The game hints that there's another difficulty after Hard,
is there a way to unlock it without doing a complete playthrough first, maybe with a console command or a text file edit?

In what way is this hinted?

if you press F1 while having the "Hardcorps" difficulty selected, at the end it says: "Could there be another skill level?"


since that post, i've figured it out. similar to Quake 2 (same engine), you can set the skill level through the console.
to do this, you use the cvar "skill", after which you can start a new game by typing "map intro_start" in the console.

there are 4 possibles for this cvar: 0 for Rookie, 1 for Officer, 2 for Hardcorps, and 3 for the non-selectable difficulty.
so, typing "skill 3" and then "map intro_start" in the console will start a new game at this hidden difficulty.

at any time can you check the difficulty by just typing "skill" in console.
by default, you open the console with the `~ key
otherwise, you can go to Controls -> Video Controls (F7) -> "Bring Up Console Interface..."

Not really. I only did some quick "testing" to see whether there's a difference at all.
The only thing I'm sure about is that their damage is increased.

It's hard to recommend it for speedrunning, as most parts will force you to slow down. Hitscan enemies like the Reconah will destroy you unless you take the time to make use of cover.
Even regular Grunts can kick your ass in small groups, or otherwise make sure that you need to hunt down some health and/or armor afterwards.

But if you end up giving it a try regardless, I'd love to see your attempts :-)



And something offtopic:
In case you didn't know about the following cvars, they might make the game slightly more comfortable to play/run.
If want to try them out, simply copy-paste them into "autoexec.cfg" (create in main directory).

set bob_roll 0
set bob_pitch 0
set bob_up 0
set run_pitch 0
set zoomscale 0.3
set s_mixahead 0.05
set sensitivity 2.3

The first four eliminate all forms of swaying (simulating your head going up/down/left/right as you move).
s_mixahead controls how many seconds the audio is delayed. If you hear glitches (pops, crackles), just increase it (to 0.1 for example). Default is 0.2.
zoomscale controls how much your sensitivity is reduced when you zoom in with the sniper rifle. Not a very important command I suppose. Default is 0.1111.
I assume you know about sensitivity, but I just added it in case you didn't. The game only allows big jumps in (mouse) sensitivity if you use the in-game slider, but if you use this cvar, you can fine-tune it way more precisely.
There's also run_roll, but it doesn't seem to have any effect.

Maybe you don't care about this at all, but I figured they might be nice if you'll be speedrunning this :-)

Thanks for the info! I have a fairly up-to-date list of useful commands and such on [url=https://kb.speeddemosarchive.com/SiN_and_SiN:_Wages_of_Sin]here[/url]. Indeed the plan is to run it later on (the current run isn't very good objectively speaking), and certainly a hardcorps run has been on my mind later than later on. We'll see.

If you have in-depth info about the game/console commands, there may have been something I didn't quite get what it did or so that could be useful in speedrunning and bringing it up on the talk page of the wiki would be cool.

wow, that's a very impressive page.
i'm not sure how to use the talk page. do i have to make an account somewhere? it says i do not have permission to create the page. i'm clueless!

anyway, i doubt i can add much, if anything, that would be useful for speedrunning. i only browsed through the commands and cvars to make my casual playthrough as comfortable as possible.


but maybe for completion's sake that you might want to expand on some subjects:

# autoexec.cfg does get executed at startup, but when you log in after starting the game, your user's config will get get loaded, potentially changing some settings that the autoexec had just set.

all you really have to do to get around this issue, is manually execing your autoexec after logging in. this only has to be done once (unless you've changed something in your autoexec), because the user's config gets saved when you quit the game.

you can easily confirm if autoexec has been executed at startup by checking the console; it should report any execing. in this case, it should say "execing autoexec.cfg".

# you can skip logging in by setting the user directly in the shortcut. in my case it's:
"J:\Games\Sin Gold\sin.exe" +set player Cake +menu_main

the +menu_main there will send me straight to the main menu (skipping the intro videos). you could potentially replace this with +menu_loadgame to go straight to the load menu.

in fact, you could otherwise add +load <savegame>.
where <savegame> is, you can put: quick, save0, save1, save2, save3, save4, save5, save6, save7, save8, save9. (save0 is the autosave.)
this way, you can make shortcuts that directly open saves.
or, you can add +map <mapname> if you want to have shortcuts that open specific maps.

...in fact! you can even add stuff like +wuss and +noclip directly in the shortcut! (it's probably more convenient to bind that kind of stuff to buttons, however.) you can make this as crazy as you want, i suppose.

creating shortcuts like this might speed up practising specific maps/areas.

# some settings (like zoomscale and the viewbob commands) do not get saved, which means they have to be set each time the game is started. (these commands are the only reason i have an autoexec.)

# it might be worth noting that just like with Quake 2, SiN will use Windows' "enhanced pointer precision" acceleration curve. the only way to fix this is by changing something in your registry. the MarkC fix does exactly (and only) this.

# the in-game sensitivity slider actually goes from 2 to 22, in steps of 2. (what were they thinking?)


i can't really think of anything else that might be handy. most stuff seems to be related to audio / video / frames / time / multiplayer / hud / debugging...

but yeah, that's a nice amount of information on that page. i might actually look into it a bit more and then try a Rookie any%! not looking forward to save-load skips however, they're no fun imo!


edit: regarding the map command; i don't know how to manipulate the point of entry.
for example bank has two entrances, but if you directly load the map, you will spawn at the front door. i wonder if there are flags that can be set directly in the console. iirc there are a handful of maps that can be entered via different approaches.

Thanks for the extra info! I'll edit that into the guide later on (I have lots of notes from my research that are just on my computer for now because of other speedrun projects: I'm the idiot who won't do one thing at a time). Otherwise, and especially if you want to try a (non-casual) speedrun, which unfortunately would probably have to use the save-spamming (which is challenging to do, believe me!), then you'd better create a user on SpeedDemosArchive.com and that should allow you to edit the page as well. There's a thread as well which has some of my observations about how to improve the existing run but as I said, there's more stuff too.

If you do end up wanting to look into the game, we should coordinate in the thread and/or the talk page. As I said, I'm very deep into another run after which I have to go back to yet another game which has deserved my attention for the longest time, but SiN is the third on the list. I hope I can get to it in another couple of years' time (I repeat, I'm an idiot.) Either you can work independently on sorting out things I didn't look into yet, or try to figure out some mysteries, but there's no point in doing any serious routing right now if you wanna do things the way I'm doing it.

Thanks for editing that stuff in! I noticed that I could only get it to work once (?!) and then it stops going straight to the main menu again. There's stuff I just don't get with this game. :P

If anyone is still following this there is info an GitHub by Night dive studios
github.com/NightDive-Studio/sin-ex-game

Thanks! I put the link in the speedrun guide as well. Could be some VERY interesting stuff in the source.