Hey everyone,

We've made the decision to start requiring demos for all submissions instead of the current top X standard starting on January 1st, 2022 (0:00 NYC timezone). We are also going to be re-banning changelevel on L4D1 v1.0 on this date as well (more on that below).

The main reason for doing this is so that we can start releasing various cheats features in the speedrun plugin (SST) such as autojump (for use in the bhop script category extensions) that has actual clientside prediction (so jumps aren't laggy in singleplayer or co-op). In addition, SST will also add the ability to toggle sv_cheats in singleplayer/co-op lobbies for practice. The move to demos being required in addition to video for all runs was going to happen at some point, so we figured we might as well do it sooner rather than later.

To be clear: this does not mean that using the plugin is required yet, however it's highly recommended because it makes recording demos for full-game runs much easier (in the event you need to use the main menu or map command to switch campaigns). Currently, with the plugin you still need to manually start recording demos, but after that it only stops if you run the command "stop" or if you restart your game. Without the plugin, demo recording stops any time you create a new server (i.e. going to the main menu or using "map" command mid-run).

For L4D1 v1.0, I strongly advise that you use the plugin so that you don't have to manually restart demo recording under a new name for each campaign switch (due to "map" command usage) now that changelevel will be banned again. Changelevel was temporarily unbanned when the demo rule first came into effect so that people would not lose time from having to restart demo recording on each campaign change (this was before the plugin was released). Now that this is no longer an issue, we are banning it again as there could be unintended side effects of using changelevel that makes the speedrun illegitimate (as seen in later versions of L4D1, and all versions of L4D2).

Once again, installation instructions are given on the plugin download page ( https://mikes.software/sst ). Make sure to use the -insecure launch option or you risk getting VAC banned when loading the plugin and connecting to a VAC secured server. If your old version installs are current, they will have game-params.txt in the base folder - simply just write -insecure in that file and always launch the game with run.bat. If not, ping me in the speedrunning Discord server and I'll send you the two files needed for this. You can verify that this worked by loading up singleplayer or a map server, and writing "status" in the console - it should state that the server is running in insecure mode.

If anything is unclear or you need help using the plugin, feel free to ping me (or mike :tf:) in #new-player-questions. I'll try to make a video at some point this week that covers this stuff in a little more detail but most people shouldn't have any troubles just following the instructions on the download page.