L4D2: Interview with Chet Faliszek about the Hard Rain Campaign

An old but good video about Hard Rain, with a little bit of scavenge mode thrown in at the end for good measure ...

Left 4 Dead 2 - Guardin' Gnome Achievement

Dark Carnival just got more fun!



Everyone in the group gets this achievement (so long as one of you makes it into the helicopter with the gnome).

Looks like a nice achievement to try and get!

Left 4 Dead 2 DLC - The Passing - Spring 2010.

The newly announced DLC for Left 4 Dead 2 is called "The Passing" and is due out in Spring of 2010.

The survivors from the original Left 4 Dead will be reunited with those from the sequel in a small town in rural Georgia, with players controlling the L4D2 characters.

There will be "something new for every game mode plus a new uncommon common and weaponry."

It will be interesting to see exactly what this new DLC offers and how much it will cost.

Souce: left4dead411

Left 4 Speed 2 (Parody)

Just as good as the first one in it's own right I think!



Enjoy!

Shaky Hallows: One to look out for ...

I must confess that I do not know much about Shaky Hallows other than the videos that have been posted to YouTube, but what I have seen is pretty impressive!

When this comes together this will be much more than your regular custom map - there's a flamethrower (on rails), a train crash, and news reports on TV to name a few. There's even a turret system that will shoot you if you stray outside of playable areas of the map ... and a very nice looking forest so far ...

The intro to some of these videos is very long, so don't let this put you off viewing the actual content. It's worth it!

Shaky Hallows is full of promise, but I have no idea when it will actually be finished.

10 Ways to Annoy in Left 4 Dead

This should probably be renamed how to get kicked in less than 10 seconds ... some of these are funny to watch on youtube, but annoying as hell when some lame griefer ruins the game ...

Still if you have four more minutes of your life to waste ... here it is:

Resident Evil - Last Escape (Beta 1.0)

Outatime has obviously been working hard on recreating Resident Evil's Racoon City for Left 4 Dead - and it clearly shows in this Beta 1.0 release of this map.

This map is a complete rebuild of an earlier map and was started 6 months ago ... it's in Beta, so it's not perfect, and players with lower end PCs will likely experience lower frame-rates.

Having said that this map looks really good and will only improve with further development. I quite liked the early "hastily" thrown together version that this grew out of - and as you can see that this version has been nicely crafted and put together so far ... great work Outatime!

I am sure that there will be many people keen to watch the development and completion of this campaign.

You can download the map from here: http://re3.ninthworld.net/?p=64

This youtube video shows the Beta release off in third person view:

Unrest Mod - 8 v 8 Versus!

Unrest looks like an interesting Mod, not just because 16 players can play 8 v 8 in Versus mode, but also because the abilities of the special infected have been tweaked to make it harder for the survivors to get to the safe house.

Unrest was created by EVOL, the creator of the Hunter Games mod.

Here's what you need to know:

* Zombie hordes are 50 in size instead of 30.

* Smoker tongue range increased 25%

* Smoker pull is almost instantaneous

* Survivors being dragged accelerate much faster (other survivors cannot catch up to them, but are instead forced to attack the smoker)

* Better chance of pulling a survivor who is running around a corner

* Incapped survivors can crawl

* Hunter claw does 8 instead of 6

* Max hunter pounce damage is 50 instead of 25. This scales correctly, so what is normally a 20 damage pounce is still a 20 damage pounce, not 40. For more than 25, you'll have to go pretty high.

* You can have to up 3 smokers and 2 boomers. This way, the survivors never know what they are up against. And, in 8v8 games, this equates to pure chaos.

* Tanks are 7% faster.

* When there are more than 6 survivors, when a tank comes, a second one will immediately spawn. Both will be controlled by human players (no AI).

The combination of these changes should give a faster paced and shorter game for the survivors - which should be a lot of fun playing in Versus mode. So if you get beaten to a pulp as the survivors just make sure that you return the favour when you are playing as the infected ...

There is a Steam Group to advertise Unrest games to get groups of 16 players together here: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/UNREST?

In the meantime check out the Unrest gameplay below:





You can get the latest release from the Steam Group page - the current link is here: http://huntergames.org/phocadownload/unrest-1.0.3.zip

Community Map - Death Aboard IV - The Ship

This, the 4th map the campaign (by Ditpus) takes place on a ship.

The angle that the boat is resting on gives this map a disorienting feel, and again this looks like another great map in this campaign ...

This just leaves The Lighthouse as the finale.



Download: http://l4dmapdb.com/campaign:death-aboard

Extract the files and copy files to: C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead\left4dead\

Open the Console and type:

map:l4d_deathaboard04_ship

Links:
Death Aboard III - Docks
Death Aboard II - PrisonYard
Death Aboard I - Prison

Video by Zilla422.

Community Map - Back to School - I - Forest

Forest (by Fake100) is the first map in the Back to School Campaign.

- Forest (by fake100)
- Train station (by romasm)
- Town (by romasm)
- Road to school
- Escape

Download the map from here: http://www.l4dmaps.com/details.php?file=76

Extract the files and copy them to: C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead\left4dead\maps

open the Console and type:

map:l4d_backtoschool01_forest.bsp

Nicely designed map, great start to the campaign!

Commnity Map - Red Sea - I - The Roofs - Beta 3.5

The Roofs is the first map in the Red Sea Campaign by SilverRagout:

*The Roofs
*The Metro, school, theater
*Port
*The ship
*Finale on deck

Download the map from here:http://www.l4dmaps.com/details.php?file=342

Extract the files and copy them to: C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\left 4 dead\left4dead\maps

open the Console and type:

map l4d_redsea01_roofs

This looks like a promising start to the campaign with a versus map also available!

L4D - Matchmaking Changes - Coming Soon

The SDK is currently in closed beta and will be released after the fairly imminent Survival Pack. Along with the SDK the matchmaking process is being extended to:

* allow for 3rd party campaigns

Valve then plans to add extra features such as:

* find servers running the campaigns that you have installed
* see friends playing on 3rd party campaigns and download those campaigns

An interesting planned feature is to enable team based matchmaking:

* two teams of four players join up to compete in a Versus game.

Skill based matchmaking is also being refined to better try and match players of similar skill who have good pings together.

The blog post detailing these changes is here: http://www.l4d.com/blog/post.php?id=2390

Crawl While Incapped / Down - L4D Hidden Feature

This video shows survivor behaviour modified to crawl when down / incapped by use of the following commands:

sv_cheats 1
sm_cvar survivor_allow_crawling 1
survivor_crawl_speed 15

The speed can be set to what you want but anything above 25 is not recommended as the animation gets flakey.

You will need to have SourceMod installed to be able to use the sm_cvar command.

If you want this running all the time you can add the commands to server.cfg.



All credit goes to Apex: http://www.apex-games.net/?page_id=145

Permission to post this video is here.

Community Map - L4D Death Aboard III - Docks

Docks is the 3rd installment of the Death Aboard campaign, which is coming together quite nicely now.

The Survivors have a fair amount of ground to cover with a single crescendo event towards the end of the map.

Known bugs:
* All ladders have been changed to fit with L4D's proper settings now. But they are still confusing bots and npcs sometimes.
* The bulletproof glass in the prison is still not blocking bullets
* Water in docks level still not final
* Saferooms might spawn too many healthkits in campaign mode
* Tanks and witches don't spawn in campaign mode.

I'm going to try and see if I can find some servers hosting the Versus map soon - it should be a blast!

Links:
Death Aboard II - PrisonYard
Death Aboard I - Prison

Download: http://l4dmapdb.com/campaign:death-aboard

Left 4 Dead Update - Wednesday March 25th

Well, there are no doubt a few welcome changes in this update. I am most happy to see melee fatigue, Boomer vomit passing through common infected, and server fixes. I have never been able to get the sv_search_key (now just "key") to work ...

Game and client changes:

• Introduced fatigue to the melee attack in versus mode. You will see a HUD display when your melee swing is cooling down
  
• Boomer vomit will now pass through common infected
  
• Addressed some surround sound detection issues
  
• Fixed a rare crash when exiting Left4Dead on Windows Vista
  
• Fixed a case where the complete all expert campaigns achievement was not being rewarded

Dedicated server changes:

• Corrected an issue where Windows based dedicated were sending spurious shutdown notifications to the master causing them to delist temporarily
  
• Fixed dedicated servers not resetting the versus team swap correctly--you could join a dedicated server that had a previous game that was swapped and arrive on the other team than what was selected in the lobby
  
• Renamed the tags for sv_search_key to use "key:" in the server tags instead of "sv_search_key." This should help with issues of the 63 character limit of server tags
  
• Fixed an occasional server crash related to voting