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For the first stage, I was able to make a beeline to the safehouse. Did not take a single step in the wrong direction. The openness certainly feels more realistic than the spoonfed "openness" of the Valve campaigns. —doorstuckdoorstuck (forums.ihatemountains.com)

Archive for April, 2010

Apr30

New website and Left 4 Dead 2 compatibility

Posted by Nicolas in Lamentation, Progress

Tags: , , ,

A few months ago, I told everyone we needed to migrate our website before the end of march because Google was dropping Blogger‘s external publishing feature. Finally, they extended the date to mid-april, and then to the first of may and since procrastination is my religion, it’s been only two days I started migrating the website. So far everything seem to have gone well with the import, but if you seem to encounter something strange, please report it directly to me :
nicolas@ihatemountains.com.

For the moment, there’s nothing more to show you unfortunately. We’re in the process of making what have been done on Left 4 Dead 1 compatible under Left 4 Dead 2 and this is not as easy as Valve said it was going to be when they released the so-called Left 4 Dead 2 Add-on Support. Basically, the thing is crippled with problems, there’s content from Left 4 Dead 1 randomly missing everywhere. Sometimes it’s a texture definition file although the texture itself is present, sometimes it’s a model that only lacks its textures, and sometimes they even replaced a perfectly valid Left 4 Dead 1 model with another model from Left 4 Dead 2 (like a mop changed into a bucket or a caboose into a wagon railing). Not to mention the content from Crash Course, which is entirely missing.

Of course, this is not helping us to make the campaign compatible. So far, we repackaged all the missing content, but there’s still a few issues to solve, like a violent crash when starting the fourth level. For a tool that was supposed to allow us to easily port our Left 4 Dead 1 campaigns to Left 4 Dead 2, I guess it totally misses the point. Anyway, that’s not much a problem anymore since we’re used to it now, it just takes longer.

By the way, stay tuned because we’ll update next week (if everything goes as planned) with the promotional screenshots we’ll send to various websites to notify them about our upcoming release.