QuickFix: Split screen Left 4 Dead 2

Smash zombie skulls with a buddy and a joypad on the same PC

Valve’s Left 4 Dead 2 smashes a cricket bat in the face off all the doubters and haters who planned a boycott when it was first announced. Those who feared there wouldn’t be sufficient content to justify a sequel were left to quietly eat their words as they fought off the horde with a chainsaw at a stadium rock show full of explosives. Told.

Along with new multiplayer modes, like the excellent scavenge, Valve included full working code for split-screen capability. Unfortunately for those who like their multiplayer of the same-screen variety, they never fully implemented it into the final release. Forgivable, given the level of polish and variety of gameplay modes that feature in L4D2. Still, it ain’t hopeless for us old school co-op’ers. With a well-placed text file and some fairly basic console wizardry, the split-screen code can be accessed and it’s perfectly playable.

The best thing about split-screen is the ease of communication. Gone are the reams of ‘omg lol’, ‘help me dumb n00b’ chatter. No more must you blast infected to a soundtrack of French teenagers fuzzily mumbling over voice chat. You can discuss tactics at the loading screen, cry for help without having to press a button first, and physically high-five each other when you slay a tank. It’s a fiddly, but rewarding outcome adding a new dimension to team play. Wonder how difficult a ‘players: 2’ option would have been in the campaign menu though.

Step 1
Download and drop in

Your first step is to download the ‘Splitmode.txt’ file from here. Then simply drop it into the ‘cfg’ folder of your Left 4 Dead 2 directory. This enables the split-screen mode and controller configurations for each player. Before you load up L4D2, make sure your game is fully updated; earlier versions had some graphical artefacts that made the game pretty much unplayable.

Step 2
Controller beware

Make sure ‘enable developer console’ is selected in the ‘options>keyboard/mouse’ menu in-game. To load a map, you’ll need to bring down the console using the tilde key and type ‘ss_map ’ followed by the map you want to play, e.g. ‘ss_map c5m5_bridge’. The console suggests maps so you can just cycle through them. At the loading screen, unplug then plug in your 360 controller making sure the light is set to player 2 rather than 1.

Step 3
Split-screen joy

Now that you’re in the game world, bring up the console again typing ‘exec Splitmode.txt’. You’ll see another loading screen then you’ll be back in split-screen mode. To set each player to a specific character, you’ll need to activate cheats by typing ‘sv_cheats 1’ into the console. Then ‘sb_takecontrol Nick’ to assign Nick to player one, and ‘cmd2 sb_takecontrol Ellis’ to assign Ellis to player two, for example.

Phil Iwaniuk

Posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 11:28 am under Games. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: First Person Shooter, Party, Platform, Racing, Sport, Test Drive Unlimited 2