Metal has uploaded part 3 of his hunter pounce compilation video. I can only hope that I get that good someday

Ok, here’s the thing. I love playing L4D. Love it. Every day at work we sit down and play versus for an hour or so, and it rocks. In the evenings, we usually get a campaign in. All this is great, but it’s starting to signs of getting a wee bit repetitive. The AI director does a lot to help overcome this, and I’m still suprised at all the new and frustrating locations it chooses to spawn witches and tanks. However, I can see the day coming when myself and the people I play with are going to want something different. With any luck we’ll be seeing the other two Valve campaigns made available soon, but what I really want is something completely different. Something fresh. Fortunately, the modding community is already gearing up for some seriously good looking content. Here’s a couple that I think look really promising:

Dead Before Dawn

Dead Before Dawn is a campaign based on the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. It started life as a map of Crossroads Mall to be used in another zombie mod, but when Left 4 Dead came round the designers saw the oppurtunity and jumped on it. They have a head start on most of the rest of the custom mapping community because they already have a lot of content prepared. Here’s a video of what they have so far:

I’m impressed by the quality and scope of the design, but I have to say I’m a little worried about their gameplay plans. From watching the video, it seems that there will be a lot of backtracking. It also seems like it would be very easy to get lost in the back corridors of the mall if there aren’t any hints letting the players know which way to go. After reading Valve’s blog posts on L4D’s art direction, it’s clear that a lot of effort was put into making the levels navigable as well as pretty to look at. My hope is that the makers of this mod have also read these articles and will put the advice to good use!

Final Flight

Hoo Boy. This looks like it’s going to be a biggie. Final Flight is the work of Markus Bernhardt, author of the Mindful Gamer blog. He has a history of game design and user-centered design, both of which I share an interest in. He has already created some fun L4D content in the form of South Park styled wallpapers and sprays. Final Flight is his concept for  a L4D campaign, and the setting couldn’t be more awe inspiring:

“Final Flight is an all new Left 4 Dead movie that features an extensive new storyline with a rather unusual setting and a pretty generous portion of old-school sci-fi/horror trash. After numerous fights against the Infected horde, the Survivors are on their way to the Pluribus Space Center, a huge aerospace facility on the very top of a plateau, somewhere in the state of Colorado. Knowing about an intact space shuttle that was previously used to transfer visitors, employees and other passangers to the Pluribus Orbital Station -- an experimental, fully self sustained installation with hundreds of jobholders directly above earth -- the Survivors set out for their ultimate challange to get aboard. Unfortunately this isn’t the easiest task. The whole facility has been run down by Infected and so the Survivors need to fight their way through the spacious parking area and the Pluribus Space Center itself. Finally they need to reach the very top of the launch pad to get into the space shuttle.

Will the Survivors catch their final flight off this doomed rock? Does anyone of the Survivors know how to operate a space shuttle? And most importantly, why does no one at the Pluribus Orbital Station answer their distress calls?”

Can you say “WOW”? Final Flight takes the number one spot as my most anticipated custom campaign. With his background in user-centered design, I think that Bernhardt can pull of an experience that will match expectations.

There’s no release date for either of these two campaigns yet, and it remains to be seen if they will even be completed. That said, both mods look to be handled in a professional manner by the authors so fingers crossed we’ll be seeing them both in the coming months.

As something of an experiment, I’ve started a Steam group for the blog. It’s called (predictably) Francis Hates Everything and can be found here. I don’t have a server, or even any events planned but I figure that it can’t do any harm to have one and if enough interest is generated around it (i.e. if enough people join) then I can look into that sort of thing. So, if playing L4D or just chatting with people that read this blog sounds like something you’d enjoy, then sign up!

Erm… I’ll be in my bunk:

Left 4 Dead – Witch + Zoey by ~bar1scorpio on deviantART

There are prints available… just make sure you get them laminated before you *ahem* use them.

I will put my hand up and admit it now: I have not played L4D on Expert difficulty yet. I get most of my playtime at work with my friends in the office. We represent a range of different skill levels, and nowadays we usually find ourselves playing campaigns on advanced. However, there is always the lure of those two achievements: ‘Zombicidal Maniac’ and ‘What Are You Trying To Prove’. When we eventually decide to make the final step up to Expert difficulty (I’m told it deserves the capital ‘E’) I will definatly go back and read this article on tactics for surviving the campaigns. Unlike a lot of the general guides out there, this one has in-depth info specifically taylored to Expert play. Even if Expert seems beyond you right now, I’d definately recommend giving it a read. It’ll give you something to aspire to. It did for me.

It lives! It lives! francishates, my twitter bot that I’ve been working on over the holidays, has finally gained sentience!

Well, not exactly sentience. Poor guy can’t even handle grammar properly. But he does know what he hates, and he’ll tell you if you want to listen. Every 6 hours he will update his twitter status with something new that he hates.

I did a lot of thinking about the ‘best’ way to make his posts random, funny and at the same time relevant to a wide audience. My first plan was just to have a script pull random words from the dictionary and use those. Whilst this would be funny, the chances are most words picked would be meaningless to most people most of the time. So the dictionary idea folded. My second idea was to scrape feeds from various sites and analyze those for suitable content. The problem with that was that if I chose the feeds, all Francis would ever talk about would be technology, video games and the BBC. I settled on Digg as something of a lowest common denominator. The popular stories on there have already been vetted by the general public and so are far more likely to be relevant. The people, places and things within those stories stand a higher chance of being familiar to readers. Also, it has a cool API that I wanted to try out.

Mashing the Digg stories into a single twitter post was accomplished with a really nice little POS tagger written in python that I came across. It tags all the words in the text I give it with their semantic meanings: adjectives, verbs, nouns, that sort of thing. Then I do a little bit of magic to select what is (hopefully) a coherent sentence, tack ‘I hate’ on the front and spit it out into twitter be their (awesome) API. The code is far from perfect and will probably get tweaked a little over time to make it more coherent in more cases

So with all the technical stuff out the way, I hope you will choose to follow Francis on his crusade of hate and find yourself amused by it. Enjoy!

Spurred by all the recent L4D twitter bot activity lately, I’ve been working on my own. He’s nearly done, and I’ll do a full writeup later. The only real obstacle I’m facing is that my web-host has an old version of python installed that doesn’t support the twitter library I’m using. D’oh! I’m working on the problem now, so hopefully Francis will be dispensing fully automatic hate to anyone who will listen within the next couple of days!

This thread shows off a neat customization tool: Adding new radial voice menus to your game. Currently when playing as a survivor you have 2 voice menus (bound to z and x). By editing a single config file, it’s possible to edit these menus or even add more (up to a total of 4, apparently). What’s more, you’re not limited to voice commands. Any console command can be bound to the entries on the menu. You can even string a whole bunch together if you desire.

In keeping with the theme of this site, I created my own voice menu specially for Francis:

UPDATE: I have compiled a useful page of all the sound files I could find where Francis hates stuff. Behold: Stuff Francis Hates

Well, it seems like I’m not the only one who thinks that both Twitter and Left 4 Dead are awesome… Here are two Twitter bots that both look to L4D for their inspiration:

The first ‘bot’ is actually a group of 4 interacting bots, created by Tom Armatage. He’s not unfamiliar with Twitter and its API as he previously wrote a bot that makes Tower Bridge talk. The 4 L4D bots (one for each survivor) chat amongst themselves using (from what I can tell) in-game dialog. I can’t do them justice describing them here, so go visit Tom’s blog post where he talks about them in great detail.

The second bot is very much like my own, francishates (whose twitter posts can be seen at the top of the sidebar over on the right there). Found at ihatevans.com, this bot seems to be taking tweets from the public timeline and echoing anything that they hate. I’m not sure whether I should be impressed that madlep (of ubercharged.net and boomercharged.net fame) did pretty much exactly what I wanted to do with my bot before me, or angry for the exact same reason. Either way, hats off to the man for getting it coded and out the door. You are far less lazy than I!

The official L4D blog just posted part 2 of their analysis of the Left 4 Dead art style. This one deals with ‘Stylized Darkness’, and discusses the methods used to light the maps to give the atmosphere they were after. Here’s a sample:

“Flashlights, like car headlights, were a great way to light the game without contradicting the game’s fiction. Even better, we found that by making the flashlight weapon-mounted, the light is just slightly off-center at all times. This created interesting shadows and helped make zombie attacks much more dramatic. From a gameplay standpoint, gun-mounted light sources also had the interesting side effect of disappearing when you reloaded or shoved zombies back.”

Part 1 of the article can be found here.