I spent the last weekend working on writing patches for DepotDownloader and messing around with it in hopes of giving players a simple and legal way of getting old versions of L4D2.
List of old updates:http://store.steampowered.com/news/?feed=steam_updates&appids=550
Game version mapping: http://pastie.org/private/pnmm0nugimwvppawmunaTODO: Map this to dates and update notes.
Recommended DepotDownloader build:http://kc.prodigysim.net:1337/indexed/DepotDownloader/DepotDownloader-r705.7zTODO: Replace with official build
DepotDownloader CellIDs:https://bitbucket.org/VoiDeD/steamre/wiki/Networking/Steam2/CellID.wikiUse depotdownloader to "update" your l4d2 directory to a given version:DepotDownloader was built with dedicated servers in mind, so the -dir (install dir) commandline option doesn't match up with steam's. I'll probably correct this/add a new option to DepotDownloader, but for now you can work around this by using
mklink to make a symbolic link to a directory.
mklink /D "C:\Path\To\Steam\SteamApps\common\left4dead2" "C:\Path\To\Steam\SteamApps\common\left 4 dead 2"
DepotDownloader -cellid <fromwiki> -depot 551 -version <depotversion> -dir "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common"
Also possibly necessary:
DepotDownloader -cellid <fromwiki> -depot 552 -username <steamusername> -version <depotversion> -dir "C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common"
Note that the version numbers for depot 552 are different from the ones for 551. For most recent game changes (post-sacrifice) you shouldn't need to use depot 552 to get old content.
Note! Do not put a trailing slash after common!Identify .DEM game version:Unfortunately valve started using NetworkVersion after the sacrifice update, so it's hard to tell what version a demo came from. Normally you can use a hex editor and inspect the 4 bytes from offset 0XC like so:
http://i.imgur.com/L2BQJ.pngHowever this data isn't useful for any demos post sacrifice (or maybe it was passing? hmm).
Your best bet for identifying correct demo versions is to use the
"Date Modified" field on the file. Hopefully you won't have mangled these yet!
Once you have the date of the demo, you should be able to consult the game version mapping (TODO: Map DepotDownloader versions to PatchVersion, NetworkVersion, Store update news, and date). Note that DepotDownloader versions are completely different from other version numbers.
Once you've managed to get DepotDownloader to grab the correct version, you should be able to launch the game and play the demo. You may have to bypass steam to get it to launch without updating (Directly run C:\...\Steamapps\common\left 4 dead 2\left4dead2.exe)
Also, if any of this sounds interesting to you, you can add me on steam and either help me out or test some of this stuff.
