Demo, Split-Screen, Third-Person, More - 11/11/08

Lots of news on the day of the public release of Left 4 Dead's demo.

Steam stats
You can tell what time the L4D demo was released today by the spike in Steam bandwidth, peaking at 70,460 Mbits/sec. Graph below.

Also available through Steam stats is the peak of people playing the L4D demo, which is at 19,500 as of this posting.

Split-screen coming back
Split-screen is coming back according to Valver Yahn Bernier, posting on the official forums:

Splitscreen was always something we only wanted to officially support on the x360 due to the controller issues. However, we are planning on making some of the functionality work on the PC as an "unsupported" bonus feature. We turned it off for the demo because we didn't want to have to deal with any additional bug reports etc. about it interfering with the demo experience, but the current plan is to re-enable it after we launch the full product.

There are a number of tuning variables, the but tricky thing will be the controller. When testing, the best setup on the PC is to have two joystick/x360 style USB controllers. I think it will also be possible to have one keyboard/mouse and one joystick player.

I haven't looked into supporting two keyboards/mice, as I'm not even sure PC's can deal with that and I doubt we're talking about lots and lots of possible users for such a config.

Good news for PC players wanting to play with their friends and family.

Third person options
There are three different gameplay perspectives that we've found in Left 4 Dead. The first of course is first person which is default:

The second can be done on any server at any time, which gives a Gears of War-like view over the shoulder. All you have to do is type thirdpersonshoulder into the console.

A new one that we didn't see until the newest update to the L4D demo is a full third person view, farther back then the thirdpersonshoulder view. The strange thing is that you must have sv_cheats 1 set and then type thirdperson into the console. We're not exactly sure why this view is a cheat and the shoulder view isn't.

The next picture is what happens when you're just standing around during a live game.

To return to first person from the new thirdperson view you must type firstperson into the console.

Other stuff
IGN has posted their impressions of the demo with news that their full review of L4D will be posted on Monday.

NemesisLeon has started a thread on the forums for alternative mode config files including "Item Survival" and "Lone Survivor". Hugh created a fan video of L4D to the song "Love Song For A Vampire".

Servers
In server news, Valver Milton Ngan posted on the hlds_linux mailing list detailing how Valve sets up each server box with 40 server instances each which I've reposted here.

Oblivion165 has created a video showing how to set up an L4D server on your PC. Very well done and it should help you out if you're having trouble.

If you're in the market for a Left 4 Dead server and want to help support L4D411, order a server from GameServers!