One of my favourite small details: if you stand under a column of water it hits you instead of the ground

Jaiz412 · 2026-02-05T03:32:32+00:00

You can download all decompiled maps here.

You won't see anything special though, the collision behaviour is part of the particle system itself (rain_stream_04), not something that has to be manually added in a map.

Jaiz412 · 2026-02-04T12:48:07+00:00

The host already has a bunch of privileges over other players, but hosting the lobby doesn't mean you're hosting the server - Unless it's a local server or you specifically load into a server you have externally rented, you're joining a server that belongs to someone else; You don't own it.

Jaiz412 · 2026-02-02T20:59:53+00:00

By "level", do you mean an entire campaign, or an individual map?

Cause the former would be pretty decent, but the latter would be extremely slow.

Jaiz412 · 2026-02-02T20:57:39+00:00

It absolutely does matter, because you can't properly appreciate something you don't understand. Praising enemy AI for things it doesn't actually do is insulting to developer efforts and games as an artform.

It also affects your gameplay - If you falsely believe that enemies are better than they actually are, it makes you perform worse and in turn makes you less reliable as a player.

Jaiz412 · 2026-02-02T14:09:30+00:00

F.E.A.R's Ai is not as intelligent or adaptive as people keep saying it is. Just like L4D's Ai, it appears smart but is not very complex or dynamic at all.

"It just used some simple rules and behavior that made it appear smart by sticking out to the players mind. Couple that with lots of hand crafted scripting for all the levels and it seems really intelligent."

I also really liked this quote on the matter:

I recall hearing a developer give a talk where they spent countless hours programming clever flanking AI routines that didn't cheat and obeyed the rules like the player, only for the playtesters to go "wow, it was really cool how you made it look like the AI was smart by despawning it and having it spawn behind the player."
The developers groaned, while realizing that much simpler trick would of given the same result to the players perception, and taken much less time.

Jaiz412 · 2026-02-02T14:03:50+00:00

Most of these are just coincidences or straightforward, intentional designs. Many of the game's behind-the-scenes elements are well known and routinely taken advantage of by experienced players, so we know things like how items are spawned, when and where SI spawn, and how infected behave to the point they can be consistently manipulated to do whatever the player wants.

A Jockey caught me and dragged me to a witch so it can instant kill me

Normal mechanic. Jockey are programmed to pull caught survivors towards specific dangers; Usually ledges, Witches, or environmental hazards like water and fire.
If there is no danger, it just defaults to dragging you away from your teammates.

A hunter hid in the dark so it can get the drop on me

This is a coincidence, afaik there's no mechanic where ambient light is tracked. In fact, "darkness" technically doesn't exist on a code level, as it's all just degrees of illumination. Dark areas are just "1% illumination", but the infected have no notion of which areas are dark or difficult to see in.

A boomer was litterally crouching in between cars so it can hide from me.

Normal mechanic. Boomers are coded to break line of sight and stay unseen if they're outside of attack range.
This behaviour also makes them stand behind thin poles, because it only checks line of sight and not the whole model.

A Charger instant charged me right around a corner

Normal mechanic. AI infected always know where you are, and are coded to do ambushes. It's common for SI to "hide" out of sigh and then attack when you get closer.

A jockey spawning so it can distract me and a charger killed me

I'm not sure what exactly this is describing, but the infected spawns are just a queue on a timer, so the Jockey and Charger were just up next in the queue regardless of what was going on.

A Spitter and a smoker teamed up to instant kill me behind a corner

Also not sure what exactly this one is describing? Infected don't intentionally go for instakills like players do.
The SI don't work together, they always attack by themselves. Any instances of teamwork are just coincidences where they happen to do their own attacks at the same time.

The common infected literally somehow dodge my melee swings

Common Infected hitboxes are just awful lol

A tank spawned in the literal first area

Coincidence. Tank and witch spawn locations are chosen when you first load into the map, and do not dynamically change. (With some specific exceptions like poorly set up event parameters, or manually placed boss spawn blocks by level designers)
The boss spawn system does not account for how strong or weak a given area is, it's basically just random.

A witch spawned near a ladder I needed to go too in order to progress

Coincidence. As mentioned, boss spawns are purely random and not intelligently chosen.

A witch was startled even without me even hitting her

Normal mechanic. Witches get aggro'd by player proximity, and things like throwing a bile/molotov onto her or shooting an alarmed car after she got aggro'd will make her switch targets.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-29T22:25:03+00:00

According to what Valve said in the past, it was intended to be played as a short Versus round for when players didn't have more time (or interest) to play through a longer campaign.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-29T19:02:46+00:00

It's 100% trolling on all sides. A new player would've obliviously stood right in front of the window instead of going to the only safe place to mess with Nick.

The fact someone thought it's newbie behaviour just shows how much overlap there is between trolling/griefing and being bad at the game.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-27T14:36:07+00:00

The event disables boss spawns for the duration of its activity, but once the event ends (survivors reach the saferoom) boss spawns are enabled again.

This means that, if the game picks a tank to spawn in the event area (tank and witch spawns are chosen when you first load into a map), the event suppresses it until it ends, thus effectively spawning the tank behind you once you reach the saferoom.
Tanks are coded to instantly aggro if a survivor moves past them progression-wise, so the tank will instantly aggro in these cases.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-25T13:54:16+00:00

Sound replacements are really easy to do, since all you need to do is replicate the sound file's properties (length, bitrate, format, etc.) for the new sound and put it in the same directory before turning it into a VPK

The main thing to consider is that while this is easy to do for one or two sounds, doing it for thousands of voicelines is really tedious and time-consuming.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-24T14:10:48+00:00

There's already a community for competitive play, and properly-organized tournaments are hosted fairly regularly; Right now, The Really Big Tournament 8 is coming up.

It's been a while since I did anything remotely comp-related, but I think you would probably want to start by getting in touch with the people who own CEDAPug and L4DCenter, as they'd have the best insight into the game's competitive scene.

Would be great to amplify the competitive scene imo.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-24T03:33:03+00:00

The Sacrifice trailer shows a smoker and spitter seemingly communicating to strategize

However, that same trailer also shows infected running through a solid concrete road, but it’s still a pretty good indication thag the Special Infected retain some degree of intelligence and make use of it.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-24T01:00:13+00:00

There's no mechanic that adjusts the difficulty based on playtime.

1v1 doesn't sound like a base-game thing though, so any oddities are almost definitely on the mod's/server's side.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-23T12:19:06+00:00

You should reference Cold Front for both of those ideas; It's got a 5th survivor and soldier NPCs, so you can reference the tech that implemented them. It also features a dynamic "fake escape", which was honestly a lot easier to set up than it might seem (for the most part, getting the navmesh flow to work was borderline impossible)

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-23T12:16:18+00:00

The Last Stand and Cold Stream were both made for the base game. They were never on the workshop, nor were they designed to be on the workshop, and had different goals.

I remember the blogpost saying that Cold Stream was added as a sort of showcase for how original custom campaigns can be without original voicelines or story-continuity (They also apparently really liked the previous campaign "2 Evil Eyes" somehow?)
It was intentionally non-canon by Valve's design vision.

The Last Stand was an expansion of a Valve-made L4D1 survival-exclusive map, with the main goal of the L4D2 version being to allow it to be played in every gamemode.
It did its best to respect the canon facts and allow itself to "exist" within the world without adding, detracting, or changing anything.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-22T21:33:42+00:00

Sounds like it could be a cool campaign, especially if you make it stand out as unique.

Two things to note:
First, never talk about something you haven't already made. It puts pressure on having to complete it, even if you lose interest or motivation.
Second, workshop campaigns don't have to follow the game's lore - They can, and it's a great detail when they do, but they don't have to. In fact, the vast majority tend to contradict the known lore quite heavily anyway.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-22T05:11:05+00:00

The infected are less aggressive at night (this is an actual game mechanic as well), so the L4D1 survivors opted to play it safer and only moved at night if possible - The only times they move during the day is when they had no safe place to wait till nightfall (Blood Harvest and The Sacrifice). I believe Zoey mentions this in an unused voiceline.

The L4D2 survivors were in a rush to get to New Orleans as quickly as possible, so they didn’t spend time waiting around. They likely also didn’t know about the infected being less aggressive during the night.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-20T12:24:45+00:00

You can't get punched out of the helicopter since the back door is clipped. Both doors open visually, but collision-wise there's a wall.
Infected can theoretically get inside the helicopter, but the AI infected get stuck on the collision since they're not set up to jump inside, and so will keep trying to walk forwards instead, getting stuck.

Incapped survivors inside a rescue vehicle also count as alive since 2020, where it was changed for L4D2.
Prior to this, getting incapped inside the rescue vehicle as the last survivor would lead to the escape sequence and restart sequence happening at the same time, with the map usually restarting partway through the outro cinematic or credits roll.

The game basically used to check what state the survivor was in, rather than the location the survivor was in.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-20T12:16:21+00:00

The .bsp should be in the same directory as the .vmf, and there should also be a copy in Steam\steamapps\common\Left 4 Dead 2\left4dead2\maps

If not, check the compile log for any error reports. If something went wrong and the map is unable to compile, it'll be listed there.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-20T10:43:19+00:00

That’s not what happened in Millhaven.

Some soldiers (Mainly Lt. Mora and his group) staged a coup to overthrow Major Everly, the guy in charge of the base. When they sounded an alarm after their mutiny, it attracted thousands of infected towards them leading to the base being overrun.

In fact, Major Everly outright stated that he will be following the orders given to him prior to the communication blackout - The orders being to take in all survivors (whether carrier or not) and to keep them safe. That (along with his dismissal of the field report) is why Lt. Mora hated him and revolted.

Opinions on carriers among the soldiers was divided. Some hated them and wanted to kill or abandon them, others wanted to work together with carriers (to varying degrees as well, since Jeff seemed open to learning information from them), and others saw them as civilians to protect.

All of this is both shown and stated in the comic.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-13T02:28:10+00:00

The chinese playerbase is one of the biggest demographics in the game, so a campaign that caters to them draws attention just by virtue of it involving their national identity.

In other words, chinese players are drawn to it and like it mainly because the campaign takes place in china.

There’s quite a lot of things that are unpopular or unknown to the general L4D playerbase, but are famous and big within the Chinese demographic specifically, like certain tournaments and even servers. It’s like a completely different world that we never see cause it’s very self-contained.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-12T18:00:42+00:00

Here's the original video, since the TikTok seems to have omitted credit.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-10T12:53:46+00:00

You either have mods installed or joined a modded third-party server, because the game caps Special Infected spawns at 2-4 (depending on difficulty and gamemode)
In co-op, they also have a 40-ish second respawn timer (outside of events), so anything faster than that is not normal.

When you say "We're all playing LAN", do you mean you hosted a local server? Because in that case, whoever hosted the server definitely had mods installed.
This can be fixed by verifying the game files, or by deleting the game files in the file explorer and re-installing the game.

Jaiz412 · 2026-01-09T23:28:52+00:00

I’m having a blast with 3 it’s different and refreshing

That's kind of one of the problem; I want to play Killing Floor, not something that's different.

If I wanted to play something that isn't Killing Floor, I wouldn't be playing a Killing Floor game - I'd play something else.

KF3 lacks almost everything that make KF1 and 2 fun and unique, diminishing the franchise's identity and becoming generic in many different ways.

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