Left 4 Dead

I discovered that enterprising individuals may opt to customize Left 4 Dead in a variety of ways. One of the simplest “mods” that one can make is to change the texture maps/skins of the characters/props, and so I decided to take a stab at that (as you can see by the image to the right) before making any more involved explorations into the world of modding. Making a level seems tempting, but man… this game was not set-up to allow for straightforward editing. I’m not sure what the rules are for naming convention… but it seems that you may randomly add characters to some file names… but not to others… same with reducing the number of characters in a file name. There also appear to be multiple instances of texture calls per character… how these calls are actually used? Dunno… all I found was that attempting to edit the second call causes Left 4 Dead not to start. At any rate, I’ve created a “new” skin for Zoey (which was mostly just an edit of the default one in Photoshop). No more “me time” though until I finish some shading stuff.

Update: I decided that I’m not going to do any additional work on the Zoey skin, so I’ve uploaded it in case anyone else wants to use it. You can download the skin here. You’ll want to enlarge the image to your right and make sure that the pak01_dir.vpk file has lines that have been edited to look as they do in the image. If you’re not familiar with how to edit skins in Left 4 Dead, you’ll want to look through this page.