As in, manually counting how long your loading screens are and removing that from your end time. Load times on Source are pretty variable so it's necessary.

There's no autosplitter for Alien Swarm (yet) so it can't be automated.

Super rolling is also possible, though more limited, in singleplayer by keybinding "asw_afk" and using that. However, because the afk mechanic takes a while to remove (about 5 to 6 seconds) you can only super roll once in a row, and it's gonna have to be a solid super roll to be worth the time investment.

So now that this is a thing, time to add a 'solo with bots' category? It's easily faster than co-op. Possibly faster than co-op with bots. It's real funny, but can be really finicky. It completely takes away all the challenge of running the game, and replaces it with swift execution and accuracy of super roll launches. Is that really fun to run?

I added a rules clarification that bots are not allowed in Solo runs. The point of the category is beating the missions with just a single marine; not just a single player. However, I'm open to creating a third category for runs with bots. They can be pretty useful in saving time, though not nearly as much as a second player. And I presume it'd be interesting to run while giving commands to the AI the best you can.

With that set out, there's something that might warrant some discussion.

In Jacob's Rest, the IL table consists solely of Brutal difficulty runs. This is for two reasons. One, Brutal has faster movement speed, duh. Two, it's the nature of IL runs to be much higher difficulty.

From my preliminary exploration, it's looking like Brutal difficulty is extremely difficult if not flat-out impossible for the majority of the new ILs. I haven't succeeded at a single Lana's level (though Maintenance has hope!).

This raises the question: Should the IL table be Brutal only? In theory, lower difficulties are slower due to the movement speed. But it might turn out that, in practice, lower difficulty is faster simply because it's less deadly, allowing for higher risk strats. Do we think this goes against the spirit of the IL table? Or are we just going to let speed speak for itself?

Reactive Drop has a ton of new content. A lot of it is gonna be great fun to route and run. But some of it isn't. Some campaigns are almost impossible to run solo. Most levels are almost impossible to run solo on Brutal. And some things... have changed. That's why I'm going to do the following:

1. Jacob's Rest will NOT be featured. The campaign has been significantly nerfed in Reactive Drop. Run it in the original Alien Swarm and submit times for that.

2. I will add campaign categories and IL tables when they are being worked on and/or run. I'm currently running Lana's Escape and Research 7, so I started by posting those. Note that by table I mean one entire campaign done as ILs, not a couple arbitrary levels.

3. Non-official campaigns, i.e. workshop submissions in the future, may be accepted for leaderboards if runs are done. It's practically a mod pack as is, I don't see why we wouldn't add more.

Because there's so much content in Reactive Drop, you'll have to forgive me for not posting every single campaign and IL table immediately. If you want to feature a run, please post here or contact me anywhere else (SourceRuns discord, Steam, etc).

The main argument Jhobz left out of the above, is that we've come to a point where the mouse wheel lets us do things that are otherwise humanly impossible. We allowed mouse wheel binds to make inputs EASIER. It was for convenience. It allowed a lot of runners to get consistent double-bashes, and later on, consistent door warps.

But now it's being used to do TAS-like Spirit Flame inputs. It's letting people kill enemies without slowing down in a way that's humanly impossible. It's giving Ginso boss cycles that are humanly impossible. Sure, it's just a couple seconds, but you all know how competitive the times are. If you're going for a top spot on the leaderboard, you need every second you can get. That makes mouse wheel binds mandatory, doing something that was never intended, and we never intended when we ruled in favor of them.

Very old glitch.

There's a pit under that pusher. It pushed you inside, then you respawned inside of the pusher. While inside any form of collision, you ignore all other collision, so you could dash through that wall.

Not limited.

It's far less pointless and arbitrary than a midas speedrun, that's for sure.

Seeded runs would pretty much defeat the point of speedrunning a game like this.

Major glitches: Menu Storage, which leads to Save Anywhere and Teleport Anywhere Keystone duping Door warping

These glitches all abuse glitches caused by mishaps in core game logic (i.e. how it treats pauses, and how it treats loading/unloading assets). Most other glitches are caused by unintended game mechanics, or intentional game mechanics being used in unforseen ways. I.e. save dropping is all intended mechanisms, though the result is obviously unintended.

Not technically a major glitch, but probably worth banning: Double bashing

Removing double bashing makes some of the harder strategies slower but more palpable. It's worth asking ourselves, though. Double bashing is hard, but is it harder than doing Sorrow Bash any other way? Does that make it worth banning?

I stick to my opinion that "clipping" should be allowed, while "OOB" should not. OOB areas are characterized by the void, the lack of background assets, and the fact that saving inside the void leads to an unusable save file (when trying to reload). It's a pretty clear distinction to me.

It'd allow the boulder clip, the clip in ginso, and possibly some other route changes. It's not hard to investigate found skips to determine if they're OOB or not.

Fully allowing OOBs would make the category just any% with more busywork, you'd still use the ginso>horu oob to dash straight to the end.

You could just make a strawpoll for "Would you run any% no warps, or 7 assets, or neither?"

Does it really take half a week to verify a 3 minute run? :|

Door warps are definitely a glitch.

We should probably have a vote on whether rocket dashing counts as a glitch or not. My theory is that it uses the mechanics of bash gliding, which are fully intended, in a very unintended way. But it doesn't really make much sense and its interaction with game physics is so weird.

Outside voice says your choice is between any% no wrong warp, or any% no duping, as separate categories. I'm pretty sure people are going to want a run in between any% and all missions, you'll just have to figure whether that run should have duping or not.

I know Adam would love to go back to the pre-duping days.

While I don't at all care about glitchless categories, I condone the above ruleset as a fair and not entirely arbitrary set of limitations. '-'b

https://docs.google.com/document/d/182rRKGZ2AjzzpEeyg1dq8svNNFFM2tev9CTTorJBSG4

If you use Turn time to go to the underpass, you can't immediately use it because of the cooldown, so you're kinda making it harder on yourself that way.