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!

I would have to ask my friend about that. I am not sure how interested he is in running outside of practice for a possible GDQ run, though.

On a side note, did you see our four-man run on SynTek a long time ago? The coordination was quite nice, although now that shield bug trick to get to the elevator quickly would blow the time away. Still, for a full, OOB-less run I'm not sure it could get better.

I'm the upper-left "ooh that was nice" guy and the friend I am running with now is upper-right. Notice how the elevator button lights up just as lower-left gets there. Good stuff!

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.

Giving my life for the run is what I do.

The Residential 4 player run looks quite smooth though have to agree with that.

Yeah, back then we had never considered using deaths. I guess it didn't really feel like a completion with them, but it makes sense to have a category that utilizes them since it does fulfill the map completion requirements. Even now, I would wonder if there should be a deathless category, which could be the 100% category considering, well, 100% of your teammates are making it out alive. Would make the run far more challenging too. If we ended up getting lucky enough to be accepted into GDQ, a deathless run is our goal.

Not sure on what the ping is from Netherlands to the east coast of the US, but I know somebody in Munich that usually gets very low or just under 100 ping to servers very close to me. Also, this game is very strange in how it handles servers since create game is actually using dedicated servers (even solo!), while using the map command from the menu launches a local server. All of their dedicated servers right now seem awful and very laggy. Figuring out the map command launches a listen server did wonders.

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.

The cargo elevator OOB would actually still be possible if one player ditches to the left when the elevator starts and the other player goes over the railing. The reactor door as well would still be a big time saver because you can hit the button at the end door much faster by getting there using OOB.

Hmm. It would change Cargo, Rydberg, Sewer (probably), and Timor.

Actually, what about an additional proposal, because I am really thinking the one category uses so much abuse a balance would be nice. How about a 100% no abuse, discounting both death abuse and OOB abuse since it really does break some maps pretty badly and I wouldn't mind seeing the lower part of Rydberg again. That would change...

No barrel strats on Landing.

No outside of the elevator on Cargo. Not that the ride is particularly difficult on Easy, but this would be a bigger deal if the category was run on higher difficulties.

Deima remains unchanged, I guess? It's not actually out of the map, only on top of the console is maybe questionable. Might want to consider any part not a walkable "path" not allowed, which may discount the console.

Rydberg obviously changes significantly. Finally have to hack again!

SynTek mostly unchanged, but no shieldbug strats on Brutal, and Insane if it's on that difficulty too.

Sewer unchanged, although a death might be faster with one player using that ledge skip.

Timor changed a bit and the danger is added back to the tech's return trip. Jump to the bridge questionable? But you can definitely argue that is a walkable path, the gate just isn't open yet.

Note that I am thinking of this for a full run. Probably would be too convoluted to also have this for the individual levels so it isn't necessary there.

Thoughts? I wish there were more people to run this game, it would be nice to have more ideas around. If only Valve had created a sequel...

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.

To return to the topic of 4-player co-op, now that I have had the chance to play with and talk with mr.deagle about it he's up for trying at least SynTek to see what we can get.

I noticed in your videos that you guys are using text to communicate in-game. Do you or have you used any voice stuff to communicate? We use Mumble frequently and would like to all communicate on our server there.

You can add me on Steam if you want to talk about it more, themaster627.

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

Hmm, I may have gotten it wrong again... that is my account name and I think that has not shown in the past as well. I can never remember which they go by when searching for people. I'll just add you now, then.

For the voice, yeah, we definitely couldn't do it without voice communication ourselves, we've been using it for our group for many years now. I actually don't see a way to not record the audio stream of certain applications when recording with OBS so I don't have much choice or I may have considered disabling the voices. But, I don't know, it adds flair to the video anyway? It works alright I think.

Is it possible to record a demo file for a clean video? Because I have no clue either how to split audio and prefer just game audio unless it has to be commentated over (like a tutorial or something similar).

We actually already tried that and the demos completely break once a death happens. Something about the slow motion is captured really badly when the gameplay is played back, it will return view to the player recording but then everything moves in ridiculously slow motion and might be stopped completely. I even tried using the recording tools to skip to the tick after the death happens figuring if it doesn't play through the death it will be alright but it was still broken. Unfortunate.

We had demo problems five years ago as well but it wasn't as bad since we weren't using death abuse back then. Everything rubberbands when Adrenaline is used but it clears up once the effect wears off. You can see that in most of our old recordings that has any hacking.