Overview
In this guide, you will be taught how to use speedrunning strats, from beginner-friendly to outright confusing, just to screw with randoms in coop matches as you please. Some of the contents are: Bhoping, Circle Jumping, Crouch Flying and how to use those to achieve the funny with 10 yro kids in coop.
An Introduction
If you are reading this, you are interested on how to be le epic troll in a decade old game, and if so, you came to the right place. You see, over the years Speedrunning Tech has evolved for Portal 2, with new things being discovered and new routes created, but we don’t need any of that right now since all we will focus on is on making kids jump into pits after seeing you gracefully circle jump over it.
Next off, we will set up most of the stuff we are doing today.
Setting Up
First, we are going to mess with something that is scary for starters, but as you use it you will prefer to chat here rather than in actual game chat: The Developer Console.
To open it, you will need to go to settings and under keyboard and mouse settings and turn “Allow Developer Console” on.
This is where the magic begins.
The next thing is optional, but very helpful if you do it. You can install SAR (Source Auto Record), a plugin for Portal 2 that has A LOT of functionality for Speedrunning, and in our case, to train some tech. To install it, follow these steps. If you don’t want it, skip to the next section.
First, download at .dll file in this GitHub repo[github.com], and put it in your portal2 folder. This folder can be found in “C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonPortal 2portal2”, or “<wherever you installed steam>SteamsteamappscommonPortal 2portal2”.
Next off, just go in-game and type “plugin_load sar” in the console I just taught you how to get, and you are good to go!
Bhopping Basics
Now I will teach you how to bunny hop, or in short bhop. This is an advanced technique in Portal 2 Speedrunning that is very helpful for our cause, since you can go at basically double your regular speed if you do it right. The side-effects of bhopping can include:
- Being called a hacker noob
- Being called a macro noob
- Being called a noob in general
- Making your teammates jump uncontrollably trying to imitate you.
Now, if you are a source veteran and know exactly what bhopping is, don’t be afraid, bhopping in Portal 2 is MUCH easier than in games such as TF2 or CS:GO, as it is way more effective than there.
The reason Bhopping in P2 is easier is because in other multiplayer games it was nerfed to avoid players abusing it too much, so there your speed gets reduced back to 300 once you hit the ground with more than 300. But it is different in here.
Firstly, there is no such cap for speed. You can zoom through places as you wish. Secondly, the speed you can gain is technically infinite, though you won’t be able to control it over 300, but that isn’t really a problem for beginners.
The juice for bunny hopping is simple: You need to jump as soon as you hit the ground, and use air strafing to gain ridiculous speeds. Now, it might sound hard to jump so perfectly and still be able to strafe, but fear not, as you can use your ebic haxer skillz to bind jumping to the mouse wheel. Basically, this lets you send a bunch of inputs in a short period, in this case around when you hit the ground. This will let you hop nearly frame-perfectly, if not perfectly.
To do this shenanigan, type in the Developer Console “bind mwheelup +jump”. This basically lets you scroll up to jump. Now, it is out of preference to do “bind mwheeldown +jump” instead of up, or even both if you want. Now all you need to do is scroll up/down when you are close to hitting the ground to spam jump and do a coolio bhop.
Now, this only lets you retain your speed by not losing it to ground friction, so to gain it you will need one more trick: Air Strafing.
This is a technique in source games that basically makes you gain extra speed by pressing the a/d keys on your keyboard and moving your mouse to that direction. To see if it actually works, do “sar_hud_velocity 2” if you have sar on or “cl_showpos 1” in the console to see how fast you go. Walking straight forward is your usual 175, strafing gives you extra speed.
Now, you do lose this speed with friction nearly instantly, so to keep the train going you can do the bunny hopping I talked about to keep stacking speed. It might be super hard at first since you need to manage 2 new things at once, but trust me, after some training you can do it. This also brings us to the last topic of this section: Bhop maps.
This is a cool list of some[docs.google.com]. Have fun.
Spicy Jumps: Circle Jumping and How to Do It
If you got here, then congrats, you really want to mess with kids. Now, the hardest thing you will do here, probably: Circle Jumping
As confusing as the name is, no you don’t draw a circle on your screen and jump, it is much harder than that. It basically consists of using advanced strafing to gain ridiculous speeds from a stand still before a sequence of bhops.
It is an advantage in coop because you can do some tricks such as ditching pinging Glados for the Portal Gun completely and just yoinking over the gap like a madman. But before you can do that, you will need to train A LOT.
The optimal circle jump is achieved “When one leaves behind all material implications and spends unholy amounts of time in a game you shoot holes at walls exactly to not shoot holes at walls”. Before you can circle jump, you will need to train it for 10s of hours. You need to know that this is a rite of passage from a walking peasant to a God-Tier flying machine, so it IS very hard to execute at first, but will become easy enough once you train it.
I will just link the best tutorials on it I found online, but currently they don’t show up too often. I would recommend joining the Portal 2 Speerunning Discord and getting into the Bhop chat, asking around, taking feedback. Circle Jumps ARE hard, but after you know what to do, they get easy. Tutorials are the following:
2013 Beauty
Blenderiste’s Bequest
And zMg being far too helpful recording this for me
Portal 2 Speedrunning Discord Invite[discord.gg]
BONUS: This is an edited version of it, and I finally managed to explain how to circle jump in text.
1. Walk forward sightly, just for a moment; 2. Do a strafe to the right/left for a moment, just like how Blenderiste does it; 3. At the peak of your strafe (which is the part that takes loads of practice), jump and strafe to the other side, just like how Blenderiste does it. Congrats, you just caused grueling nightmares in Portal 2 Devs.
Crouch Fly Glitch, aka “OMG NOCLIP HAXER NOOB”
This is a good one. Whenever someone new in the scene goes to Twitch and sees people using this in the ending of the speedrun they go like “Hey guys can someone call the mods I think he is using cheats”. No worries, it is normal.
This is the kind of thing you can find tutorials online pretty easily on, so I will mostly just focus on common misconceptions.
Crouch Fly Glitch, or CFG is basically abusing Valve’s programmer’s by messing with their spaghetti monsters in the funnel code. It works like this: You need to have a funnel holding you, and when you are absolutely still, crouch. Then, after being still again (in the case of upwards-aiming funnels), just vibe out of it and ta-da, you are a wizard harry.
It is kind of hard to explain on text, so here you go, HCM, our lord and savior, is back at it. Brewery boy made that big boy tutorial with A LOT of cool strats that I will not cover here since they are not so useful in coop official maps, where most randoms play anyway.
Now, some myth-busting: To initiate a CFG, you can be either in a horizontal funnel or one going up, if you are going down it doesn’t work. Also, sometimes the thing doesn’t work, so you may need to jump for it to work. Also, to get it done you cannot have jumped into it, nor have fallen into it. You need to have walked to the funnel, or else it just nopes you.
One place this is useful is in Double Bounce, which not only let’s you do it solo, but also skip the entire puzzle. You can just use the vibe tubes to fly from the last platform to the exit, and if you are feeling epic just do a circle jump to the first one.
A Quickie on Portal Bumping (Only useful in community chambers).
This is not used at all in the main coop courses as Valve was aware of it and avoided it at all costs. However, the community is not so good at map making as they are, so you can just skip entire puzzles with this.
The way to do it is to: 1. Shoot a portal next to a thin surface, such as glass or even retractable panels; 2. Shoot the other portal right next to it, on the side the wall is; 3. Well done, you’ve just broken the map little jimmy spent 10 hours making. Feel proud.
Stealing Cubes From Glados
If you didn’t know, Fizzlers destroy cubes. Which kinda sucks, since sometimes you just want to bring your friend with you in the other parts of the chamber. Then fear not, you can simply steal them.
With revolutionary techniques of crouching-and-looking-down™, you can bring cubes with you and ignore the fizzler. As stated, while holding a cube just look down and crouch while going through the cube yoinker, and it will ignore the fact that you clearly have a cube under your shirt.
Note, this doesn’t work with spheres, but you can do it with cubes and be able to complete other places quicker.