Friday, January 2, 2009

Community Map: L4D Farmhouse Defense

Well, it hasn't taken long for community "mods" and maps to make their way on to the Left for Dead scene, despite the lack of an official SDK from Valve (which is expected "soon").

A prime example is Zawbie's map called Farmhouse Defense, where the survivors must simply survive for 20 minutes.

The map has a great "Blood Harvest" feel and the survivors can build make shift barricades to help block the doors from the zombie horde ...

There is also a secret built in to the map that I have not yet discovered and (sadly) a couple of texture glitches with the kitchen counter-top and the conservatory glass, but other-wise the map is top notch!


There is however some tweaking in the console that is required to get the map functioning with a nice onslaught of zombies.

To play the map you need to copy the .bsp and the .nav files to C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead\left4dead\maps (assuming of course that steam is insatlled on your C:\).

Farmhouse-defence.bsp

The map does not come with a .nav file and so you can either generate your own or download that one that I generated.

Farmhouse-defense.nav

Or you can generate your own .nav as follows via the console:

sv_cheats 1
nav_edit 1
nav_mark_walkable
nav_generate


wait until this is complete and then type:

nav_analyze

wait until this is complete and then type:

nav_edit 0
sv_cheats 0


Now restart the map and the survivors and zombies will work, it's just that you will not experience a whole lot of zombies in the 20 minutes that you can play. Entering the following commands in the console should do the trick:

sv_cheats 1
director_panic_forever 1
director_force_panic_event


You can read a full discussion of this great map at this thread. Obviously props to Zawbie for making the map and to l4d_JD and DeAdly for telling us how to make the .nav file and spawn more zombies!

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