Steam Community Tie-in for L4D Servers - 11/14/08

Valve has released a required update for the Left 4 Dead demo which adds the ability to tie game servers to Steam Community groups. Erik Johnson sent the following message to the mailing lists:

Ok, we're getting ready to ship the first round of the group features we've been working on this week.

There is a new cvar called sv_steamgroup, which takes the Steam group number (which is now visible on the group's administrative page). The server will still be part of matchmaking, but users that are in that group will be able to browse directly to it from the main menu. Also, if this value is set, there will be a button near the message of the day that allows users to go directly to that group's page. This allows them to join that group if they like, and then be able to browse back to it in the future.

There is another convar in there called sv_steamgroup_exclusive, which isn't completely implemented yet. The goal if it will be to make a server only joinable by users within that group, but there are some edge cases where matchmaking could still potentially put users on there. People are welcome to play around with it for now, and we should have it fully implemented in the next few days or so.

Hopefully this addresses some of the concerns server admins have brought up.

A few minutes later Jason Ruymen made the announcement:

A required update for the Left 4 Dead Demo has been released. Please run hldspdatetool to receive the update. The specific changes include:

- Added the ability to tie game servers to Steam Community groups. Group administrators can now see the GroupID on the group's administrative page, which can be used as the value for sv_steamgroup. Users that are in that group will then be able to browse directly to them from the main menu
- Fixed setinfo exploit
- Fixed a crash when exiting the game
- Fixed a few cases where the game would crash when using ALT-TAB
- Fixed a problem that could cause texture corruption on some ATI video cards
- Fixed a bug that could cause infected horde to disappear

And we've added more documentation for dedicated servers in the file dedicatedserver_readme.txt

Our Steam Community group can be found here and you should definitely join it by clicking here. Server dudes looking to hook yourself to the best L4D Steam group can use our ID which is 883.

Our Steam Community Group ID is 883

Go to your server.cfg and enter sv_steamgroup 883.

We're very glad to see Valve responding to the players and we have faith that through the next few weeks they'll get the whole thing sorted out.