Good job man, I mainly run this game in coop but I'll be sure to work on the Solo runs too.

Regarding Coop RTA our runs are all pretty much outdated (except for Landing Bay) now but as soon as we've improved our times I'll be sure to upload them as well.

Congrats on taking the game to AGDQ! And yes my buddy and I are ready to compete in RTA. ;)

That's actually why I started counting at the first frame I saw movement, but if you workaround works consistently then it should be fine. :)

Difference in framerate could alter the times slightly but it would be incredibly improbably that two runs would be so close anyway so we probably shouldn't worry about it; we can just count the number of frames and then divide this number by our framerate (to get the time in seconds). Btw, I record at 60fps too so there won't be any discrepancy. ^^

Your rules about the start/stop times seems pretty consistent, I'm okay with that. ;)

My bad, it's pretty late over here and I didn't get that's what you meant.

For counting frames I've always followed the SDA rules meaning that the timer starts when you gain control and stops when you lose it. So basically I always try to locate the very last frame before there is ANY kind of movement at the beginning and stop counting when the characters stop moving in the safe room at the end (there's always a clear moment when you can see your character stopped in its tracks).

Sounds good to me.

EDIT: I'm not sure we should disallow stims, they will reflect badly on your time anyway but it could still be useful from time to time so no reason to ban it altogether imo (just in case we ever find a place where we absolutely have to use it, that way we don't need to alter the rules).

Hmm.. I did not think of that. I'm not really sure because when you get the instant hack you don't even see the intro which could mean that the game checks the position of the 1s before checking whether or not they are going in the same direction. We'd have to try a considerable amount of times and get some tangible statistics to make sure. In the end it's way too improbable (imo) to rely on, unfortunately as it can save a whole lot of time.

The math behind the Instant Hacks is actually pretty simple. Consider that every column has 8 possible positions for the 1 to be in and you want all four of them to be in the same position. There's 1 chance in 4096 (8^4) for that to happen if the 1s are placed at random. Now consider that this can happen at any 8 position and you get 8 chances out of 4096 which is 1/512.

I guess the developers forgot to put a fail-safe preventing that to happen. ^^

The adrenaline glitch may have been patched, I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't really change the fact that the adrenaline slows the game down considerably and while I concede it's necessary to use it at specific times (to perform hacks or other things like that), I don't see how we could accept a run where the players are constantly using adrenaline to take a perfect trajectory etc. because it goes against the very idea of a speedrun in my mind.

And that's why I have a problem with IG time. Like you said, IG Time is used in game where it is consistent (meaning that it's extremely close to what a RT would give minus the loadings) but it's not in Alien Swarm. A run (single map) could be almost twice as long in real time compared to IGT which makes absolutely no sense to me. Plus, IGT is becoming more and more rare because it's rarely accurate (in this particular case we can't be more precise than a second which is huge considering Alien Swarm's runs are pretty short). Consider the GQDs events, SRL Races or even SDA : the Real Time always takes precedence in importance.

Although I can understand why IGT can be meaningful and I would propose the following compromise : couldn't it be possible to show both times on the leaderboards? That way people can decide for themselves what they prefer and put the runs in the appropriate order.

As for the difficulty setting if you say Brutal is always faster then why not remove the difficulty setting altogether like I was saying? That way runners can do as they prefer and if they're faster with a different difficulty setting they are still in the same leaderboard so other runners can adjust (after all this may vary from map to map you can never be sure).

Last thing: I understand what you're saying about the number of players but if you decide to remove the difficulty setting altogether I think it could still be a nice idea because there ARE a few maps that are faster when you're playing with 4 players and in that case that wouldn't be fair for teams of 2 or 3.

Thanks. We're a little rusty but we're getting up to speed with the new routes. ;)

@TheMaster : Sorry I didn't see your message when I wrote mine, but as you can see we agree on almost everything. ^^

Hi everyone !

I started speedrunning it (with Xunkar) 3-4 years ago and stopped after having reached what we believed to be close-to-perfect times with the routes we used at the time. I'm really glad that people have started speedrunning this game again... Unfortunately there are a few problems with the current rules and categories.

First of all, there is absolutely no reason to use the IG timer as the game allows the players to use items that slow time which means that runs can have an incredibly slower IG time while being 2 to 3 times longer in Real Time and we can all agree that speedrunning is about going fast, not making the game THINK that you're going fast. IG time is only used with games in which it is reliable and cannot be altered (and it's only used because it eliminates differences in loading times, which is pretty much irrelevant here).

Plus, and this has been known for a while in the Alien Swarm speedrunning community, on top of making for a slower and irrelevant time, "Adrenaline Abuse" can actually gllitch the IG time to make it excessively lower than what you would get doing the EXACT same route without using the adrenaline. This thing is completely broken and this is why we should only care about Real Time.

Second of all (this is far less important but needed to be mentionned anyway), there are two obvious flaw in the way the categories are made : the first one is that it does not differentate between 2, 3 or 4 players in coop which seems pretty illogical considering the number of players changes your options and routing. More importantly : two players (or three) who do not have the option to play with more people shouldn't see their times ignored just because of that.

The other flaw, minor this one, is that it is limited to only Easy and Brutal. I see where this is coming from but in this game each difficulty setting could make the route different and interesting. In my opinin we should either add every difficulty setting or just remove them altogether and just focus on getting the quickest time (what should be our ultimate priority, not discriminate by a number of criteria that have no real basis).

Anyway that's all I had to say about all this, I hope you take it under consideration and will then love to come here again to share our runs (and a few guides we've written along the way).