Synergy: Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary Update

Greetings Rebels!

Its been a long time. The last official Synergy update was way back in 2015!
Over the years we've been working in the `development` branch, which has had a lot of work done to it.
Due to the release of Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary update, we are prompted to release this sooner than we've planned as to resolve numerous breaking changes from Half-Life 2's recent large update.

We're happy to announce that Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary Update is now supported and we thank you for your patience.

Patch Notes

• Support for the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update!
• Fixed numerous crashes like the infamous "unconnected" player bug and player models jittering.
• Significantly improved overall performance, especially with large player counts.
• Rebalanced numerous, rather absurd, map-specific difficulty spikes in the Half-Life 2 campaign.
• Fixed SteamVR starting when changing settings.
• Initial official native support for Steamdeck (UI still leaves a lot to be desired).
• Fixed various HUD issues introduced by Half-Life 2's Steamdeck update.
• Official support for Linux Dedicated Servers.
  • Requires steam client installed (e.g. `sudo apt install steam`).

• Added support for saved games.
  • Host can load a saved game and friends who join will be restored if they were connected at the time of the save.
  • Works on dedicated servers.

• Various map-specific (EDT) improvements throughout the Half-Life 2 campaigns.
• Fixed many level transition issues, particularly on backtracking maps.
• Steam Cloud support for settings and saved games.
• Steam Workshop support for dedicated servers.
• Steam Rich Presence support.
• Enabled spectator mode via console (jointeam 1)
• Players will spawn in a vehicle on airboat levels (coast levels TBD).
• Vehicles will no longer stop when the game autosaves.
• Added more player voice command lines from ep1.
• Fixed player viewmodels being invisible under some circumstances.
• Optimized networking for some entities like the Airboat.
• 'Use' key will now go through players to avoid blocking anything.
• Removed cheat flag from some useful commands/cvars.
• Added game content rating to unblock Synergy in Germany.
• Increased maximum player support from 10 to 32.
• Other changes lost in time.

Previous Version

If you run into any regressions from the previous version (56.16) or bugs in general, please report them to our public issue tracker. Also feel free to make some noise on our Discord.
The previous version of Synergy is still available on its own Steam beta branch: `56.16`. Please report a bug if you feel the need to rollback. If you do rollback, also set Half-Life 2's beta to `steam_legacy` to make everything work as it did before Half-Life 2's 20th Anniversary update.

Our Next Steps

One feature we were planning to have complete before releasing this update was automatic networking and Steam friend lobbies. This feature would remove the requirement of the host needing to port forward their local (or dedicated) server so their friends can join. This has been a large hindrance for those who simply want to play Half-Life 2 with friends out of the box and not deal with troubleshooting networks. Such a feature is a very high priority to us and we hope to have it ready in the near future.
There are likely other issues introduced in the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary Update so we're keeping an eye on those as well.

Special thanks to IntriguingTiles, Balim and modi for helping with testing, reporting and fixing various issues over the last several months.

There is still much work to do but thanks for raising your crowbars with us over the years and we hope to see you again in City 17!