Sunday, February 7, 2010
Don't worry...
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Don't worry, we're not posting articles anymore because we're migrating our website to Wordpress. Google is slowly giving up on the external publishing and hosting features on their Blogger platform. This is quite a sudden decision on their part, and it seems that all they want is to gain control over all the blogs they're hosting and save a few bucks.
Even if we see the advantage of letting Google take care of the server, I can see a lot more advantages in hosting it ourselves. Of course scalability is their main advantage, I can still remember this server, down on its knees when I released Portal: Prelude back in 2008, but still, this was only for a few days. The problem with this approach is that we're losing all control and giving it back to Google. It prevents us from building our site the way we want, optimizing it for our needs and adding pages as we see it.
There will be a Bonuses/extras section on the website (it's not a secret, there's a disabled link on the left), plus one or two other things when the campaign will be released. We want to be able to build little dynamic systems and stuff. Of course, migrating the website to Wordpress isn't quite a piece of cake. Sure it can import everything from Blogger but it isn't compatible with what we developed in the background and our design... soooo... it slows us down. Yeah, yet another excuse.
As for the anecdote, we've been in touch with people from Valve in the last few weeks. We told them about our problems with the game, the bugs we're facing and the issues with the VPK system. For the moment, our campaign can't be launched from a lobby, and it's apparently something they're aware of and trying to fix. Unfortunately as I said in our twitter channel, they can't help us with any of our other issues (such as the few models making the game crash). I guess they fear an overwhelming increase in people asking for help, and we can understand their choice. I hope they'll change their mind once we'll send them an early build of what we did :D (dreaming is still free).
Monday, November 23, 2009
Lies and concerns
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Since the release of Left 4 Dead 2 a week ago, we received a few emails asking us if it was going to have any consequences on our I Hate Mountains campaign. I thought it could be good to clear up the situation for everyone at the same time. So here's our thoughts on the current situation.
- First, there's still no SDK for Left 4 Dead 2 and something tells us that we might not see it before a long time. So we can't port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 if we wanted to.
- Second, even if we could, we won't be able to port our campaign to Left 4 Dead 2 because Valve lied about their so-called interoperability between Left 4 Dead 1 and 2. There is no such thing and all the content we used from the first game (textures, models, sounds, etc.) isn't available in the second for the moment.
- Left 4 Dead 1 is still crippled with bugs and it's still rather impossible to create a serious campaign using custom everything (models, particles, music, sounds, etc.) that doesn't rely on dirty and risky hacks. We might finally use these, but we'd really like to avoid it.
- Most people are starting to move on from Left 4 Dead 1 to Left 4 Dead 2 and even us are seeing Left 4 Dead 1 as a serious regression over Left 4 Dead 2. It frighten us a bit because, now that the community is splitted (thanks Valve), we don't really know were our potential players are.
Finally, I guess nothing really changed for the moment. We're still working on the campaign, but we've been quite depressed by the quality and the originality of the new Left 4 Dead 2 campaigns. It's really hard to focus on your own campaign when you perfectly know you'll never be able to reach this kind of result. But still... we're working on it.
Labels: problem, source sdk, valve
Monday, November 2, 2009
Advertising and notifying
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Just a quick note to tell everyone to try the Suicide Blitz campaign for Left 4 Dead 1. We don't know the guy who made it, but kudos to him, we were asbolutely thrilled when we played it yesterday. The campaign is brilliant and beautiful, full of details and sweet lighting. Plus, the ambience is really great, the difficulty high enough for a great challenge and the optimisation is quite good too. The five maps and the overall campaign are a bit too long (took us almost 3 hours in advanced) but it's definitely worth a try. One of the best campaigns we stumbled upon for the moment.
Aside from this, we're still working hard on the campaign. And as you can see with the semi-chaotic release of Dead Before Dawn a few days ago, we were absolutely right when we talked about how bad Left 4 Dead 1 was supporting custom campaign. That encourage us to wait more and more, until Valve releases the patch they're talking about for months.
On the bright side, our maps are finished. Two of them are in the optimisation process, four of them are in the final navigation meshing process, and then it should be finished for good. We won't give any hint on a possible release date for the moment, we're not planning anything since there's too much unanswered questions for the moment. What's sure is that we won't release anything until Valve fixes Left 4 Dead 1 for good. But for the moment, they still have some time.
PS: Ok, the guy's named R.T. Frisk, see in the comments.
Labels: difficulty, maps, problem, valve
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Could someone fix Left 4 Dead please?
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
As you may already know it, we're almost done with the big stuff (ie: level-design and gameplay). What's left is mostly bugfixes, sound effects and little details here and there, which will still take some time. But I'd like to point a few things I'm not really happy with recently and that most people don't understand when they contact us.
I'm not gonna make a pamphlet about Valve, but the situation around Left 4 Dead custom campaigns is seriously fucked up. Sorry for the harsh words but, it's been nearly one year since the game was released and six months since the SDK was added to the game, and still... half of the features are still bugged out or simply not supported. That's something people heavily discuss on the Left 4 Dead Mailing List, but nothing seems to move on Valve's side. What's still impossible to do, you ask?
- You can't embed custom music in your campaign VPK.
- You can't embed custom sounds in your campaign VPK at all because players would have to rebuild the whole Left 4 Dead sound cache each time they install a new campaign, and when it doesn't simply mess up everything, it takes almost 10 minutes to complete.
- Custom models are crashing the game randomly when embedded in the campaign VPK.
- You still can't embed custom particle effects, in the maps or in the VPK.
- The sound system is ruined and plays random sounds at random events, like an alarm sound when you set zombies on fire and such...
- We can't make custom game instructor messages and as we can't record survivor voices ourselves, there's mostly nothing we can to to help players understand what to do.
And believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Basically, what I'm saying is that more than 11 months after the release of the game, we still can't make elaborated custom campaigns. Should we see a deliberate method of pushing players and modders to Left 4 Dead 2, I don't think so ; but there's something seriously wrong in there. So, if you're waiting for our campaign, you might as well wait for the next bugfixes. Until then, here's a few widescreen action screenshots of the first three maps!
Sorry for the quality of the darkest ones, the JPEG format doesn't like big dark areas. And by the way, what I said in this article is my own opinion, and not the team's one (even if I know they agree with my opinion) and I know there's some campaign out there that do have custom sound/music/models, but it mostly relies on hacks and exponentially increase the campaign size. And our campaign contains a hell of a lot of custom content.
Labels: difficulty, forest, manor, problem, source sdk, underground, valve
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Is anyone there ?
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Hi back, I'm writing this from home, where I'm constrained since a few weeks... It's been a terrible mess recently and we kind of lost our goal with this campaign. As I'm writing, I don't really know where my team mates are and I don't really know if they're still working on their part of the campaign since I didn't had any news for a few weeks. I became sort of Internet-anonymous in the past few weeks and didn't bother much about anything else than my health.
Anyway, we're not out of business. I was already done working on my maps when the accident happened, so I wasn't even delayed. Last time I talked to Geoffroy, he was still working on his map and I don't really know what Marc is doing for the moment. The point is that we're really close to completion, it must be something like 85 or 90%, but we definitely need to refocus and clean the mess to restart the motivation machine.
With Left 4 Dead 2 coming along gently and some really creative campaigns starting to pop up from everywhere, we perfectly know we're a bit endangered right now. We'll talk about this a bit later and report here once done. In the mean time, if you know about some very good Left 4 Dead campaigns, feel free to post some links in the comments, I was out of business for a few weeks and probably missed some good things.
I know this article doesn't sound really good at first, but that's the way it is. And for the moment, we never even though about canceling everything (Ok, maybe once or twice in a desperate moment). We know it's been more than two months, and boy... that was some terrible two months. But stay tuned, or just grab the RSS feed to avoid missing something. We're not giving up yet!
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Back on the rails
Posted by Marc / Moroes
(permalink)
It's been a while since we last updated this blog with real content about the campaign and not just some random banter. It's been a while but that's it, the campaign is back on the rails. Geoffroy and Nicolas just finished their school year and I'm back from a little mapping rest. We're getting back to work, even if Valve seems to hate us, poor Left 4 Dead mappers, since they broke the SDK (again) and left the model browser lying in pieces since the last update (using the regular SDK).
During the last week, each one of us worked hard. The forest (first map) is finished, the manor (second map) is nearly finished, we're currently editing its navigation mesh. The third map is finished, the fourth is progressing quickly and the fifth too.
That's all for the moment. And if you think this news is a bit poor, head over to the Bioh4zard 2 website. These folks are building a promising campaign around the Resident Evil universe and they seem to know what they're doing. Check out their trailer.
EDIT 8:30pm
We found a fix for the model browser bug, see the comments if you want to know what to do, since ydna summed it up for us.
Labels: maps, problem, source sdk, valve
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Left 4 Dead, Left 2 Die ?
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Face it, everytime you're beginning to get "famous" in a way or another, everyone starts to ask you what's your opinion on everything. I'm not too fond on giving personal opinions in public, but hey... this is a blog after all. So, stop sending us e-mails, here's our opinion.
With the recent announcement that Valve would be releasing Left 4 Dead 2 just one year after the first one, we've all been a bit shocked. Frankly, I was the first to shout a big "WTF" and call it a prank when Geoffroy told me about it. We honestly thought that people at Valve had lost their mind, changed their business strategy and just realized there was tons of money to make there and that they just had to jump on the occasion, vomiting at the face of early adopters, all-time fans and modders just like a boomer would do.
Honestly, I felt betrayed by this announce for a few reasons.
- First, Left 4 Dead was sold for a ridiculously high price for what it was. I mean, 50€ makes $70 for a barely polished and unfinished mod where Team Fortress 2 cost a third of this price and is supported for free since its release. It seems like Valve forgot the reason why the TF2 model works so well, which has nearly quadrupled in size since it was launched (It started with 6 maps, it's now on 24). They mention that 20 new weapons is too much for a free DLC, but that’s exactly what the TF2 team has done, and it wasn't only re-skins.
- Second, there was only four campaigns with only two of them available in versus mode, that was pretty cheap for 70 bucks, even if I almost played it a million hours since it came out.
- Then, I thought about all the quality custom content that would be released a few months after, that same content WE are trying to add to the game but for which we're still all waiting for an official support 7 months later (matchmaking anyone?).
- But more importantly, what about their constant preaching about what is a real customer service and how you should make games? Isn't it Gabe Newell himself who declared this:
"So we'll do the same thing with Left 4 Dead where we'll have the initial release and then we'll release more movies, more characters, more weapons, unlockables, achievements, because that's the way you continue to grow a community over time."
Gabe Newell on VideoGamer.com a few months ago.
Now, what's the situation? We got this barely interesting survival mode that basically makes a whole game mode with the worst parts of the original game (personal opinion). Well, sure it was free, but that was just the right price for what it was. Then we got 7 achievements linked with it, which are totally impossible to unlock for me because the game keeps resetting my medals count. And we got the two missing campaigns in versus mode. Now where are the new campaigns? Weapons? Unlockables? Survivors? Zombies?
Most people feel betrayed because they already felt that they paid largely enough money for a game that was half-finished, or even because they payed for it while keeping in mind that there was going to be a TF2-like support behind the price, and that's my case. Trying to gather people into a community is a good thing, but making them pay the full price again for something you said was going to be free while preventing everyone from making their own custom content is really shooting yourself in the foot. I looks like Valve is preventing people to make user-content hopping that more people would buy their own.
Now, let's face it again, we're all going to buy this Left 4 Dead 2 (well, I guess), but Valve's reputation is still going down again and again after each of their recent moves. First there was this HUGE price increase with the stupid 1€ = $1 conversion on Steam (remember kids, it's still 1€ = $1.41 today), then Left 4 Dead came out half-finished, and now they're lying to customers luring them to buy their stuff. What's next? We're still not hating them, since we're all day-one fans of their work, but this really feels wrong. As Doug Lombardi said on Rock Paper Shotgun, we should just trust them a little bit... but with this full price tag coming along with just a few minor changes to the game (honestly, who cares about adding a frying pan as a weapon), this is not going to be easy. Let's just wait and see how it turns out.
P.S.: No one's against a Left 4 Dead 2 by the way, as long as they finish the first one. On the other hand, everyone knows they're not a charity company, but when you make promises, you should try to respect it.
Labels: misc, problem, source sdk, valve
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
All right, you can stop sending us e-mails to say that the Left 4 Dead SDK was released yesterday, we already know it. We're actively following what's going on in Valve's universe day after day and downloaded it as soon as it came out.
Unfortunately, it doesn't add anything useful to us for the moment, simply because we made our own SDK during this 6 month wait and because the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools doesn't provide anything more for the moment. Basically, it's just a renamed Source SDK. For the moment, we didn't investigate much, but it looks like all the changes are more or less to make the old tools compatible with the new Left 4 Dead Source engine, to release the same old particle editor and to copy/paste the Valve Developer Community's tutorials into the Left 4 Dead folder.
We'll see how it goes, but as far as I can tell, we'll only use one file from the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools, the editor's official entity list configuration file: left4dead.fgd. The Sketchup plugin looks cool too, but we'd really prefer a plugin that would allow us to export Sketchup models directly into Source models using a GUI, because Sketchup always allowed us to export in a random format (well, the professional version does it) and then convert it into an SMD file using XSI Mod Tools.
Anyway, there is no revolution for the moment. We are more eager for them to update the matchmaking system and I bet this release won't change much for us. At least until the SDK is fully finished and polished. Then we may see tools like the ones everyone thought they would add. But I'm getting a bit bitchy there :D
Labels: problem, source sdk, valve
Friday, April 17, 2009
Unfortunate SDK Accident (fixed)
Posted by Nicolas
(permalink)
Believe me, we'd really like to add some news on this front page, but I got an unfortunate accident with my Source SDK. Today, without any warning, it just stopped working. When opening up the Source SDK Launcher, there's nothing I can do anymore. It opens correctly, but I can't click anymore on the tools. If I try to double-click on Hammer Editor, Model Viewer or Face Poser, the SDK Launcher just stops itself without any error message and without launching the corresponding application.
This is not the first time the Source SDK stops working... but this is the first time it does not display any error message. I tried the usual stuff: Refresh SDK Content, Reset Game Configurations, Defragment Cache Files, Verify Integrity of Tool Cache, Restart Steam, Reboot Windows, Delete the ClientRegistry.blob, uninstall and reinstall the Source SDK GCFs, delete everything SDK-related in Steam and reinstall everything from scratch... I even deleted the whole Valve preferences from the registry. So far no change.
I used the SDK for a few hours and it stopped working when I tried to relaunch Hammer using a different game configuration. The only thing I did before it stopped working is install the Dawn of War II Demo (but I doubt this was related, I uninstalled it just to be sure). There was also a Steam update released at the same time... I really don't know what to do, if some of you already faced the same problem someday and know what to do, please post in the comments or send an email to nicolas@ihatemountains.com, I really need it to finish the fifth map of the campaign...
Edit April 18:
I just entirely uninstalled Steam and reinstalled it only with Source SDK to witness that it doesn't change anything. I'm now completely stuck.
Edit April 19:
Mokay, I uninstalled Steam again, trashed ALL the GCFs (sigh), deleted the whole Valve registry key, cleaned the computer with TuneUp, and installed everything back from scratch (40 GB of GCFs to download, sigh) and things seems to be working again. Thanks to the people who tried to help there and via e-mail, much appreciated.
Labels: lakeside, problem, source sdk
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Left 4 Dead hates open spaces!
Posted by Marc / Moroes
(permalink)
A few days ago, we unveiled our new project I Hate Mountains and this website was already visited by more than 3,000 people. This is quite impressive and it motivates us for the next part of the development. We'd like to thank you all for your support and your confidence. It's now our job to try not to disappoint you, and believe us, it will not be the case.
Talking about the campaign, here's some fresh news.
In our first level, the forest, a big part had to be reviewed and redone after the release of Left 4 Dead. At the beginning, it was quite an impressive and vast open-space: fun to play, hard to optimize and finally... it had some problems to fit in the Left 4 Dead gameplay.
Making a Left 4 Dead level is not only a question of level-design and geometry. You can't build it and play it straight out of the box like most of Valve's games. You have to complete another important task, the nav mesh creation. The goal is to mark the paths for the game, these nav meshes contains a lot of informations for the artificial intelligence. Where can survivors and infected walk ? Where is the event ? Where can they respawn ? and stuff. The Director also needs it to build the gameplay during the game.
Problem is, when we got our first playable version of the level and tried to build the nav meshes, the process took three hours to reach 1%. Finally, we never managed to get a fully working version of the level. The game didn't knew how to compute the path from the spawn point to the first safe room because there was way too many combinations in this vast open-space.
Conclusion ?
We found out that Left 4 Dead was not really suitable for open and vast environments. Something had to be done. This is why I spent the last weeks trying to transform this open-space level in a corridor-like version. This is not something we wanted to do, but we had to resign, and after a lot of talking and babbling with the team members, we found several ways to transform the level without loosing this precious open-space feeling.
Today, this first level is mostly finished and we believe the creation process recently reached 75% (unless the late release of the SDK messes everything up, wouldnt be such a surprise).
Concerning the other levels of this campaign, our progress is constant. The third level is already beeing tested right now. We're trying to push the director to the limits, forcing him to make mistakes and telling us what's wrong with the level and the nav meshes.
Stay tuned for more developer banter until the release.
PS: The screenshots page is now open.
Labels: forest, gameplay, maps, problem, underground
© 2008-2010 www.ihatemountains.com, all rights reserved.Design by Nicolas "NykO18" Grevet & Marc "Moroes" Bidoul (from the work of Adam "Supernorn" Riches). Logo inspired by Geoffroy "Kane" Espinasse.
Half-Life and Left 4 Dead are trademarks of Valve Corporation. Copyright © 1996-2009