Left 4 Dead update adds lobby browser

A new Left 4 Dead update was released this morning (Singapore time). The patch adds a “lobby browser” to the game under the “Play Online” menu item.

In a statement released to Shacknews, a spokesperson for Valve said the lobby browser will make it easier for players to discover the best available lobbies and games for them to join.

The browser is also able to show games that are using custom add-ons and campaigns, even if the add-ons are not installed on the player’s machine.

“You can filter by difficulty, official and/or add-on campaigns and by lobbies and/or games in progress,” the Valve spokesperson said.

Full patch log below:

Left 4 Dead

• The Play on Steam Group Server screen now displays which Steam group it’s searching while updating the list
• After calling a vote to change difficulty in game it is now correctly updated in matchmaking

Add-on Campaigns

• When downloading a new version of an add-on and installing it (by double clicking the .VPK file), it will now correctly overwrite the pervious version, even while Left 4 Dead is currently running
• Addressed a crash when two mission files with the same name are installed
• Steam Group Servers now will now correctly offer download links when running add-on campaigns

Server

• The server will now warn if the public or private tags exceed their limits. Public tags are limited to 63 characters. Private tags used for matchmaking are now limited to 1024 characters. Note that the private tags include the name of each add-on campaign installed on the server, so an excessive number of add-on campaigns can hit this limit

SDK

• The VPK tool should be able to handle campaigns larger than 500MB now
• You can now drag and drop or pass a VPK file to the vpk.exe tool to have it extract the contents of the add-on to a folder. This mirrors the functionality of passing a folder and having it create a VPK file
• Detail.vbsp and lights.rad have been added to the distribution.