A couple of things I'd like to know before hosting my first co-op game.

What happens when one of the players triggers the exit? Are the other players forced to exit with them, or do they each have to trigger it themselves? Does it depend on the source port? I ask because I'm a completionist and I wouldn't want to miss a chance to get some secrets because a friend of mine didn't realize that an innocuous looking switch or linedef was actually the exit.

I'll be honest with y'all the only reason the topic title says "a couple of things" is because I'm pretty sure there were other things I wanted to ask about but now I don't remember but I figured if I remembered them I can come back here and ask and then the title will be more accurate.

Hello,

When one player exits the map they exit it for all players. There are patch wads that take advantage of ACS scripting which can enforce 100% kills and probably extend to 100% secrets (though some maps mostly from the past are known to have inaccessible secrets) before the map can be exited.

We've used them online recently, here (see the wads list). 

Note: In this case the exits may trigger immediately when all monsters are killed, but I wouldn't be surprised if it can be adjusted to allow an exit after that, but only when the player then attempts to exit normally.

Being a completionist when playing co-op seems fairly bizarre to me because once you finish a map you are not even given the intermission screen you get in single player which lists the total amounts of secret founds or items picked up. The only thing you're given is the total amount of kills between all players but this does not even include the total amount of kills /in/ the level (i.e. it won't tell you if you've missed any monsters).

If you really want to play the game in a completionist manner, I'm afraid co-op is not really for you.

In ZDaemon during intermission, monsters killed under any circumstance / total does show on the scoreboard along with secrets found/total, which also appears during intermission. There's also a breakdown per player underneath the totals which has the inclusion of damage dealt - I thought Zandronum would show all killed monsters and secrets as well?

The source port I actually had in mind for all this was GZDoom. It seemed simple enough for me to send the other players a .zip file with everything they need, including a .bat along the lines of "gzdoom -blah blah -join (my ip)" for them to click. The ACS thing you linked to seems to work with it but it doesn't seem to have the exact kind of function I'm looking for and I don't really have the knowledge of ACS necessary to turn it into what I want, assuming what I want is at all possible.

The reason I wanted to do a completionist co-op run was because I was going through a completionist single player run of Memento Mori and it was becoming more and more apparent to me how much of the wad's ingenuity I was missing out on in single player. But if it's really so much more complicated than I think then I'm tempted to call the whole thing off, which is a shame because the other players did seem pretty excited for this.

If you're just playing with another person you can just ask for them to wait for you to exit instead of them, since you'll be the one taking up time. Seems like a waste of time for the other player though.

In that case I'm not too sure mate but if you intend to use the great GZ, you might want to give Game Connector a go for setting up a game. You point out to gzdooms path and create a room, with your pals veggie playing. Dead handy. If you just need to know the kills and secrets left in the maps rather than enforce them that's an ACS job gzdoom will be more than capable of, but does it not show up on the automap? Can't remember heh.

Turn FRIENDLY FIRE OFF, you will regret it if you don't.