All the things you need to know about RAGE !

02/15/2017 UPDATE : This guide is a little bit outdated in some parts, i'm probably gonna remake it soon.

Hello !

This is a little guide to help people's who want to start the run :)
I'm not gonna explain all the tricks since most of them are really easy to understand and you only need to look at other people's runs to know how to execute them (Links for VOD are at the bottom of the guide).

First of all, we run the game with the 64 bits launcher (for consoles HUD commands like the FOV or the bob) and the anarchy edition (pre-order edition DLC) which add somes cool things like the elite armor or badass (useless) weapons. If you want to run the game on PC, you can get this DLC for free with a little file edit :

Go into SteamApps/common/Rage/dlc and make a new folder named "dlc1", then copy the file "info.txt" from the dlc2 folder into the new dlc1 folder you just created, then open the info.txt you copied into the dlc1 folder and change the DLC ID thing from 2 to 1. The next time you start the game you should have all the Anarchy Edition DLC stuff (Thanks to MWisBest for this useful guide).

You can delete the "rage_intro.bik" in your RAGE\base\video to skip the long video intro (same for "rage_outro.bik" if you don't want to get the end of the game video). 

You will only need 4 weapons binding in this run : The pistol gun, the vanilla shotgun, the crossbow and the rocket launcher for a boss (and maybe the BFG if you don't have ammos at the end of the game). 

If you have the Scrorchers DLC too, you can skip the ark intro sequence by doing a load of the auto-save file (save ~ 20 secondes). We don't know why this skip don't work without it.

To "walk" faster, we use a technique called bunnyhopping : This is a guide about how to do it in Quake Live, RAGE use almost the same In-Game engine so it's almost the same thing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiBDSOknI9Q

My only additionnal advice would be to bind one of your mouse wheels bind (not the two one, I'm gonna explain why after) to jump in the options. It's a little bit hard to master but it's really useful since you can't "pre-press" your next jump during your curent jump like in Quake Live. With this bind, you can "spam" and be sure to re-jump as soon as possible.

Glitch & Tricks :

There is a glitch that we use to skip parts and take objects from a long distance called "Zoom Glitch" or "Scope Glitch" : If you zoom at an object and dezoom at a certain distance (not to far too), you will be able to activate/take it during a little bit of frames. To be consitant, the best way is to bind your other mouse wheel bind to the activate action in the options. With this bind, as soon as you dezoom you will be able to spam a lot of activate action during the activation frames. Try to not spam "as fast as possible" too, you need to ear all the littles "tic" sounds when roll/push your bind to get the optimal spam setting. Oh and yeah, of course you need to buy the pistol scope to be abble to do it.

In the bunker, you can skip the elevator part by doing a funny glitch : Put yourself in the fence placement (it's a really precise position, my advice would be to watch a run VOD) and activate the elevator button. Now you are stuck in the invisible wall : spam the jump and you are gonna "fly". At the end of it, just quick spam your forward arrow and the jump at the same time and you will get out (need a little bit of practice). 

There is a trick to "jump" really high and get over invisible walls that we use twice in the current run : You need to put at least 3 or 4 RC cars on the floor then shoot them and jump at the same time. You are gonna be ejected in the air and be abble to get over the walls. You will need to practice them a little bit since it can be really cluncky to get everytimes.

For the other tricks and littles optimisations, just watch the runs VOD, it's not really hard.

Useful links :

Takyon WR (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7Q3Hxas1q4) : highlights for all tricks in the description of the video, my best advice would be to start here. 
My (XeoStyle) actual PB (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXs9nCi9BpU), Really close from the optimal actual route, use a lot of new strats.
Takyon channel ( https://www.youtube.com/user/Kitinid/videos ) : A lot of cools RAGE stuffs (and speedrun things in general), if you are curious. 
Speed Demo Archive forum of RAGE ( https://forum.speeddemosarchive.com/post/rage.html ) : A lot of interresting info about the routing and stuffs. 
Autosplit/Ingame Timer for RAGE ( https://github.com/ttakkyon/RageSplit ) : Self explaining.
All commands ( https://www.idgames.de/threads/rage-commands-cvars.13208/ ): if you are really curious :D (Works only with 64 bits launcher)
Some useful give commands : http://www.gamewinners.com/Cheats/index.php/Rage_%28PC%29

New Timing Method

The new timing method for RAGE uses LiveSplit and an autosplitter developed to be as compatible with the old 'Play Time' timing method as possible. The autosplitter is available directly through LiveSplit. Just go to 'Edit Splits' and select RAGE as the game. An option to activate the autosplitter will then appear. Remember to then set the 'Compare Against' option in LiveSplit to 'Game Time' to display the correct timer. The autosplitter can also be downloaded and forked from https://github.com/ttakkyon/RageSplit

The autosplitter uses the in game time, but fixes the flaw of removed fractions of seconds after game load. It's also possible to make and load saves during runs with this timer. The timer also negates the start and end cutscene time from the run time. It does this by starting at a negative value and then by subtracting time at the last split when the level changes from Authority Base to Subway Town.

Rationale behind the timer:

The problem with the old 'Play Time' method of timing was that it only worked for single-segment without saves and that it floored second values to integers after each level/save load. This means that, for a run with 72 level loads, anywhere between 0-72 seconds was removed from the run. On average this resulted in 36 seconds being removed from each run. This adds up pretty nicely to the start cutscene of 38.320 seconds before the player first gains control, which previously wasn't removed from the run time. By removing this first cutscene in the new timer the run time now ends up pretty close to the old timing method, so the runs can be compared somewhat directly. Only timing the interval of the run where the player has control is also a standard practice in speedruns, and now this is possible for RAGE.

The problem with RTA timing is that RAGE runs contains several minutes of loading time, and just by running the game on better hardware the RTA time can be reduced by minutes. It would be possible to use real-time and cutting out the load times with an autosplitter, but this has issues as well. The routes and strategies used in every run of RAGE was created with the in-game timer in mind, where menu time doesn't count. If we suddenly started counting the menu time then the run would end up different, and this isn't compatible with the old runs. The in-game timer of rage also runs at 0.96% of real-time, so the times of equal runs would look completely different depending on when they were made if we started using real-time.

The first run to use this timer is the 1:27:23 Any% run. This run is several minutes faster than all previous runs however you choose to time it, which makes this a great point in time to reset how timing is done to a more robust version.

Name	Autor
All the things you need to know about RAGE !	Xeo 6 years ago
New Timing Method	Takyon_DF 5 years ago