This guide aims to give you everything needed to play competitive L4D2, be it l4d2center.com, cedapug.com, or pickup games with friends and strangers. First you will need an autoexec. This file specifies your game settings, and makes it easy to customize your experience as much as you’d like to. If you don’t already have an autoexec, a fantastic starting point is Vanille’s autoexec. This autoexec gets you ready for games on 100 tick servers. Download and open the document with a text editor of your choosing. Skim through it! Vanille has included descriptions of each line, so you can easily customize it. A few customizations you may want to consider are included below. If you’d like to continue playing vanilla games, common may be jerky. You can bind a key to a different lerp, for the purpose of this guide we’ll bind the F5-F9 keys to different lerps. Feel free to add the following to your autoexec:
bind "F5" "cl_interp 0.0"
bind "F6" "cl_interp 0.016"
bind "F7" "cl_interp 0.033"
bind "F8" "cl_interp 0.066"
bind "F9" "cl_interp 0.1"
One side effect of 100 tick servers is, without intervention, special infected and the tank may become invisible. Let’s make sure this never happens to you. You will need to bind a key of your choosing to “record demo; stop.” pressing this key will make this issue doesn’t happen. To prevent this from ever occurring, let’s include it with the “ready up” bind so you will never need to remember it. For the purpose of this guide we’ll bind it to the “i” key with the following line:
bind "i" "record 1;stop;sm_toggleready"
I highly recommend binding this to a key of your choosing. You are free to press this at any point during the match to record demo.
Once your autoexec is ready, save it. We will need to put it in the right place. In Windows, open Steam, go to your library, and find Left for Dead 2. Right click and select “Properties.” While we’re here, let’s customize our launch options. Prsto made a video about this which you can find here. Here’s my launch options, with a short explination of each item.
-novid -high +fps_max 999 +r_dynamic 0 +mat_motion_blur_percent_of_screen_max 0 -lv +exec autoexec -freq 280 -refresh 280 -280hz
You may recognise these from prsto’s video. I’ve added a few that you may want to consiter. Skip intro video, run l4d2 at high priority, and remove fps cap are the first three; followed by remove motion blur, low violence mode, and ensure autoexec runs upon launch. The last three are very important too! They make the game run at a higher refresh rate. My monitor runs at 280hz, so I set it to 280. Please customize those last three for your monitor!
Once you’ve finished your launch options, click “Installed Files” on the left. Click “Browse” on the right. This should open File Explorer. Here, double click “left4dead2” and then “cfg.” This is where you will put your new cfg file. You can rename your old file to “autoexec.bak” in case you need access to it. Drop your new .cfg here and make sure it’s named “autoexec.cfg.”
You can customize the glows in game. Prodigy Sim created a helpful tool you can find [here]https://prodigysim.github.io/l4d2-glow-picker/)