Left 4 Dead Floating Tips

[Chwaga]

I'm trying to make a l4d survival map, and I want to have a floating hint to tell the players what to do to start the survival map (as seen in the crescendo/finale events 'Push the button...Be ready to fight the horde.') How can I do this?

Thanks :)

[Nullvector]

You can find an example of a floating tip in the standards map. They are a simple info_game_event_proxy entity. You just set an event name and range it's visible from.

Now, the tricky part is that there is no list of valid event names in the wiki. The example level is set to explain_radio, and it would seem that there are various others such as explain_elevator and explain_generator, one for every event in L4D.

I was poking around in the L4D files to try and see if I could make my own explain_ texts earlier and I think it's possible by editing a couple files. I didn't test it as my level doesn't need it yet and I am hoping that the SDK update will give us a way to make custom floating tips right inside hammer... But I suppose I should go ahead and see if its doable in case they don't add that feature.

Edit:
meh, I am way too lazy to try editing resources/l4dgame_english.txt and scripts/instructor_lessons.txt, but it appears that you could make your own floating tips that way. there might be another file required that I haven't found yet.. so here's hoping they let you set up custom tips in hammer!

[Chwaga]

Okay, thanks. Adding/editing in custom events wouldn't work online though, would it?

[Nullvector]

Probably not. I imagine you could include edited files with your map, but that's bad because it'd have to overwrite theirs.

I've never actually mapped for Source before so I don't know enough about how it works, but if you could simply have your custom event stuff all on its own txt file that you include with your map and execute somehow, that would solve it. However I don't know if that would work or if things have to be in specific files...


This is definitely a topic of interest though, as creating unique encounters is not very difficult, and as such, being able to explain them to players in game would be great.

The first thing I wanted to do with the SDK was see if I could make events that require you to get from point-A to point-B rather than just wait them out. It's definitely doable but without a floating tip, how am I going to make it clear to the players that they need to keep moving?