Facility Decoder Door Lure

This page explains a theoretical one guard lure for the decoder door on Facility in GoldenEye.

Overview

Part 1: Guard approach

The TAS gets the 1.38s look around animation (1 in 6 odds) but the 1.83s shoulder injury animation (1 in 3) looks to be more sensible for console (thanks Rhakiath for suggesting injuring the guard). It does have a minor drawback as we'll see.

You set up to the left of the door. Once the guard finishes his animation, he straightens up taking randomly between 0.25 and 0.32s, and then he'll begin running towards Bond.

He plots his route as in the image above. If you got the 1.83s shoulder animation this backs him up far enough that he's closest to the pad behind him (0), otherwise he starts with (1).

As he moves he aims for the next pad, but if he has a clear path to any later pad then he'll switch his aim to that (though he doesn't check for this every frame). He can't see (4), Bond's position when he started moving, because there is a short ramp leading up to the door. This creates these 'thin walls' either side of the door (black on the diagram).

So essentially he'll go almost to (1) then see (2), which drags him out a bit before he sees (3) and heads towards that. If he moves to (0) initially then he can spin but it depends how soon he sees (1). You can lose anything from 0s to 0.8s, though less is more likely. On the other hand the guard will take a random amount of time up to 0.3s to respond to the nearby shot during the look-around animation, and it's probably very tight to set up in time on console.

Part 2: Spinning

This is where things get spicy.

The guard sees that the ramp edge is in his way, and spins back left. There's some technical stuff to understand here:

• The guard's "movement corridor" (outlined in faint grey). These are 2 lines starting from the left and right sides of the guard, heading towards his target, and spreading out slightly. We're interested in which of them get blocked, and on what.
• The barrier (outlined in blue). The edge of the ramp is split into 2 parts, which is essential. The barrier is made up of the parts of this ramp edge which the movement corridor has collided with
• The dodge points (in yellow). These are computed precisely to avoid the barrier to the left / right. The guard will generally have a clear route (movement corridor) to them here.

When the guard first reaches (3), his route to (4) is clearly blocked.

For the first 7 frames of spinning, he's looking for a clear route from his current position -> a dodge point -> (4)

The first half of this will generally be clear, and the 2nd half will always be blocked, for both the left and right dodge points, so he just spins.

Part 3: desperation

After these 7 frames he gets a bit desperate and says to himself: "Okay I just need to get around this barrier", so he relaxes the need for a clear route from the dodge point to (4).

The problem is that he always considers his left dodge point first. So on this magical frame, we need the following picture (taken from the TAS):

Click it to take a good look. The guard has come far enough down that the left boundary of his movement corridor just misses the bottom half of the ramp edge. But the right boundary still hits the top half. On the next frame..

.. his perceived barrier is the top half of the ramp edge only. He didn't see the bottom half at all. This is the only way that his left dodge point can be blocked (by the lower half of the ramp edge that he didn't notice). So he selects the right dodge point:

And now he has a 3/10 chance to open the door within the next 3 frames, before he will move his 'local target' (in purple). See my post about (ghost) doors for more on this.

Conclusions

It's unfortunate that the guard favours dodging left rather than right, otherwise this lure would be very consistent (~1 in 10 including the 1 in 3 to get the right shoulder injury anim). However it's no coincidence that I stumbled across it, because how far back out the guard comes in those 7 frames is just a question of lag. If stable low-ish lag can be achieved on console then it should still be viable.

Also the TAS uses 2.4 so has to lure the guard to nearer the lab door, since it only just ducks out of sight in time. With 1.2 you can lean so can lure him to right by the door and still escape, which would help widen the movement corridor:

Note that the lag is actually too low in this PROM TAS for the trick to work. It gets 30fps while the 45.10 TAS is at 20fps in full lookdown in the lab. Also I got the worst spin possible so the guard was very slow.

As for other doors (S1/Aztec) there's just not the geometry to set up a similar trick, so this is pretty unique.