This is from 2009/2010, and I came across it after re-playing L4D2 in the wake of its one-day-giveaway by Valve. It's aimed at graphics devs but has a lot of interesting insight about visual design and perception, procedural generation techniques, and how to simplify in general.
The last few slides are pretty great, showing how they render the gaping internal zombie wounds in a computationally efficient way. Some fun bullet points: "Culling a torso as easy as culling an arm"..."1.5x as expensive...156x the number of ways to die"
If you've ever played the game, the graphic touches are so well done you just take it for granted. But it's interesting to see how important they were to the developers, especially to serve as visual feedback to emphasize the power of certain weapons. That's not an option for most realistic shooters, or at least it seems the ratings board is more approving of gibbing zombies than human baddies.
The graphics in L4D2 are great, the game runs very fast on Ubuntu, Valve has done a great job. I hope more games keep coming to Ubuntu and Linux for Steam overall. I tried the Source SDK recently and the sample builds and runs successfully on Ubuntu. Now as far as game play, L4D2 and TF2 seem similar to me, too Hollywood, I like more muted game play, similar to L4D which I tried on Steam on Wine once. If that was on Linux now I'd buy that one and probably play it more. Also more Minecraft like games where when a grenade goes off you see damage to the walls, ground, etc. and you can build stuff, defenses, machines, etc. that would be unreal.
L4D and L4D2 are so similar I'm not sure I understand how one is muted and the other is too Hollywood. The only real differences between them are a few changes to infected, melee weapons and some additional gameplay mechanics.
E: there's a really cool technical presentation here that goes through some of the technical changes in L4D2 [1]
Left 4 Dead 2 punishes you much harder for going slowly. The Spitter and Charger were introduced for that express purpose, and a number of other mechanics (like crescendos) were changed in that direction too. That's probably what jebblue means by "muted" vs. "Hollywood" — the pacing.
If Valve is really invested in Linux, they should be working with the open source drivers' developers to make the game work better on Mesa. For example, I can't play games on Arch Linux because ATI's driver doesn't work with the latest Xorg.
Valve makes game software not video drivers, you need to email ATI and let them know you'd like your card's driver improved or bye a different vendor's card that has better support for Linux.
The last few slides are pretty great, showing how they render the gaping internal zombie wounds in a computationally efficient way. Some fun bullet points: "Culling a torso as easy as culling an arm"..."1.5x as expensive...156x the number of ways to die"
If you've ever played the game, the graphic touches are so well done you just take it for granted. But it's interesting to see how important they were to the developers, especially to serve as visual feedback to emphasize the power of certain weapons. That's not an option for most realistic shooters, or at least it seems the ratings board is more approving of gibbing zombies than human baddies.