Dog's Left4DoD Blog

For the past year, making changes to the strength of Zombies has been a nightmare.  Making a change in one thing meant changes getting borked elsewhere.  This became pretty evident as I adjusted the Skeleton and found out that it was hard getting him just right.

There were too many variables – the strength of weapons, the health of zombies, the bots having different criteria from human players…

So I did a complete rewrite of the Health system, removed all weapon modifiers, removed headshot modifiers and simplified everything.  It also allowed me to remove a lot of the health upgrades that kept screwing around with how the game worked.  So pills, kevlar, basic armour etc, were removed, players were given 150hp and using a clever health scaling system devised by my coder buddy Andersso, was able to match the health bar so that the player could see how much health he actually had.

So the system is in place now.  Let me know of any issues or inconsistencies.

Wow!
I haven’t written in here for a while.  Shame on me!

I have been working my little butt off getting Left4DoD ready for Halloween.  There were many new features including a newly written parachute section.  It’s not like the parachute SM plugin at all.  This is totally different code and only allows players to parachute into areas where they control or are currently losing.  So if the Zs are capturing a flag, you can quickly parachute in there and take it back.

The Skeleton has caused the most issues.  I wanted to bring in a Zombie that was totally different from all the others and make the players work.  I get fed up with the lazy bastards that treat this mod as a boring shootfest.  Someone told me on the server, that was what they expected and would never play Zombie.
Rather disheartening.
So the Skeleton, which can only be killed with a punch or knife, has caused many of them to get all butt-hurt because it ‘has taken the fun out of the game’.

Fun? Fun is the challenge of staying alive.  Fun is having to watch your back at every turn, heightening your awareness.  Fun is not knowing which way to turn.

So I have had to nerf the Skeleton a great deal, by adding head damage back in, lowering health, making him susceptible to explosion damage.

Dear shootfest lovers.  Please set up your own server and add a bot (sv_cheats 1; bot) and just shoot the damned thing time after time after time.   And if you do have anything to whine about, please don’t broadcast it publicly in chat.  You didn’t pay anything for the game, I don’t owe you a thing and positive suggestions are always preferable to ‘poorly thought out’, or ‘skeleton makin me say fk it to game’.

I’m looking forward to this!  It should be a blast.
All the people that have signed up for it are some of the coolest, hard-fightin’, smart L4DoD players.  Since it is Coop mode, a team of six versus the Zs is gonna be intense.

Despite my in-depth knowledge of the plugin, I’m gonna be a professional and just play

My buddies over on TheVille.Org have put together a tournament that looks to be a blast!

KRG, our venerable organizer of Ville activities has combined with some of the main L4DoD Admins and come up with a tough little tournament.

There’ll be more Zombies, and tough objectives!
Keep tuned and more details will follow!

I haven’t blogged for ages.  So little time as Real Life is dominating right now. Also so tired…so tired…

Well, the recent VALVe update borked a lot of Left4DoD and it took a lot of work to get it back to normal….whatever normal is.  The thing is, I’m beginning to lose interest in the project for a number of reasons.

One reason is that it takes up a hell of a lot of my time.  The collisions change in SDKHooks meant a lot of code changes which took 48 hours to figure out.  When I make changes, people moan and bitch about it.  Reading through the chat logs of the stats can be a disheartening experience and I’m not up to fixing every issue because, it’s me on my own and I’m not getting a cent for any of it.  I have a real job that demands so much of my time (for which I also don’t get paid overtime for – what the hell is wrong with me?) that I have no time for this little pitiful DoDS mod that not many care about!

I hear people clamouring for the source code already.  I made that mistake in 2008 with Cube Soccer and that won’t happen again.  It took pretty much a year to write, and releasing the source code would just ruin the game.  People would take it and modify it and change all the settings and fuck it up completely.  I stopped trusting server owners a long time ago.

So there won’t be many updates in Left4DoD, for a while.
I’m not even sure if it’s worth it.

Many people asked for the airstrike to be moved to the USE key since they often didn’t know they’d picked it up and inadvertently launched it at their own team.  So that was one of many changes this week.

But the big news was TheVille.Org starting up an Australian Left4DoD server.  We had many Australians and New Zealanders asking us for the game over the past year so we decided to create a server.  It has been not too bad a startup.  Getting a new server off the ground has many issues, from getting the plugins right to finding the right settings.

There are still some issues but we’re solving them.

Kudos to Hypernia the game server company for agreeing to my various requests!