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

Believe me, we’d really like to add some news on this front page, but I got an unfortunate accident with my Source SDK. Today, without any warning, it just stopped working. When opening up the Source SDK Launcher, there’s nothing I can do anymore. It opens correctly, but I can’t click anymore on the tools. If I try to double-click on Hammer Editor, Model Viewer or Face Poser, the SDK Launcher just stops itself without any error message and without launching the corresponding application.

This is not the first time the Source SDK stops working… but this is the first time it does not display any error message. I tried the usual stuff: Refresh SDK Content, Reset Game Configurations, Defragment Cache Files, Verify Integrity of Tool Cache, Restart Steam, Reboot Windows, Delete the ClientRegistry.blob, uninstall and reinstall the Source SDK GCFs, delete everything SDK-related in Steam and reinstall everything from scratch… I even deleted the whole Valve preferences from the registry. So far no change.

I used the SDK for a few hours and it stopped working when I tried to relaunch Hammer using a different game configuration. The only thing I did before it stopped working is install the Dawn of War II Demo (but I doubt this was related, I uninstalled it just to be sure). There was also a Steam update released at the same time… I really don’t know what to do, if some of you already faced the same problem someday and know what to do, please post in the comments or send an email to nicolas@ihatemountains.com, I really need it to finish the fifth map of the campaign…

Edit April 18:
I just entirely uninstalled Steam and reinstalled it only with Source SDK to witness that it doesn’t change anything. I’m now completely stuck.

Edit April 19:
Mokay, I uninstalled Steam again, trashed ALL the GCFs (sigh), deleted the whole Valve registry key, cleaned the computer with TuneUp, and installed everything back from scratch (40 GB of GCFs to download, sigh) and things seems to be working again. Thanks to the people who tried to help there and via e-mail, much appreciated.

A few days ago, we unveiled our new project I Hate Mountains and this website was already visited by more than 3,000 people. This is quite impressive and it motivates us for the next part of the development. We’d like to thank you all for your support and your confidence. It’s now our job to try not to disappoint you, and believe us, it will not be the case.

Talking about the campaign, here’s some fresh news.
In our first level, the forest, a big part had to be reviewed and redone after the release of Left 4 Dead. At the beginning, it was quite an impressive and vast open-space: fun to play, hard to optimize and finally… it had some problems to fit in the Left 4 Dead gameplay.

Making a Left 4 Dead level is not only a question of level-design and geometry. You can’t build it and play it straight out of the box like most of Valve’s games. You have to complete another important task, the nav mesh creation. The goal is to mark the paths for the game, these nav meshes contains a lot of informations for the artificial intelligence. Where can survivors and infected walk ? Where is the event ? Where can they respawn ? and stuff. The Director also needs it to build the gameplay during the game.

Problem is, when we got our first playable version of the level and tried to build the nav meshes, the process took three hours to reach 1%. Finally, we never managed to get a fully working version of the level. The game didn’t knew how to compute the path from the spawn point to the first safe room because there was way too many combinations in this vast open-space.

Conclusion ?
We found out that Left 4 Dead was not really suitable for open and vast environments. Something had to be done. This is why I spent the last weeks trying to transform this open-space level in a corridor-like version. This is not something we wanted to do, but we had to resign, and after a lot of talking and babbling with the team members, we found several ways to transform the level without loosing this precious open-space feeling.

Today, this first level is mostly finished and we believe the creation process recently reached 75% (unless the late release of the SDK messes everything up, wouldnt be such a surprise).

Concerning the other levels of this campaign, our progress is constant. The third level is already beeing tested right now. We’re trying to push the director to the limits, forcing him to make mistakes and telling us what’s wrong with the level and the nav meshes.

Stay tuned for more developer banter until the release.
PS: The screenshots page is now open.