I Hate Mountains

All right, you can stop sending us e-mails to say that the Left 4 Dead SDK was released yesterday, we already know it. We’re actively following what’s going on in Valve’s universe day after day and downloaded it as soon as it came out.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t add anything useful to us for the moment, simply because we made our own SDK during this 6 month wait and because the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools doesn’t provide anything more for the moment. Basically, it’s just a renamed Source SDK. For the moment, we didn’t investigate much, but it looks like all the changes are more or less to make the old tools compatible with the new Left 4 Dead Source engine, to release the same old particle editor and to copy/paste the Valve Developer Community’s tutorials into the Left 4 Dead folder.

We’ll see how it goes, but as far as I can tell, we’ll only use one file from the Left 4 Dead Authoring Tools, the editor’s official entity list configuration file: left4dead.fgd. The Sketchup plugin looks cool too, but we’d really prefer a plugin that would allow us to export Sketchup models directly into Source models using a GUI, because Sketchup always allowed us to export in a random format (well, the professional version does it) and then convert it into an SMD file using XSI Mod Tools.

Anyway, there is no revolution for the moment. We are more eager for them to update the matchmaking system and I bet this release won’t change much for us. At least until the SDK is fully finished and polished. Then we may see tools like the ones everyone thought they would add. But I’m getting a bit bitchy there :D

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 16th, 2009 at 18:01 and is filed under Development, Lamentation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.