I don’t play much Left 4 Dead on PC and never bothered to look at how they do demos on modern Source games, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t do it the old fashioned Quake engine way, which is just to store a stream of world state update deltas. This type of demo encoding is extremely lightweight and won’t impact your gameplay at all. It isn’t (again, assuming modern Source Engine demos are like old Quake engine demos) actually doing a video encode or anything like that. Even back in the days of Pentium 1s and shitty slow IDE HDDs, this type of demo recording had no significant impact on frames per second or stuttering or anything. So don’t worry about it.
FRAPS type recording is a whole different thing than what I’m talking about, and can be an issue even today, but if you use in-game demo recording you can always just not run FRAPS style encoding while playing the game, just record a FRAPS capture of your demo as played through the game later if you need an actual video file encode of the game session.
ya, seriously, wtf happened there? I’m moving forward looking for the witch, and there she is wrapped up in you…
Also, not to pick on you, but going back on NM3, looking at both lazy’s and my vids, I don’t see another healthpack in that room. Perhaps you care to upload your video proof?
Finally, anyone know anywhere else the t2 guns couldve been on that level?
They weren’t in the garage in front of the saferoom, not in the 2nd floor room by the gas station, not in that sewer room before the ladder…
No I was just fucking oblivious. I was just rushing to cover ground and missed the audio cues.
The medpack in NM3 was on the left on the wooden spool. Copet was ahead of me and grabbed it just as I was entering the room. Also there was one in the ambulance right outside the saferoom. I uploaded my demos to rapidshare last night and put them in the chat. I’ll do it again in a .zip tonight.
Pretty sure only when they implemented, because when I checked mine a couple of weeks after stats were implemented a lot of numbers looked wrong - like 40 total minigun kills. Err, no, maybe 400 or 4000!
Yeah, no - the stats didn’t record, or didn’t record accurately, until they were brought online. Mine only show the matches I’ve played since the stats launched, and none of the dozens of games played before that.
We really need practice. Some things we should discuss/work on:
I don’t think we rush particularly well. I know that rushing can work but for whatever reason we just don’t execute it well. We’re not going to change our DNA in 2 nights so lets just stick with what we know/are good at, and go at our own pace.
Since our pace is slow and we tend to bunch up, we need to bunch up somewhat less in order to minimize boomer damage.
When we ARE boomed, that’s when we need to stack up (preferably against a wall) and melee like crazy. The boomed person should NOT run around like crazy. If you’re boomed, find a wall or anything to get your back against, get to it, and then SIT and melee/shoot. Melee is generally going to be more effective. If you’re not boomed, go find the boomed people, and stack up on them and cover whatever angle they’re not covering.
We should definitely try to cover whatever ground we can when we know all the opponents are dead, I think we all agree about that.
Cover downed people better. This applies to both people recovering from hunter pounces and people incapped/getting picked up. In all of these situations a person is helpless to fight off common infected so if you’re covering, try to do it by standing on the person and meleeing liberally.
Basically we should be in one of 3 modes at any given time:
normal move. walking pace mixed with running, killing all common infected. Slightly strung out so that we can’t all get hit by one vomit.
stacked. If there’s a barfed person or a natural horde, find the nearest defensible position and everyone stacks up and defends.
burst. About 10 to 15 seconds of focused running because we know all special infected are dead. Any more than this and we tend to get hung up anyway and shit starts going wrong.
I agree Trey, one peeve of mine is when someone is boomered and A. they run around into everyone’s line of fire and B. no one is covering their backs. Rushing is our biggest weakness I think, if we go up against a team that does it we need to then focus on hitting them all at the same time and not one at a time.
If we can take down the smoker , boomer and maybe one hunter that should be the cue to run like hell (within reason of course) as one hunter by themselves is no threat.
If you are boomed, most important thing is to duck. If you do that then teammates can shoot above your headline and clear them off. This is important if you can’t make it to your teammates.
Also, if smoker and boomer are down, I think that’s enough for a rush. Two hunters can’t do much if we rush together. The thing is that one person usually starts lagging behind.
Some things to think about for BH:
BH1 - You know where all the boomer spawns are: rocks, trees, etc. we really need to stop boomers in BH1, since it is hard to see anyways. We also need to avoid getting stuck in the forest, which means saving anyone who gets pulled right away.
Another important thing is to get on the bridge instead of getting stuck on the picnic table.
BH2 - Getting pulled down out the first windows is very bad! It isn’t too hard to kill the smoker before the pull, just strafe in and out the windows. If he shoots his tongue and misses you have a few seconds to shoot him. If a teammate gets pulled down, don’t jump down with him! Fall damage sucks, just cover him from up top unless you can’t get to him.
BH3 - Just gotta make a lot of headway while special infected are down, especially at the end.
BH4 - Not too hard. If we end up fighting the tank at start, watch out for the tree trunk! Do you guys want to go through the house at the end or jump behind the fence and go around? Also, do you guys like to search the warehouse after the beginning? Guess it depends on if we have a moly.
BH5 - Probably should just cheese it up in the corner :P Save a pipe for the ending, perhaps.
The BH finale is pretty easy (and frustrating for infected) if you make it all the way to the farmhouse, as our team showed last night. Three people in the corner with auto-shotties and one person on the table with a HR to kill smokers that peek in the various windows, then head outside for the tanks and be patient and juke rocks. I hadn’t played it in a while but it is definitely the easiest and most intuitive of all the finales for the survivors.
Actually a good tactic for that level might be to really focus on the very first tank as that is not an easy tank. We should play just the finale a few times to get some more practice as infected, as that is the hardest level to be infected on and is the most point-valuable round. Our team was getting smoked up to that point and almost turned the game around with a finale win alone.
Yeah we need to plan carefully when we’re infected in the finale. I think saving the infected to hit the survivors when/if they try to leave the house to the backyard is a good plan. It’s especially important to try to get a barf on them before they get out into the open. This will slow them down and give the tank an opportunity to catch someone slowed by common infected.
If the survivors make it out into the backyard, there’s really only a couple of options:
snipe with rocks. Try to do this from behind obstacles like the garage/shed thing so they can’t take you down while you’re throwing. some non-tank should act as spotter/forward observer and correct the tank’s aim
go in with a log to try to take some out. The tank basically has no chance of catching anyone in the back yard so the logs are the only way to incap a survivor. There’s one log over by the barn (near the haybales) and one behind the garage.
last resort, we could run the tank as far back in the level as it can go before we lose control of it. Once we lose control, hopefully we’ll be able to get all 4 of us spawned as special infected and be able to help the AI tank once it gets back to the backyard. This might be a good idea if the survivors start trying to hunt for the tank. Even if they kill the tank, we will have drawn them far away from the rescue vehicle.
