I was testing the possibility of activating generators early in level 5, and came up with a solid "maybe".

You can hit the generators from a pretty great distance, but as far as I can tell, you need to get quite close to them before they will load. If anyone can activate a generator with some setup like the ones I use in the video below ¤without¤ approaching the generator to load it first, there could be some extreme time saves available for glitchless runs.

Assuming the generators are indeed unloaded until you approach them, it may still be of value to figure out exactly when they load, and potentially try to snipe them from there.

The youtube description has timestamps leading you to relevant times (nobody needs to see 5 minutes of me shooting nothing before explicitly loading the generator, then doing the same thing and hitting it).

Interesting o/. I tried a little without much success, until at the end, i did a little test and i succeed to activate the gen you consider the first one, from the top of the horizontal jumpad at the gen 3 (where you come from in ng glitchless), here is a video. I don't know if a gen loaded stay loaded forever ? I'll try to the normal ng route to see if i can redo it.

Also, as i'm playing in very low. You can easily see when the textures will (de)pop. And when you aim precisely, the textures will automatically pop, but i don't know if they have a physical existence or not, it seems so. The generators can be see from pretty far away too but targeting them generally do nothing, so that's why i'm surprised about by random try at the end of my first tests.

• For gen 3, i think we don't need to cross the gravity field with spinning lasers, we probably can activate it from the platform right before, maybe with a rocket jump then blasting or something. I was able to activate the 2 blocks which let us target the gen behind.
• Gen 2 : The loading limit for the gen seems to be on the last gravity platform, that's where textures (de)popped at the top. Edit : Well, it seems generators are coded differently than textures. You really need to get in a somehow small range. Here's another exemple. Despite textures load way before, i wasn't able to power the gen before i was close enough to load it first. Atm, one way i see this useful is if by any mean you fail to activate the gen near the end, you can probably activate it from very far away, without having to do the route again (Edit² : Yes, we can). But yeah now we need to know when we can quick respawn, and we can't know that with the textures unfortunately.

I couldn't seem to activate them via the setups that seemed to work for Sigma [aim / standing positions] when I hadn't gotten within a decent range of them. What's interesting is that the 'first' generator [the one after the dash-from-slope area] can be 'sniped' from where the gravity field is, perhaps the generator spawning is tied to Line of sight as well as distance, if not just line of sight?

I know this because by super dash-boosting off the moving jumppad below the generator, I was able to get extremely close to the generator, within a few meters, but not actually seeing the generator, so if it spawns based purely on proximity, I should have been able to activate it. Despite shooting at multiple locations near the generator, I was unable to activate it, despite having got within a few meters or so of the generator, without actually having seen it.