A short while ago I introduced my 2 favourite upcoming 3rd-party campaigns: Dead Before Dawn and Final Flight. I haven’t heard anything new about the latter, but today I came across a new video showcasing some of the other locations to be featured in the Dead Before Dawn campaign.

There certainly seem to be a large number of different locations, all of which are very impressive. However, I really hope that the layout will be different in the final product. It seems from the video that all the locations are laid out around a central park area. At one point it is mentioned that the map was originally just one large area, but that it has been split into 4 separate maps. From the amount of content shown here, I certainly hope so! This campaign continues to look promising, but I still have my reservations. I guess we’ll have to wait and see!

By law I am required to inform you about the new L4D patch. I haven’t had a chance to play since it came out, but the details look juicy. Check them out here.

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!

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!

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.

If anyone out there hasn’t got their copy of L4D yet, now’s the time. Valve just put it on sale at 25% off. There are also discounts on all other Steam games, but who cares about that when you can kill thousands of zombies on a reasonable budget?

Call your friends, break out the champagne and party! No, not because it’s Christmas, Festivus, Kwanza or any other of those generic Winter holidays. You should be rejoicing because this blog, Francis Hates Everything, has gone live! Yay!

Ok, there isn’t much here to celebrate yet but over the days, months and maybe even years to come I will be posting articles, links, videos and thoughts about Left 4 Dead, Valve’s fantastic zombie shooter.

If you’re looking for something to do while you’re here, try clicking the ‘Random’ button up at the top of the page. If you have your speakers turned on, you’ll quickly discover why this site is called Francis Hates Everything!