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About

This video was made not only to entertain its viewers, but to show the jumping community what you can do with mods. Hopefully more jumpers will be open to performing modded stacks after seeing this video. We hope you enjoy this video as much as we did making it!

Contact Info

IRC - irc.bungie.org, #jt

AIM - DJ Maluu | iReidon | MrOllie16 | Heyitsnick07

- FAQ – This FAQ was created to effectively explain what modding really is and to rebut the most common arguments against modding.

- Q: Why did it take you guys so long to release this video?

- A: Oh would you look at the time! Man, I better be going...

- Q: Not so fast you! *Grabs question answerer guy

- A: Err...right. Well the jumps took longer than anything. Most of them are extremely difficult in either the setup or performance aspect. Some may take hours just to setup, but only a couple minutes to land (Most of the rubbles). While others have an easier setup, but are pretty hard in the performance category. The really hard jumps have hard setups and performances. One of the jumps took over 2 months just to figure out the setup, and a couple weeks on/off to land. Anyways, I'm just saying we were working pretty hard on the content. The editing portion took about 2 weeks.

- Q: Why do you use mods?

- A: We use mods to expand the current limitations of the game. Modding allows for more complex, creative, and skillful jumps to be performed. It also makes jumping more fun because it allows for new discoveries, as well as a new level of competition.

- Q: But I don't like modding...RAWR!!!

- A: That's not even a question...but I'll reply by saying you probably don't like modding because you think we are cheating or changing the gameplay. By that I mean making the jump height .01 higher than normal, or the rocket/nade force .01 more powerful. We do not change the physics in the game at all, and you just have to trust us on this. We could if we wanted to, but that would ruin the fun for us, and that's why we do this in the first place.

- Q: So what mods do you use?

- A: Infinite health/ammo(no reload)/nades and savestates. For filming purposes, we use a flycam and timefreeze.

- Q: What are savestates?

- A: Savestates allow you to reset the map by pressing a combination of buttons to save your state, and then a different combination to load your state. When you load your state, it resets your position on the map, direction of aim, and the position of anything else on the map according to how it was when you saved it. This is very useful for doing jumps that require complex setups using rubble or fusion coils. Savestates are also useful if the location of the start of the jump is annoying to get back to should you fail on an attempt, simply save your position at the start, perform the jump, and reset if you fail.

- Q: Doesn’t that make jumping easier?

- A: No they don’t. Savestates do not make jumps easier in skill, simply more convenient. Let me use an analogy to prove this. Say you have a decently difficult long jump located on the ground. Every time you miss the long jump, you can simply walk back to the start and try again. Now take this same exact long jump...and put on top of the highest headlong building, and if you fail the jump, you have to somehow get all the way back on top of the building. Now...does this jump all of a sudden take more skill to perform just because its location has changed? Of course not, the jump is exactly the same, it is the inconvenience of the location that makes the jump more annoying to perform. It is this pointless factor of annoyance for why people make the misconception that a jump is harder if it takes more time to reach on a failure. Why take the time to have to work around something as arbitrary as the location of a jump? It could be any jump, anywhere, yet its difficulty is judged based on its location?

Savestates also make jumping more enjoyable. Imagine performing ollie's [dubble rubble] jump without savestates. It is pretty much safe to say it would be impossible. The amount of time it would take to reset the jump on a failure is ridiculous. No one would take the amount of time to do that because it's not fun. Savestates take away all the pointless annoyances of a jump, and allow you to actually focus on the jump, which in turn, makes jumping more fun. Pushing boxes around the map for two hours isn't what I call fun. Do we have tricking videos of people pushing boxes around the map? Do we say someone is a good jumper because they have to walk back and pick up rocket ammo, or wait for the plasma grenades to respawn? Didn't think so...why? Because that doesn’t take any skill, so why should you have to deal with it?

If you are still against savestates for some reason or another (at this point it can only be stubbornness), I have something to show you. Go over to the [HIH Campaign Tricking Forum] and watch a couple videos or two. Pretty cool huh? Wanna know something? Campaign trickers use savestates too, they are called checkpoints. Now imagine doing campaign tricks without checkpoints. Their videos would be nowhere where they are now if it were not for checkpoints. This is perfect example where savestates made tricking better. We are doing the same, just in multiplayer, and because checkpoints aren't built into multiplayer, we worked around it by modding, but why would that even matter? It doesn't.

- Q: So what about infinite health? I mean...with infinite health, you can just use 43928743 nades to get anywhere you want, where is the skill in that?

- A: Tell me exactly how you are going to get 43928743 grenades to explode all at once. More realistically, how about just 10 while playing solo? That's what I thought.

- Q: Yea but I mean...using 5+ grenades in one jump, isn't that a bit much?

- A: How is that any different from a jump that uses 2 grenades?

- Q: Well, then you could just use 5 grenades on a jump that only need 2.

- A: Ah, that is called modding abuse. We frown highly upon that. If a jump ever uses a more rockets/nades than it needs, it isn’t as good of a jump, kinda like using a save on a jump that doesn't need one. What about a jump that required the maximum explosive force from 5+ nades? Would you be ok with that?

- Q: Yea, that would be pretty cool actually.

- A: Cool, it is actually pretty hard just figure out how to get that many grenades to explode at once. There are many different techniques we use throughout the video. In the video, try to watch how the jumper gets the grenades to do what he wants them to do.

- Q: Ok, well here's another thing about inf. health. You don't even have to worry about dieing. Without inf. health, it takes a considerable amount of skill to be able to time grenades so that they are the right distance away from you when they explode so you don't die, but close enough that they give you as much force as possible. This skill is lost with infinite health.

- A: You are 100% right on that. The skill of survival is lost when modding. However, I would argue that there is more skill to be gained with the use of inf. health than there is trying to survive grenades. Why? Because you have no limit to what you can do, there are so many new things you can do with modding that no one has even thought about yet. You are sacrificing one skill, for who knows how many new skills there are to be discovered. Just by watching the video you will see new ways of jumping you have never thought of before.

- Q: So if I did the same jump without inf. health that you guys did with inf. health, my jump would be better, and you would be "abusing" mods as you call it.

- A: Correct to a certain degree. If the jump does not require the skill of survival, then the fact the one may be using mods is irrelevant. For example, you can survive two rocket explosions with an overshield automatically without any skill. Using infinite health to do a jump that only used 2 rockets is not abuse, because it is no different than not using mods. With that said, most modded jumps will already go past the survival limits anyway (numerous explosions), so this really isn't that big of an issue.

- Q: Well, I agree with everything so far now that you explained it all to me. But I'm still not sure... it all just seems like it's not right because you're changing the game so you can do stuff you weren't suppose to do.

- A: Not really...you are confusing yourself, let me explain it to you. The reason why people are (or should be) unsure of modding has nothing to do with it allowing you to do "stuff you weren't supposed to". It has nothing to do with giving the game infinite health when you shouldn't have it, or infinite ammo when you shouldn't have it. It has everything to do with how available it is to everyone. Modding is not something someone can just turn on, you have to copy a couple of things onto your xbox, and that takes some knowledge, and there is risk involved. If you are using this reason for why you don't really like modding, that is ok, and I would probably agree with you. But you cannot say that you don't like modding because it changes the game. Why? I can point to jump vids that use juggernaut jumping, or sputnik, both of which actually do change the game even more so than mods, they actually change the physics, something we would never do in modding. I can also point back to campaign videos where they do exactly what we do with checkpoints. Now why is it that no one objects to these videos this saying, "Hey thats not how the game was supposed to be played I don't like this!" It is because this option is easily accessible to everyone. Modding is not.

Above all, think about this. If every single mod we use was available to you on the quick options screen. Almost everyone would most certainly use it. Why would you use it? Same reason for using speed jumping or sputnik, it is openly available, so why not? Yet for some reason, if the word "modding" is used, it is all of a sudden different? I guarantee that if the option that allowed speed jumping did not exist, and someone made a video which does the same exact thing, with mods, everyone would be against it. I would be too, I don't personally agree with changing the physics of the game. So why is it that you may be ok with speed jumping/sputnik, yet against modding, when both do the same exact thing, change the game? Stop using the reason, "it let's you do stuff you weren't suppose to do", and realize that it is only because of the lack of accessibility.

- Q: Well you have basically rebutted every argument I could think of...and now I want to mod! But I don't know how! Thanks for nothing....

- A: Wrong you are again. I have created an extremely detailed modding tutorial from start to finish. It is my [Complete Guide to Modded Stacking]. This tut is specifically designed for people who are modding noobs, so have no fear!

- Q: Wow...is it safe to say that I now have NO reason NOT to mod?

- A: Yes my friend, it is.