Left 4 Dead

While cleaning/moving our offices around (all our desks at Valve are on wheels so we can have desk races), we discovered this old, long ago used Zombie decision making tree. It was created before our session with Mike Patton to record the common zombie sounds. While it is near indecipherable gibberish thanks to bad penmanship, it shows not at an AI level how a zombie behaves but all the speech opportunities and transitions.

Lone GunmanYou and your Magnum against the deadly horde and Boomers.So you have your Magnum pistol and… well you do have your Magnum pistol. You better be counting bullets because four swipes by a common and you are dead. Getting boomed? Forget about it.

Following Left 4 Dead 2 How do you follow Left 4 Dead 2? It depends on your platform.

If you are on the PC or Mac:Facebook Only 4%Twitter Only 2%Steam Forums Only 36%Facebook/Twitter/Steam 5%Facebook/Twitter 1%Facebook/Steam 16%Twitter/Steam 4%None of the above 32%

Another way to look at it is 26% PC/Mac players use Facebook, 12% use Twitter, 61% use the Steam forums and 32% use none of those ways.

If you are on the 360:Facebook Only 22%Twitter Only 2%Steam Forums Only 9%Facebook/Twitter/Steam 6%Facebook/Twitter 5%Facebook/Steam 7%Twitter/Steam 1%None of the above 48%

That means 40% Xbox 360 players use Facebook, 14% use Twitter, 23% use the Steam forums and 48% use none of those ways.

If we combine the communities – they are about the same size - 33% use Facebook, 14% use Twitter, and 43% use the Steam Forums and 40% use none of these. These numbers do not include the non-votes and only include players who read the blog so the – none of these – option is probably much larger. We have some work to do…

Movie Fan?Have you ever watched a Left 4 Dead 1 or 2 inspired live action video on YouTube?

Next Wednesday?Check back next Wednesday for a special update. We are going need your help...

Last night a few updates were applied to the Xbox 360 version of Left 4 Dead.

Foremost is the ability to recover achievement progress that was lost after The Sacrifice release. Recovered progress will be added to any new progress made since the release. In a few cases it may not be possible to recover the data for every achievement, but the majority of players should see their progress restored.

The update also includes the following:

• In Versus mode Tanks will spawn in stasis until a human player takes over. Tanks in stasis are invisible and invulnerable, and won't move or attack.• Tank speed is no longer reduced when on fire.• Allow players on the Infected team to manually spawn during finales.• Added a vote option to toggle All-Talk.• Special Infected that causes a Survivor to stumble into a "ledge hang" situation will receive 50 points.• Bullets that first pass through an infected character before striking a Survivor are now ignored as friendly fire.<• In Versus mode car alarms will now trigger anytime a Special Infected pulls or stumbles a Survivor into an alarm car.• Survivor Bots no longer try to melee exploding barrels out of their way.

We are also “featuring” Realism Versus. This week we added quicker spawns for the infected. If you haven’t played recently, you are missing out on one of the most intense Left 4 Dead 2 competitive experiences. It is like regular Versus but no health kits in the world, no glows on fellow survivors, harder to kill commons and now faster Special Infected spawns (coming soon to the 360). Give it a try this week, it's what all the cool kids will be playing.

You are glowing

You liked the idea of changing the Survivor’s glow. The breakdown was roughly 50% for, 30% against, 20% no opinion but I just like to vote. So this week we are changing the glow and also incorporating a suggestion from the forums. The glow color will now correspond to the run speed of the Survivors. This should help tanks know who they can catch.

While we were at it, we added a glow to the Witch for the Infected team.

Do you compete?

Have you ever played in an L4D1 or L4D2 tournament? Let us know in this week's in-game poll.