Interview with veteran mapper Kev Edwards

Danny and Walter have an interview with the extremely prodigious and talented Kev Edwards.  He will be going over his current work and giving you spoilers on his next big project.  He shares some other thoughts with us as well.  Here’s a quote:

Do you have any thoughts on ways Valve could make it easier for people to download your custom maps?

The largest single thing Valve could do to help people download custom maps is to provide a solution within Steam for keeping custom maps updated. Custom campaigns for L4D featuring a series of maps can be hundreds of megs in size (for instance, the compressed download for One 4 Nine is around 170mb), and currently a custom campaign needs to be re-downloaded in its entirety for every new version that is released.

Few enough people are prepared to download custom campaigns in the first place, and fewer will bother re-downloading huge files to keep up to date with the most recent versions. This of course will also mean people will likely have different versions of custom campaigns, leading to problems finding a game online due to conflicting versions. Clearly then, there is a problem with the distribution of custom L4D maps.

If you enjoy interviews with community mappers, this is the one for you. It’s easily the largest and most intricate interview we’ve received thus far. Check it out here.

One 4 Nine