Valve recently updated Left 4 Dead third-party support, providing players with more user-friendly methods of playing custom campaigns. Most people will be satisfied with hosting or joining local servers (i.e. games hosted on players’ home computers), but some players will be interested in playing custom campaigns on dedicated servers.

This brief guide will only cover campaigns packaged in the .VPK format. For technical information on .VPK files, read the VPK article on the Valve Developer Community wiki.

This tutorial is designed for server admins with remote access to their servers. Server admins with local access will need to make slight adjustments to the instructions.

Server-side Installation

1. Download the campaign. For this tutorial, I’ll use Detour Ahead.
2. Extract the downloaded archive file to any directory on your hard drive. In the case of Detour Ahead, the archive file name is 230609-bbls-detour.zip.
3. Open a FTP client. I use and recommend FileZilla.
4. Log in to your game server via FTP.
5. Upload the custom campaign .VPK file from your computer to your dedicated server’s left4dead/addons directory. Click here for a screenshot of the FileZilla user interface for this step.
6. Upload your addonlist.txt from your local Left 4 Dead install (default directory is C:Program FilesSteamsteamappscommonleft 4 deadleft4dead) to your dedicated server.
7. Restart your server.

My wife and I purchased a notebook computer from Best Buy in Feb. 2009. (No, the title of this post wasn’t a typo or an incorrect paste; this is relevant.) One year, 3 months, and 10 (yes, ten) phone calls to Reward Zone support later, I finally received the long overdue Reward Zone certificates last month (May). Since I am currently unemployed and since most items of interest at Best Buy cost significantly more than the total value of the certificates, I had decided to watch sale bills until something inexpensive struck my fancy.

I had also been eyeing Wii Fit for a few months, but the $90 price point delayed the purchase. (You can probably guess where this is going.) After confirming that Wii Fit was not on sale at any reseller, either online or B&M (brick and mortar), my wife and I decided to purchase the exergaming megahit.

We brought the Wii Fit bundle, complete with Balance Board, home last Friday. I read the manual and set up the Balance Board later the same night; my wife and I started our Wii Fit journey the next day.