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I just had to write and let you know that while I have played some modded levels before, nothing has really gotten me as excited as when the game originally came out, until I Hate Mountains. —Sean (by e-mail)

Posts Tagged ‘underground’

Jun22

One awesome co-op experience

Posted by Marc in Media

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Over the last weeks, we watched a lot of people playing the campaign and we learn from their mistakes by fixing things here and there in the campaign. Now these guys I’m gonna link you right after are just the kings of awesomeland. We watched their videos together and we were literally laughing our asses off in front of our computers. Seriously, if you had to watch one walkthrough of the I Hate Mountains campaign, be it this one! Thanks to them for sharing a good moment, this is what all I Hate Mountains co-op plays should be.

Oct22

Could someone fix Left 4 Dead please?

Posted by Nicolas in Development, Lamentation, Media

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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.

Jul6

Hang on tight!

Posted by Nicolas in Lamentation

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We know it’s been seriously quiet there since mid-may regarding new materials, but don’t panic! We’ll have plenty of new things to announce in the upcoming weeks. No, not a release date unfortunately, but some crusty details about the manor (exterior detailling stuff), the lumberyard (progress stuff), the lakeside (progress stuff), the forest (gameplay stuff) and the underground (ambience stuff).

And if you’re patient enough, we might even release some details about the music and a super-secret-new-poster-because-the-current-is-not-cool-enough. But shhht! Nothing’s really fixed for the moment. If you’re really patient, we might even whine and lament on one or two things (one of them beeing Valve, of course)!

Stay tuned for more developer banter coming soon!

Edit: As you may have noticed it, there’s still no news for the moment. The reason is simple, I suffered a very bad lungs accident a few weeks ago and had to be hospitalized for a while. I’m now in the process of cancelling my trip to USA next month because of the damn utterly expensive american medical system :D
I can’t take the risk of beeing indebted for the rest of my life for the moment.