Left 4 Dead has officially been released on Steam, and you can also watch the 2nd TV Spot. Have fun!
Left 4 Dead and the 2nd TV Spot are both available on Steam now
Submitted by smacker626 on Tue, 11/18/2008 - 8:39am. Not tagged yetNVIDIA ForceWare v178.24 and v180.43 beta
Submitted by smacker626 on Tue, 11/18/2008 - 8:30am. Not tagged yetNVIDIA ForceWare v178.24 was released on October 15, 2008, and v180.43 on October 24, 2008. You can grab them both here.
I'm currently running v180.43, it comes with PhysX v8.10.13. There's no fan speed control with nTune or the latest System Tools, and Flat panel scaling can't be changed from "Use my display's built-in scaling." Because of the lack of fan speed control, I finally tried EVGA Precision, and it works great, all of the stats that it can report can be shown via a built-in in-game overlay, and even in the System Tray.
Left 4 Dead pre-load and Demo size
Submitted by smacker626 on Thu, 11/13/2008 - 10:03pm. Not tagged yetDo you want to know how big of a download the Left 4 Dead pre-load is? Well here you go.
Keep in mind that I had the demo downloaded before I started pre-loading, and that may decrease the pre-load size.
You can also see the Hard-Drive space taken up by the pre-load and the demo.

Left 4 Dead pre-loading now, and the demo is out for everyone
Submitted by smacker626 on Thu, 11/13/2008 - 7:54pm. Not tagged yetLeft 4 Dead can now be pre-loaded by pre-purchasers:

Also, the demo is currently available for everyone, even non pre-purchasers. The "open" demo started on the 11th and will continue until the 17th the release of the game on the 18th.
And in case you didn't know, if you pre-purchase the game (i.e., buy before it's released), you get a 10% ($5) discount.
Happy zombie killing to all!
Left 4 Dead: screenshot of the loading poster when going into a server
Submitted by smacker626 on Mon, 11/10/2008 - 7:12am. Not tagged yetRead the title, and then check the attached picture :).
Does Left 4 Dead freeze your system for a few seconds at random intervals? Do you have a multi-core CPU? Try this
Submitted by smacker626 on Mon, 11/10/2008 - 6:24am. Not tagged yetUpdate (2008-11-15): I've played again since the last few updates and my problems when using AA and or VSync are pretty much gone now :).
This post is just going to be a copy of my post at SUF.
See my edit(s) below for a "better?" fix.
At certain places I would have stuttering for just a second, it seemed like it would be loading something there, so I figured it was the usual HL2 stuff. But randomly while playing, the game would lock the OS up for about 5 seconds, and then go back to normal (OS lock up means that even toggling Caps Lock doesn't work).
A Left 4 Dead fan pic
Submitted by smacker626 on Mon, 11/10/2008 - 5:57am. Not tagged yetI was reading SUF and saw this post by fhein, apparently he made this as an entry for a L4D giveaway contest. Unfortunately it didn't win, but the picture is awesome enough to be my new desktop background ;).
He also posted the sprites he made for that picture.
Left 4 Dead preparations
Submitted by smacker626 on Sun, 11/09/2008 - 7:48pm. Not tagged yetI bought Left 4 Dead a few hours ago and downloaded the demo. I'm going to check it out soon, but first I'm defragging everything.
In case you haven't seen the first 30 second TV Spot for Left 4 Dead, you should check it out. The music is especially good, and you can find the full music video here. You can also find the 5 minute intro to the game here.
And for anyone tha
Obama wins the 2008 presidential election
Submitted by smacker626 on Wed, 11/05/2008 - 12:12am. Not tagged yetI don't care about the election personally, but a lot of people do, and it's hard not to hear what's going on, so I figured this was worth a short update.
I have a lot of stuff to write about right now, but it will have to stay on my TODO List until I finish getting Windows back up to speed :(. Suffice to say, I was troubleshooting for about 2 weeks, and then an NVIDIA ForceWare update hosed my installation of Windows XP Pro.
Later.
NVIDIA ForceWare v178.13
Submitted by smacker626 on Mon, 10/13/2008 - 2:43am. Not tagged yetIn case you didn't know, the NVIDIA ForceWare v178.13 drivers for NVIDIA GeForce video cards was released back on September 25th. It includes the latest version of the PhysX System Software.
