I'm looking for other people's thoughts on how to solve this problem...
I'm currently admin (but not owner) of a 20 player Coop Left 4 Dead 2 server that regularly gets traffic between 10-20 players especially during prime time and weekends. Several regulars including myself have been wanting to have custom campaigns added to the server to increase the variety, especially for those who are getting fatigued of the official campaigns, myself included.
We've since gotten our wish, but there's a problem, in that L4D2 there is no built in FastDL for custom maps like other Source games, at least to my knowledge.
Thus, if the server switches to a custom campaign, any clients that don't have the campaign installed get booted to the main menu with no error message. There's a message that appears in the console, but the average person most likely doesn't look at it. It bewilders me how L4D2 doesn't have a feature that other multiplayer Source games have had for years; this problem wouldn't exist if L4D2 just had it like the other games.
In the server Discord, we've since been getting pushback from a couple of other regulars stating that custom campaigns hurt the server because the random players just finding the server get removed whenever the server switches to one, causing the player count to fall from the mid-double digits to the mid-single digits. Right now the owner is currently siding with these people.
This has been a regular debate on the Server Discord, and I've been meaning to find a direct solution to this once and for all.
So far, the best two solutions I could come up are:
- Me making a plugin that regularly prints a chat message saying "We may occasionally enable custom campaigns on this server. To ensure that you are not kicked when the server switches to them, copy/paste this link in your browser and click Subscribe to all [workshop collection link]"
- Whenever the server is going to be switching to a custom campaign soon, I would spam a keybind in chat warning everyone that if you are not subscribed to it, you will be removed upon the server switching to it.
- I've also tried making a plugin that, when a player types "!custom" in chat, directly opens to the workshop collection in the MOTD display, but web pages don't seem to load at all in L4D2's MOTD 95% of the time.
But these aren't really direct solutions. At best, it would only take an average person 20-30 seconds to do, but it relies on people seeing the message, understanding it, and caring enough to stop playing to do this.
I believe I've come across other servers implementing some sort of custom vpk content download functionality. For example, I have had a vpk addon called "MadX" mysteriously show up in my addons folder, presumably from me joining a server of the same name at some point. The vpk just has a handful of custom sound files. Is it possible to accomplish the same thing but for map files?
I also came across this person here that seems to have figured it out, but they didn't say how to do it, or if their custom stuff was even campaigns at all, and I'm not willing to necro post asking them:
https://forums.alliedmods.net/showthread.php?t=307481
I'm just wondering if there is anyone out there is anyone out there that knows of any better way we can go about solving this problem. Thanks in advance!
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