Personally I'd much rather have a saturday evening :F With a 4pm CET starting point I won't be able to finish before other duties interfere, but I'll probably join in at the start for the fun of it.

I did a practice run of the category. I ignored two characters dying on Providence as if they were successful, for the sake of timing, and finished in 3 hours, 15 minutes. So go by the assumption that that's the least amount of time it could take. 4 hours is more likely.

I might be tempted to join the race.

But the game has enough categories as is, I'm not going to bloat the leaderboard further with arbitrary categories unless they actually get enough competition to warrant it.

You also need all of them to be moving in the same direction, don't you?

I don't mean consistent as in related to real time. Almost no ingame timer is. I mean consistent as in it works the same for everyone. No hardware differences, settings differences, or platform differences will make your ingame timer slower than someone else's. That makes it a consistent and reliable method of timing.

I don't think speedrun.com has support for listing IGT, RTA, Time w/ loads, and Time w/o loads all at once. I guess we could start putting RTA times in the Time w/ loads slot.

Since everyone seems to agree, I'm removing difficulty categories from the ILs.

There is no adrenaline bug. We've seen identical IGT times with and without usage of adrenaline on the same map with the same route. I don't know where this myth came from, maybe it was the case in the past and has since been patched, but I'm absolutely certain that it's not the case at this time.

I don't differentiate between 2, 3, and 4 players because in the majority of the levels, 2 players is optimal. Getting more players will only slow you down by putting more death cams in your run. The one or two exceptions can stay as they are.

I'm half of mind to remove Easy from the IL leaderboard anyway. Brutal is ALWAYS faster, because of the speed multiplier. There are no circumstances where easier mob spawns make an IL faster than the speed multiplier gains. Plus, ILs on anything lower than Brutal are so easy, what's the point?

As for IGT... It's more than standard for games to abide by their in-game timer as long as it's consistent. Not accurate. Consistent. And the Alien Swarm timer is very consistent. Of course, we don't use it for full-game runs, because you also have to do menuing, and make important choices whether switching a weapon is worth losing two seconds to gain it back on the next level.

Sure, speedrunning is about going fast. But how do you define fast? I'd rather define it as running through a level perfectly as proven by the ingame timer, with all the optimizations and abuses related to that, than to who lags the least.

I mean, Goldeneye still clings to IGT and it has far more reason to stop using it. It works as it works.

Oh, and welcome to the competition. TheMaster could take to lose a few records ;P

I can see how it's a different category. I can see it being a neat run.

But it doesn't really need its own leaderboard. Since it's local co-op, you won't get any competition, I don't think any of the other co-op runners will bother traveling to the same place for this one category that's only a little different from online co-op.

If you want to compete, play online co-op. If you want to have fun with local co-op, go have fun, you can submit your runs under co-op if you want to or just post them somewhere else. I'm not gonna make a new leaderboard for it.

Similarly, I'm also not making special leaderboards for more than 2 players, or for IGT%, or for all artifacts. Those are all legitimate categories, but they have no competition.

I don't see a reason to count local coop as a different kind of coop than online coop. Considering you can just use the online coop mode to play locally anyway.

themaster627 doesn't give any results in Steam :(

You should be able to find me (@FollowOnin) and ShadowDraft on steam pretty easily.

Mostly we don't use voice to keep the recordings clean and also because we're lazy, we're well aware of it being technically suboptimal. :3

On Brutal it should definitely spawn. But it only has a certain range. You have to get the elevator bump as fast as possible in order to stay out of his range. It makes it a pretty frustrating IL, but so be it.

e: Mmh. I honestly can't tell if it spawned or not in my IL attempt. I wasn't doing anything special to try to despawn it, I was just confident I was out of its range so I didn't pay any attention to it.

That was the previous record and you can clearly see the mortar bug has spawned and is ignoring me.

I think death abuse can be kept. You can run a No OOB category, that would still change the route pretty significantly in both solo and co-op any% runs. It's pretty easy to see what's OOB or not: standing or walking on top of walls. I don't think the Deima terminal counts, and jumping from in-bounds path to in-bounds path also doesn't count as OOB in any case.

Personally I'm not very interested in arbitrarily going slower just to go through levels "as intended," it doesn't really make the game much harder.

Yeah, any difficulty is allowed in the any% run. Easy tends to be the fastest because it's low risk and also just has a lot less drone spawns and they move slower than you so you're hardly ever harassed by them.

If you can get a good run on Hard or higher and the speed multiplier alone makes the difference, well, good luck to you! :>

I think people went for deathless because the speedrun achievements require all marines to stay alive. But we're not aiming for achievements, we're aiming for lowest time possible.

If you want to go deathless, even in full-game RTA runs, you'd miss out on significant skips, like the co-op cargo elevator oob or the reactor door jump.

I cut the first frame of the loading screen, up to the first frame where the cursor re-appears which is a few frames after the loading screen disappears.

You don't have to cut them all out, you can just count the loading times up and remove it from the end time.

Might be a bit difficult with EU to US latency, but it's always worth a shot.

Most of my and SD's runs are faster than all the 4-man runs on youtube, because we use suicides and they all don't. Syntek is no exception there.

Yeah if you double-tap E and get the instant hack it wastes more time than a quick hack would take. It sucks :(

Stop beating all my ILs, now I have to beat them back! >:P

ShadowDraft and I have only run Alien Swarm at the SourceRuns marathon so far, but it had pretty good reception, I'd say it has a decent shot at getting into a GDQ. It's great to have some proper competition in general, though, can't wait for your co-op runs :)

ShadowDraft and me have put some good effort in the co-op ILs. Most of the maps are optimal to do with 2 players, since more bodies doesn't speed things up, just requires more suiciding, etc.

But there's at least one map that we really need 4 players to get a perfect run. That's SynTek Residential, of course. It's also the single most difficult map, so many parasites, so few ways to control them. Everyone needs to succeed at their job or the run's over.

We've been looking for 2 more players that are up to the challenge for quite a while. So if you're up for it, feel free to leave a note here!

Somehow this never happened to me or Shadowdraft in all the time we grinded out ILs, and then it happens two days in a row to me.

There's a minuscule chance that a terminal hack (the ones at the end of Bay and Timor) starts in a fully completed position. That sounds amazing, it saves so much time!

Problem is, you hit E twice when accessing the terminal to skip the intro screen. But when there is no hack necessary, it doesn't register the second E press as skipping the intro, but as exiting the terminal entirely. So you cancel the critical data download, then you have to activate the terminal a second time, and are forced to sit through the intro before you can click the critical data button again.

If it happens and you're not expecting it, it will kill your run. If you want to get the absolute perfect time, you'd have to reset until you get this, and then not break it. Good luck with that x_X

That has happened to me one time and I never managed to reproduce it. Never managed to figure out if it was useful. Sadly it falls under the IGT% glitch, so it's not useful in runs.