left or +right while rotating in the same direction through an arc of around 30 degrees (maybe even less). Practise this in open areas to get the feel for it using wall strafing speed as a guideline for how fast you're supposed to be able to move at best.

Another variation that might be useful is to accelerate towards your heading on the side or behind you and do a short swing of the mouse before letting go of movement buttons and hitting the jump bind, after which you're free to turn around.

Circle jumping has the distinct disadvantage that because you're relying on jumping to keep your speed, you will be affected by enemy fire coming from ahead of you, unlike with wall strafing or trilling.

• Air movement: You cannot seemingly use any special techniques to accelerate past your base movement speed in the the air. You do have the same base acceleration meaning you can strafe around corners at 320 UPS. 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've jumped 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 practice surfaces that are lower than the lowest crates are very difficult to ramp jump off (I've never been able to ramp jump off a curb but I have off the kind of wainscotting in the area above the dynamite room in abandon), and objects that you can just barely reach are the same, because you've already lost all your momentum when you land on them.

Ramp jumping twice off the SAME surface will fail, unlike in Q2. In fact doing so also completely resets your momentum from any previous ramp jumping or other boosts. Unless this is specifically called for, it's why spamming the jump bind madly is often not the most consistent method, but instead you have to time each jump so it happens only once off each surface.

You can't ramp jump while adrenalined or mutagened, not even right after it's worn out.

• Bumping: When you hit a slanted surface at speed, some of your horizontal velocity is converted into vertical momentum, thus allowing you to reach somewhere slightly higher up. In practice 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 or the floor is another idea.

Even though air acceleration quickly resets your speed to 320, there's a chance you can accelerate for some number of frames without completely wiping away extra speed.

• 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.

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

• Circle drop-offs: There's a specific technique that's sometimes useful when dropping off a ledge that involves doing the ground part of a circle jump but without actually jumping as you drop off.

• Water movement: Use wall strafing or barring that trilling. Wall strafes can be done even when moving straight down or up (the dimensions involved don't matter at all) and off non-vertical walls: also remember you can strafe straight towards a wall at 5 degrees off the perpendicular instead of using +left or +right all the time, which might make some strafing easier.

When trilling, it might be fastest to use both jump and trilling while facing slightly lower than the desired 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 although crouching at least gives you the normal underwater speed whereas jumping (+moveup) gives a lesser one for some reason. Finally think about combining jump/crouch with wall strafing, because, again, the dimensions involved don't matter so long as the angle is right.

• 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 (these are really just point objects that repulse you whichever way you're coming from), 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 a few spots where I couldn't get the PC 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 seems to get on the object. That's why if you're running parallel to the thing, you can try to wall strafe along it (at the usual angle is best) and jump. Suddenly switching your angle to face the thing more directly might also help. If you approach it perpendicularly try trilling or circle jumping 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.

• "Bounce" jumps: there's a strange effect by which you can get a seemingly slightly higher jump by jumping so you land right next to something and jumping again. This might make it easier to get on crates, but has also worked when I wanted to get on doors using a rocket/pulse boost. Just running towards the objects/explosions might also help.

Boosts

• Weapon boosts:
  • useful: spider mines, pulse rifle primaries, rockets, and the destabilizer
  • useless: grenades

Use weapon boosts not only for height, but also for extra horizontal speed or rotation. The boost you gain is (most times) directly proportional to the damage you've self-inflicted. Consider aiming at entities, walls and even ceiling aside from just the floor.

• • 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. They also don't always stick to objects which means you can send them towards a door that's still closed and they'll keep running after you've opened it meaning you can send them out earlier than you think. Spider mines can be redirected in multiple ways: if they hit an entity while still flying through the air, they'll often bounce off it at the same angle. You can also bounce them off other spider mines. Finally rockets and other explosions will hurl them at ginormous speeds in a direction away from them which might allow you to assassinate someone or something around a corner.

The height at which you place a spider mine for a good vertical boost seems to be fine whenever it's somewhere low down. If you don't want a vertical boost, try placing them on the wall instead.

• • Pulse rifle: the primaries give a nice boost that doesn't hurt objects if that's relevant.

• • Rocket launcher: give a similar boost to the pulse primaries but cause environmental destruction as well.

• • Quantum destabilizer: is useful because it's scalable. The biggest boosts you can gain from the destabilizer hurt you for around 35 health points. Use the sounds it makes as a cue.

• • Grenades: the boost from grenades is absolutely tiny for some reason, but might be useful (if you can time it) for easily scaling a crate.

• Explosive objects: Exploding barrels, trucks, drivable vehicles 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 at all in the direction you were going. This is why you should try to time and aim all jumps so you land them on suitable ramps whenever that doesn't cost time otherwise. 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. When going downhill, you don't actually have to jump, you can just slam against the surface without doing anything and get carried along, but you're not going to be boosted [as much] by doing it that way.

• Enemy boost: Getting hit by any enemy fire and melee attacks will propel you. The effect starts to get very 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. Object boosts work best when you're also wall strafing off the object, in which case the final speed can exceed 480 UPS.

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

OPTIMIZATIONS

• Elevators: Some lifts you can ride while preventing the inner doors from closing. This might cut off a few hundreths when exiting, unless it's best to do a circle jump out the lift instead.

• Approaching doors: with doors that take a little bit to open and thus form bottlenecks, the absolute fastest way to get through them is to aim your movement towards the first point from which you can succesfully "use" them and to aim directly at the nearest point in their use box while spamming use with the mouse wheel.

• Ladders: always aim directly up when climbing ladders unless it's more important to start shooting at someone, in which case still try to aim up as much as you can. When going down, just drop off and catch the ladder near the bottom if required for health management.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.

SAVE/LOADING

Saving and loading mostly preserves the game state intact without a lot of ways having been found for how to abuse it. You can, however, use the lag generated by saving to cause some useful effects.

• Save pushing: You can spam saving (use your quicksave or bind a key to save into a specific dummy file, e.g. "bind x save test") to counter the effects of water currents, enabling you to access areas you otherwise couldn't.

• Skipping triggers: just save before hitting a killbox or other trigger while moving at a suitably high speed. When falling down near terminal velocity is required but it's probably also a factor of the size of the box. The engine will extrapolate your movement without checking for triggers (will check for walls and other tangible things though). Might be easier with a less powerful CPU or if you cap your framerate, but it might also not matter.

Has currently only the use of getting safely down the dam in the level called that, which is coming off a long fall meaning the speed is sufficient.

NPCs

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

• Spawning: In some sequences (at least in the bank when you enter the fountain room) where exactly 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. Also consider deliberately setting off alarms to get more guys to spawn in for better boosts.

• 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.

• Ghost actors: cutscene actors sometimes already stand in place invisible waiting for cutscenes to start. Eg. in "gorge" at the very end, the cutscene Blake is standing in front of the elevator. They can be hurt by explosions which can mess the cutscene up but might have some positive effect somewhere too...

• Enemy weapons: you might sometimes be able to get enemies to drop weapons from up high if they're on the very edge. Either kill them, or try to hit the weapon making them drop it.

GENERAL

• Entities/objects: The technical in-game term for anything that isn't a piece of architecture is an "entity". They share some similarities including spider mines bouncing off them. Some are intangible (some plants), others can be collided with. Others have extra "bboxes" placed around them that act as their hitbox.

• bboxes: These are referenced in the console command "sv_showbboxes". It is unknown what 'b' stands for and they serve various purposes. Some act as the "use" surfaces of buttons etc., others represent an object's hitbox, for example an NPCs. Some are difficult to tell why they're there. Note that there are other triggers all around the game that are not revealed by using the command. Using this command is useful for easily seeing how high you have to jump to climb a tree etc.

• 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.

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.

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

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 the correct angles (about 60 degrees below horizontal if the pane is vertical), you can get projectiles to spawn on the other side of glass panes. This works with at least grenades, but pulse primaries and rockets are also a candidate in some cases, though very difficult to use. It's the easiest if the pane is slanted in which case the effective angle is also wider (along the yaw axis) than otherwise. You can get a special kind of ricochet with a narrow angle off to the side where the shot will bounce off the pane itself but still pass through it.

• Shooting through seams: grenades come in handy sometimes when you shoot through seams into places you can't otherwise visit yet, e.g. in Sewers A.

• 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.

CONSOLE STUFF

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.

• • you MAY use the console to change fov
  • also to disable view bobbing if you like (etc. mostly cosmetic changes)
  • also to rebind all keys and assign separate binds for the weapons

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, also infinite ammo on any weapon you've acquired
• noclip - also gives you flight
  • use gl_clear 1 to get rid of the Hall of Mirrors effect while noclipping
• notarget - non-aggroed 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)

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

• jungle1/jungle2
  • concertina doors: the folding doors can grab you and give you a lift

Side notes