L4D2 Hard X Expert Custom Servers

Hard X Mod v2.0 (early access)

This is a very large update. Everything I will be describing in this announcement is accurate to what the mod is capable of, but its unfinished balance will limit its potential. Many values of max SI haven't even had dedicated configs written for them. Everything will use either a config written for Hard 8, or Hard 12.
Expect balance issues.
Expect bugs.
It will take a couple of months at least to refine all of this new stuff to perfection. I'll make another announcement when it reaches the point where i consider it stable and complete
It's in a good enough state to make public. v1 of the mod is terrible, so even in its unfinished state this update is already a clear improvement. Don't be shy and give it a try. If you encounter problems, just report them in the group chat or anywhere in the group and I'll fix it as soon as i can.

The same old /hard command exists, but there is a new command called /hxo.
It's short for Hard X Override. Use it to load pre-made override configs that can change the gameplay in a variety of ways. Current release only has a few.
The X-Treme override for example will override spawn patterns to be a lot more difficult. This override alone can make a low SI value like 12 feel much more difficult - even with the same spawn frequency. I highly recommend this override if you seek the most engaging challenge this mod has to offer, as the difficulty increase comes from optimizing spawn locations to be much more oppressing.
Smaller overrides come in this release such as disabling SI being attracted to bile, disabling initial spawn delay, etc.
Many more will be added in the future! Also, suggestions for new overrides are welcomed.

If you don't have sufficient permission, any action taken through /hard or /hxo will need to pass a vote check. Before only admins could avoid the vote menu, but now the lobby host can too! If you were the first person to join - or the one who originally hosted the game through lobby in main menu - the server will now label you as host, giving you elevated permissions to customize the gameplay without hassle. Admins are still more powerful though. They can revoke permission granted by lobby host if they want

The obvious feature is the interface it provides for adjusting max SI, but it goes way deeper. Hard X as a gamemode is severely held back by the vanilla director. The patterns of how it spawns SI are monotonous, predictable, and leverage very little of the space available. Tempo can be too easily abused for cheesing spawns. And then I can go on for many paragraphs about several small details i disagree with.

So why not just remake every part of the director that's not good, optimizing it for the gameplay of hard x gamemodes? That's the primary purpose of this mod. The majority of the vanilla director's systems are abandoned in favour of those of the mod. You can think of it as a "custom director" mod.

v1 of the mod didn't go too far in achieving this purpose. The things it did do were riddled with flaws, making the net improvement over vanilla not a huge amount. v2 scraps everything from v1. All features from v1 are completely redesigned to be greatly improved, and many new capabilities are added.


That's enough prefacing - time to go into some detail! I'm only going to give an overview of the most important stuff. Proper detailed documentation will come at a later date (i hate writing documentation, so i can't promise it will be soon)

• Can define custom spawn directions
  
• Existing spawn directions are replaced with ones using better logic. For example, front direction will be way more accurate to where "front" should be, and many spawn locations previously impossible with front direction are now possible
  
• Multi-direction system finely controlled by configurable ratios/weights
  
• Direction modifiers - want a spawn to be front + above? Above is a modifier that can apply on top of a front pool. Can get super specific as modifiers can stack. left direction + far + narrow + below for example is easily defined. The mod applies modifiers based on which base pools allow/block certain modifiers (defined via the configuration), and a configurable % of how many spawns should attempt to use each modifier.

Spawn waves are finite, but are split into "levels". The custom configuration files the mod uses support defining unique sub-configurations for each of these levels. An example spawn wave:

• level 1 can force spawns to happen only in front, prioritizing furthest locations
  
• level 2 can force many spawns close and directly above
  
• level 3 can force most spawns to be directly left/right of survivors
  
• level 4 can be half front half behind

You get the idea. Spawn patterns can completely change in between levels. If you're stuck at a chokepoint that's tough to push, holding that position will be far more engaging due to your progress into a spawn wave triggering these shifts in where things are spawning. Sudden repositioning will be needed (and hopefully exciting). Also i said each level can have its own unique configuration - that's as broad in meaning as you think. You can be as creative as you want with these configurations. Set unique values of any convar (from vanilla or any plugin) for each level.
The intention behind this design is to break monotonous gameplay. Although it's a bit hard to keep it a fair challenge while trying to have such drastic changes to spawns occur between levels. This is probably the toughest part to balance and still requires a lot more work as of this release

With a finite spawn wave, sources of intensity coming from killing infected are completely removed. Intensity now serves the sole purpose of measuring mistakes.
There are global intensity values which are the primary consideration for change. Global intensity being max causes a "failure" type of relax. Between 0 and max, it will affect spawn frequency.

Relax refers to breaks from spawning. You have 3 types:

• Failure: very little base time, can be interrupted by moving very short distances ahead
  
• Reward: very high base time, allows for much further travel distance without interruption
  
• Initial: similar to reward, except its base time is even higher usually but with shorter allowed travel distance.

Initial relax can only be triggered once - upon leaving the starting saferoom.
Reward relax can only occur if you clear an entire spawn wave.
Failure relax happens from accumulating too high of global intensity during a spawn wave.
When spawning resumes after any relax type finishes, it always starts back at level 1.

The idea is to discourage using damage/incap as reliable ways to allow free progress. If you want a break from spawns that actually allows you to make progress, you must finish a spawn wave from start to end and get the reward type of relax.

During relax there exists a handicap. Intensity of individual survivors behave differently during relax. If you contributed greatly towards the global intensity that caused the failure, you will add handicap time to the relax duration until you recover (get revived, heal up, etc). Abandoned incaps will not provide this handicap.

Also, during a spawn wave, players who are far behind will contribute to a "Secondary" global intensity which is incapable of triggering relax. High secondary global intensity instead redirects spawns originally meant to happen around these straggling players to instead happen around those up ahead. If the straggling players catch up, this secondary intensity gets merged with the primary one (and vice versa)

What if the team plays extremely well, never really increasing global intensity at all and reaches the end of a spawn wave? If the team is having this easy of a time, giving them relax feels inappropriate. But how can we reward this success in a way that keeps them in the action they most probably want?

The answer is limbo. If you reach the end of a spawn wave without any major mistakes, spawning will continue indefinitely - but the pattern of spawn locations will be optimized for rushing. In this state, front direction will be used much less, with majority of these spawns repositioned behind the team. There are still some front spawns to guarantee at least some resistence, but the intended balance is to make the more aggressive rush playstyle most effective. The "reward" here is progress can be made much quicker due to rushing being the encouraged gameplay.
Unlike reward relax, limbo can last indefinitely. It can be interrupted by either:

• Not rushing fast enough
  
• Global intensity rising

No matter how it got interrupted, this interruption is always a reward-type relax.
If played right, the limbo state is a much better reward for the game's success than any type of relax.

The mod will define the current game under one gameplay profile at a time. The profiles are as follow:

• normal: nothing special is happening. Just your everyday gameplay of moving forwards
  
• holdout: a holdout type finale is ongoing
  
• gauntlet: a gauntlet type finale/event is ongoing
  
• scavenge: a scavenge type finale/event is ongoing
  
• panic: a battlefield-based panic event is ongoing
  
• panic_cont: the team exited a battlefield-based panic event by rushing forwards. Profile shifts to this if event wasn't finished

Just like how levels can have unique configurations, so can gameplay profiles. Spawn patterns can be tuned to be more appropriate for these scenarios

Panic events, specifically the battlefield-based ones, are improved greatly.
If the team is detected to be rushing forwards, the spawn pattern dynamically shifts a big portion of spawns to be in their way to give enough resistance for the challenge to not be so easily escaped.
Completely exiting the area before the event ends will transition the event to exclusively use spawn locations relative to survivor positions rather than within the battlefield areas. Exiting by retreating will keep the game under the "panic" gameplay profile, while exiting by rushing forces a gameplay profile unique to this scenario. Expect heavy resistance upon rushing past a panic event. Exploiting these events are no longer possible

• Horde spawns will respect the custom tempo system.
  
• Hordes are more frequent the more you move forward. Stalled progress results in much more relief in horde appearances

• Tank spawns respect tempo
  
• Additional conditions to delay tank spawns exist such as min progress into a spawn wave, min healthy players, max global intensity, etc
  
• unique config override for when tank is in play. Current version uses this to make SI spawns less frequent (instead of completely stopping it)
  
• A unique spawn location pool is used for tanks. Don't ever worry about them spawning too close. If it's hard 20 for example where you may need a bit of time to prepare for his arrival, rest assured that he will spawn far enough to give you this time

A common thing in many maps is that they will run a vscript changing various director variables to create an infinite horde event. Vanilla mutation scripts had a serious flaw in this case. Let's say you wanted 1000 max relax flow travel in vanilla. Many of these infinite horde events set that same variable much lower. You effectively make these events easier just to make gameplay outside of the events harder. (mutation script value overwrites the event's value)

This mod correctly scales all of its systems to respect what the map wants. Some systems can't be scaled directly due to working too differently. In those cases i just assume what goal the map is trying to achieve by this change and have the mod compromise this in its own way.

I put a lot of effort into this integration. Compatibility should be very good - even better than vanilla hard x

The mod having full control over spawn locations makes solving the problem of SI of the same class spawning too close to eachother trivial.
Each time something spawns, their position is remembered for a short amount of time. While it's in memory, spawns of the same class can't happen nearby those positions. The issue in vanilla where, for example, 4 boomers all spawn in the same ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spot (might as well just be 1 boomer if they're all gonna be together like this) is now completely gone. Their pathing will still create scenarios where SI of the same class appeared grouped, but editing their AI is completely out of the scope of this server

This took a lot of time to make. I apologize for the complete lack of updates during the dev time for all of this. A lot of the design for this was hard to get right, and even now after so many iterations i think there is still room for improvement. As i said at the top of this announcement, the balance still needs a lot of work - but what i'm getting at here is there are still large plans to go beyond what's been done in this new version. My ambitions for how great i can make the Hard X experience are extremely high. Expect continued development.

Over the coming months, the balance will slowly be refined and more overrides will be added. With my time finally freed from this major update, I'll also be focusing much needed attention on smaller parts of the server. Stuff like a simpler way to interface with the various cookie options (thinking of trying to make a webui out of the motd for this), along with many ideas of misc mods i've been wanting to work on.

Before this update i never considered these servers as "good". It's always been acceptable, but I think this update is the first step into making the servers actually good. The new spawn location system alone makes things a lot more fun. Having SI make use of so much more of the space available makes the gamemode so much more engaging.
I feel really proud with how it's all turned out. I hope you guys enjoy it too~

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oh one more thing - i revised all the mods we use. Some were even swapped out, so you may notice a few things different unrelated to spawns. Also i fixed 2 causes for server crashes.
These type of changes are extremely small in comparison to what's been done with the hard x mod