Pausing

Pausing refers to stopping gameplay and bringing up the pause menu in GoldenEye 007

Overview

When paused, normal gameplay stops. The player can change the selected weapon or inventory item, change control style, change sound and video options, or abort the current mission.

Facts

Quick Pause

Quick Pausing is a method used in GoldenEye 007 to reduce the amount of time in the pause animation. The initial pause sequence takes almost two seconds to stop and bring the watch menu up, and nearly two seconds to exit the watch menu and resume game play. Each subsequent pause, up to a limit, reduces the length of time the pause animation takes. It is not required to fully enter the pause menu to shorten subsequent pauses. Briefly tapping "start" twice to begin and then cancel a pause is referred to as a "quick pause."

A quickpause will undo all acceleration and bring Bond's speed back to 0.

Pause Duration

All pauses are equal in terms of how they affect later pauses.

The amount of lookup or lookdown affects how long it takes to pause. The shortest amount of time spent occurs at +10 degrees or anything lower.

From 0 degrees, the initial pause will take 3.65 seconds. The next pause will take 3.36 seconds. The 3rd pause will take 3.13 seconds. The fourth pause will take 2.90 seconds. The fifth pause will take 2.68 seconds. The sixth pause will take 2.46 seconds. The seventh pause will take 2.41 seconds. After 7 pauses, the amount of time it takes to pause no longer changes.

Pausing goes through various numbered stages:

1. Equips watch (lag) and wait a frame
2. Get within 30 degrees of target angle and wait a frame
3. The arm appears, and a timer runs
4. Zooming into the watch
5. In the pause
6. ... (similar leaving the pause) ...

Stage (1) must take at least 0.28s (17 frames), but the limiting factor is probably the lag from the watch.

Stage (2) has something important. The target angle is 40 degrees below horizontal (-40), so 50 degrees above full lookdown (-90). So you need to be between -70 and -10 at this point.

So full lookdown (-90) is just as bad as looking 10 degrees above the horizon (+10), and likely looses a frame or two. During the lag spike of stage 1 you will jerk your lookup angle so you won't start stage 2 at the lookdown that you started with. Nonetheless I think you'll want to start between -80 and 0 (horizontal) to be sure you aren't losing time. Looking at Karl's 16 compared to Joris / Joakim's he does seem to lose a frame here.

Then for Stages (3) & (4), the "pause speed" comes into play. This is 1.0 for your first pause, and is multiplied by 1.1 for each pause (incl. quickpauses) to a maximum of 1.7. (1.1)^6 = 1.77.. so 6 previous pauses max out this multiplier (I may have said 7 before but Henrik was right with 6). This speed makes (3) & (4) faster as you'd expect but rounding makes things slightly rougher.

(3) takes 0.68s (41 frames) where the speed is 1.0, but 0.66s / speed where the speed is greater than 1.0 (due to a strict inequality) (4) takes 0.75s / speed.

It is then possible to calculate the savings of a quickpause:

# previous pauses	saving on this pause	difference to previous
0	0.00s	0.00s
1	0.27s	0.27s
2	0.47s	0.20s
3	0.70s	0.23s
4	0.90s	0.20s
5	1.10s	0.20s
6+	1.17s	0.07s

As you can see from the 3rd column, because of rounding and little subtleties you don't get the exponential decay of savings that you'd expect.

Worked example: Silo 00A, quickpausing at the start only. The are a total of 5 full pauses (4 plastiques and the camera).

# QPs	Saving	Difference
1	1.10s	1.10s
2	2.00s	1.17 - 0.27s = 0.90s
3	2.70s	1.17 - 0.47s = 0.70s
4	3.17s	1.17 - 0.70s = 0.47s

So the first 2 are certainly worthwhile, and the 3rd if it's fast enough. A 4th would probably take longer than it saved.

External Links

• the-elite facts topic post on quick pausing
• the-elite facts topic post followup
• the-elite facts topic post on level end time save