Killing Floor coming soon

Killing Floor is a new Co-op Survival Horror game set for release on May 15th. You find yourself set in devastated England after cloning experiments go wrong. As a member of the military, who also created the beings, your mission is to survive and cleanse surrounding area’s from the failed experiments.

These aren’t your ‘usual gnaw your arm off zombies’, being for the military these solider-monsters are equipped with weapons such as chainsaws and blades, you may run into one or two with a chaingun.

The government attempted to shut them down with little success, they escaped after leaving nobody alive to try and shut them down. The experiments aren’t waiting to be taken out either, they will come for you. The police got sent in but didnt even make an impact on the situation. By the hundred the "soliders" emerged from housing tearing apart the cops turning London into a Killing Floor.

Killing Floor started as a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 and has since then grown. It was moved to Red Orchestra as a mod but Tripwire decided it should be more then that, and bought the rights and developed it into a game. The response has been excellent for it and many are awaiting its release.

Key features from the game are:

  -  Co-op game mode for up to six players obliterating multiple waves of specimens
  – Persistent Perks system, allowing players to convert their in-game achievements into permanent improvements to their character’s skills and abilities
  – Over 40 Steam Achievements, including "Dignity for the dead" for killing 10 enemies feeding on dead teammates’ corpses and "Hot Cross Fun" for finishing off 25 burning enemies with a Crossbow.
  – Watch those crucial and violent creature deaths in slomo "ZEDtime", even in multiplayer
  – Solo game mode for offline play
  – 9 different monster types trying to eat your face off, armed with everything from teeth and claws, through to chainsaws, chainguns and rocket-launchers
  – 12+ weapons for the players to chose from, ranging from knives and fire-axes up to pump shotguns, rifles and a flamethrower
  – Add in a welder, medical tools and body armor to help the players survive
  – Players choose which Perks to play with, so they can best balance out a co-op team to survive the horrors
  – Open, non-linear play areas: choose when and where to fight – or run; weld doors closed to try and direct the monster horde
  - Fully-configurable, allowing players to change things as simple as the difficulty level or number of creature waves, or go so far as to set up their own favorite waves of monsters
  – Support for Steam Friends and other Steamworks features
  – Includes SDK for the creation of new levels and mods

It is now available for pre-order from Steam with 25% of its regular price making it $14.99USD, otherwise you can purchase it for $19.99USD anytime after May 14.

L4D Freaky Free Friday

Valve have sent through news that they will be running a free day of gameplay for Left 4 Dead this Friday, titled "Freaky Free Friday".

The free 24 hours of Left 4 Dead will be starting at 12:01am GMT, which equates to 8:01am for WA users and 10:01am for Eastern States this Friday.  You can start preloading Left 4 Dead via Steam by clicking this link.  This free trial will give users 24 hours to play the game, including the new Survival mode with no obligation to buy the full game after the trial finishes.

Of course you’ll be well catered for with Freezone servers to play on, with 3FL running the largest number of Left 4 Dead servers in Australia with 320 servers in NSW and WA to play on!

Six Days in Fallujah canned by Konami

As we previously posted about, Atomic Games were working a game to be published by Konami titled "Six Days in Fallujah", it now appears that the game has been canned by Konami.  This move by Konami means that Atomic Games will have to find another game publisher for the game, which does mean it may still be released if they can find someone else to publish it. 

The title has stirred up quite a lot of controvery, with the developers openly admitting that they were consulting with US forces that were involved in the battle to take Fallujah in Iraq during the US led invasion.  What they were a little less willing to admit, but came to the surface anyway, was that they have also been consulting with former members of the Iraqi forces that were on the other side of the battles, which has obviously stirred up quite a lot of negative publicity for the game in the US.

Either way, it’ll be interesting to see if this title makes it and how much of the "realism" of the actual battles end up in the game if the title does find a new publisher.

Via:  Gamasutra

Valve tweaks Left 4 Dead

Valve have released a small required update to Left 4 Dead this morning, making a couple of tweaks and fixing some exploits.  Simply restarting your Steam client should pick-up the update.  Details after the jump.

The changes are as follows:

- Removed a survival related command exploit
- Achievements with multiple criteria can now be expanded to show progress
- mp_gamemode is now included with other console variables for server logging

Of course our servers are updated, so you can get back to your Freezone L4D gaming straight away!

Flash Game Friday: Robot Dinosaurs

Looking for something to do on an otherwise boring Friday whilst waiting for the weekend to finally arrive? Well maybe our section Flash Game Friday has something for you.

This week’s game is Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar, which is sort of self explanatory really isn’t it?  It includes Dinosaurs, that shoot beams, when they roar.. yeah.

Go play Robot Dinosaurs now!

Valve squash some bugs and exploits in L4D

Valve have released an update to Left 4 Dead this morning that fixes a few of the bugs that have come up on Survival mode and also addresses a few exploits that some naughty people were using.

One of the major bug fixes is making sure the tank keeps on spawning after around 14 minutes on Survival mode, with the exploit fixes changing some of the maps so that they can’t be used to be virtually invulnerable in Survival mode in certain spots.  The full list of changes are as follows:

- Darkened the Lighthouse background movie and increased the contrast with the user interface elements
- Chapter selection is now available when creating a Survival lobby
- Single player coop now works correctly after playing Survival online
- The correct game mode will be set when playing back a demo
- Changed holdout server spew to be development only
- Stats are no longer updated while viewing a demo
- Correctly update the leaderboard based on the player’s personal time, not the team best time
- Show the player’s best time in the scoreboard
- Removed Survival exploits from The Terminal, Last Stand, The Crane, The Boathouse and The Warehouse
- Fixed tanks sometimes not spawning after 15-20 minutes 

All 320 of the 3FL Left 4 Dead servers have been updated so you can get back to it asap.

Behind the scenes of the 3FL Gaming Network

Last night 3FL hit a new concurrent player peak, beating out the previous record of 779 set back in January by a large amount to take the current concurrent player peak to 1128.  So we thought it might be interesting to take a quick trip behind the scenes to have a look at what makes this stuff all happen from a technical point of view.

As many people would know, the main resources 3FL provides are a large number of games servers, the web site and associated features (including downloads and forums) as well as the Valve operated Steam content servers.  All of this content is provided as Freezone traffic to both iiNet and Westnet customers so it doesn’t count towards your download quota!

We did some analysis of the resource consumption that was required to cater for the 1128 player peak last night and purely from a games server standpoint we saw the following resource usage:

- Approximately 80Mbit/sec traffic directly involved with gamers playing on our games servers
- Approximately 120,000Mhz (or 120Ghz) of CPU power was required to cater for that many players

(This excludes the resource usage for other services such as Steam Content servers, web serving and the file mirror).

The hardware

Currently the 3FL Gaming Network comprises of in excess of 30 physical servers to run services such as game servers, the download mirrors and Steam Content servers.  These servers are geographically dispersed, with 3FL currently having services located within 6 different locations – specifically Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide and of course in Perth where our staff offices are primarily located.

This hardware is made up of a mixture of Dual Xeons, Dual Dual Core Xeons and Dual Quad Core Xeons ranging in various speeds (with the latter making up a larger number of our servers these days).  All of these servers plug into either 100Mbit or 1Gbit switched ethernet environments depending on their role, requirements and location.

Typically the newer games such as Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 run on the newest and fastest hardware, as the per-player system requirements for these games are higher than older games such as Battlefield 1942.  For example, our current loadout of 320 Left 4 Dead servers are run from 5 of our Dual Quad Core servers, with each server running 64 servers utilising the forked mode that Valve introduced for servers under Linux with Left 4 Dead.

What we run

The majority of 3FL is currently run on a fairly standard Linux OS, with a lot of custom created systems around this including extensive scripts and applications that tie certain features together and make them all work.  We do run a small number of Windows servers for specific applications (e.g. Steam Content servers) in addition to the Linux servers.

We utilise a number of freely available tools that have come from within the gaming community, such as the Sourcebans system for Valve Source engine based games, and other tools such as HLStatsX for player statistics generation.  Other tools such as the one that generates the numbers that appear on the Serverspy page utilise part community tools and features that we have custom written in-house, with other sections such as the Booking System being one that was entirely written in-house.

Steam Content servers

The Steam Content servers that 3FL provides are far and away the biggest source of traffic (bandwidth) out of all of the services that 3FL provides today.  The two servers are located in Sydney and Perth, with them both plugging into 1Gbit ethernet.  On average during peak usage times, these servers do between 150-200Mbit/sec of traffic each (so 300-400Mbit/sec combined). 

During updates for very popular games such as Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 in particular, the traffic from these servers increases many times over.  For example the traffic generated by the Scout Update for TF2 that came out a couple of months ago resulted in a spike on our Perth based server that reached 970Mbit/sec with our Sydney server at the same time reaching almost 700Mbit/sec of outgoing traffic (so in total approximately 1.6Gbit of Steam traffic).

Anyway, I hope that provides some of you who are interested a little bit of an insight into the resources and technical systems that power 3FL as it is today.  If you have any questions about different aspects, let us know in either the comments of this article or on the forums, and we’ll try to answer them as best we can (within reason).

Week 2 tracklist update for “Guitar Hero Smash Hits”

IGN have released further details on the track list for the upcoming "Best of" compilation of Guitar Hero – this time drawn from Guitar Hero II.

In the second part of their weekly series of updates they have confirmed the following tracks:

Avenged Sevenfold – "Beast And The Harlot"
Rage Against The Machine – "Killing In The Name"
Rush – "YYZ"
Lynyrd Skynyrd – "Free Bird"
Foo Fighters – "Monkey Wrench"
Iron Maiden – "The Trooper"
Nirvana – "Heart-Shaped Box"
Lamb of God – "Laid To Rest"
The Police – "Message In A Bottle"
Wolfmother – "Woman"
Kansas – "Carry On Wayward Son"
Stone Temple Pilots – "Trippin’ On A Hole In A Paper Heart"
Warrant – "Cherry Pie"
Alice in Chains – "Them Bones"
Danzig – "Mother"
Jane’s Addiction – "Stop!"
Reverend Horton Heat – "Psychobilly Freakout"
The Sword – "Freya"
Mötley Crüe- "Shout At The Devil"

Source: IGN

Left 4 Dead Survival pack is here!

Valve have released the latest Left 4 Dead update this morning, which of course is the much anticipated Survival Pack DLC!  Available to both PC and Xbox360 owners of the game, the DLC can be downloaded straight away for free.

The DLC of course includes the new Survival mode, that pitches players against increasingly more frequent and harder waves of zombies until overrun.  Versus mode is now available on the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns, so that gives you 2 full new campaigns to battle it out on as either survivors or infected.  Anyway, these are the full list of changes and features added in the Survival Pack:

Survival Mode:
- New gameplay Mode
- 16 maps including Last Stand
- Leaderboards
- 7 new achievements

Versus Changes:
- Fixed a case where versus team score would continue to be recalculated after the score panel was displayed
- Fixed an issue with recalculating the versus score health bonus for a player when they are rescued from being incapacitated
- Fixed being able to start a swing as an infected, then teleport to the survivors and have the claw swing hit a survivor
- Fixed a case where teleporting to the survivors would not reset the ability timer
- Fixed an exploit where you could load the chamber of a weapon with bullets by holding down the melee key
- Fixed a case where it was not possible to join a game while it was in a finale
- Fixed a rare case where listen servers would speed up the game over time
- Removed convars related to melee fatigue
- Fixed a case where infected players would get a respawn time on their initial spawn into a map

Server Changes:
- Made ms_force_dedicated_server not require cheats
- Add a message when queuing a heartbeat
- Simplified setting of game mode
- Removed convars director_no_human_zombies and director_holdout_mode
- Added mp_gamemode [coop,versus,survival]

General:
- Added lobby join and leave messages

All 256 of the 3FL Left 4 Dead servers have been updated, so you should be able to get a good dose of Freezone gaming out of that. 

Enjoy!

TF2 required update released

Valve have released a small required update this morning for TF2, bringing with it a few minor gameplay changes and a couple of fixes.

Simply restarting your Steam client should pick-up the update so you can get back it asap.  The full list of changes are as follows:

Game Changes:
- Reworked the character loadout screens to support future features.
- Added the ability for players to permanently delete items from their inventory using the new Backpack menu. This does not reset achievements. Once an item has been deleted it can never be re-earned
- Added the ability for players to reset their player stats using the Reset Stats button on the Stats menu. This does not reset achievements
- Added a "player_teleported" game event that is sent when a player is teleported
- Updated cp_junction_final to score per-capture instead of per-round. This fixes the map not working correctly with Tournament mode and the stopwatch
- Scouts now drop the flag if they’re carrying it when they start phasing

Fixes:
- Fixed instances where Steam connection problems would cause some unlocked items to be unusable
- Fixed the custom crosshair menu not clearing itself when "None" is selected for non-English clients
- Fixed warning about not being able to execute skill1.cfg when starting the dedicated server

As you were.