Don’t worry, we’re not posting articles anymore because we’re migrating our website to WordPress. Google is slowly giving up on the external publishing and hosting features on their Blogger platform. This is quite a sudden decision on their part, and it seems that all they want is to gain control over all the blogs they’re hosting and save a few bucks.
Even if we see the advantage of letting Google take care of the server, I can see a lot more advantages in hosting it ourselves. Of course scalability is their main advantage, I can still remember this server, down on its knees when I released Portal: Prelude back in 2008, but still, this was only for a few days. The problem with this approach is that we’re losing all control and giving it back to Google. It prevents us from building our site the way we want, optimizing it for our needs and adding pages as we see it.
There will be a Bonuses/extras section on the website (it’s not a secret, there’s a disabled link on the left), plus one or two other things when the campaign will be released. We want to be able to build little dynamic systems and stuff. Of course, migrating the website to WordPress isn’t quite a piece of cake. Sure it can import everything from Blogger but it isn’t compatible with what we developed in the background and our design… soooo… it slows us down. Yeah, yet another excuse.
As for the anecdote, we’ve been in touch with people from Valve in the last few weeks. We told them about our problems with the game, the bugs we’re facing and the issues with the VPK system. For the moment, our campaign can’t be launched from a lobby, and it’s apparently something they’re aware of and trying to fix. Unfortunately as I said in our twitter channel, they can’t help us with any of our other issues (such as the few models making the game crash). I guess they fear an overwhelming increase in people asking for help, and we can understand their choice. I hope they’ll change their mind once we’ll send them an early build of what we did :D (dreaming is still free).
I see a lot of people have troubles with Blogger lately. How fortunate that I moved to my own server with WordPress right before the ordeal :D
All thanks to great VPS hosting service that I've found that allows quick server scaling in case of a peak overloads. And their prices are very reasonable (if not the cheapest out there).
And VPS means that I can manage the server however I want: from OS to multi-host VPN with custom load balancing.
You know the l4d and l4d2 community is very knowledgeable. Have you tried going to any of the forums and mentioning your problems? Perhaps someone has found the answer already.
@13xforever:
For the moment, I'm not convinced by VPSes. It might take a little more time to gain my confidence. It may sound dumb but… well… it is.
@ohmysac:
We're discussing these problems on the official L4D mailing list. Feel free to suggest another location.
good luck with every thing. i'm really lookinhg forward to this release.
what are the chances of valve making this campagin an official campagin?
like they did with popular maps in TF2
@ anon
i can semi comfirm this, ive been emailing with valve recently, asking that question and they do intent to support custom campaigns, i quote:
"From hosting on our servers, to help them spread, to adding them to the "official" maps"
^^
this is great news. Dev's how work this hard on their mod certainly deserve the recognition from valve.
Good luck guys, seriously. We've been following your work for months now (since Prelude), and we really hope you'll release it as soon as possible.
I've given up hope that I Hate Mountains will be released some day. Nothing to see here, please move on..
If you are familiar with the modding scene you should know that a lot of mods take a lot of time to develop, some times more than 2 years. Give the devs a break – they don't need to read this kind of comments.
That's not detracting us in any way, we don't really care. People can't really understand how hard it is to come up with something like this when there's already hundreds of campaigns out there. We're not just building another campaign, we're building something from the ground up with a different approach. We know what we did, we know what we have to do, we know that the campaign is fully playable since months, but "playable" doesn't mean "finished" and even less "polished" or "bug-free".
:O
so amm.. where do i sign up for the beta?
:P
I come back here at least once a month, hoping to hear that valve has finally helped you guys out….i'm sorry that they haven't, and can't wait to be able to play this!
What a great review! I wanted to get one immediately after reading your review. You mentioned that Safety 1st sent you two Complete Air Convertible Car Seats with Air Protect at no charge, to try out and keep; I was wondering how can I get one to try out as well? Can you provide advise and insights? Thank you!