Alien Swarm

In what is now a traditional Valve release (because something's gone bad that shouldn't), the release of this anticipated game has been blighted by fundamental problems with the dedicated server.

I really shouldn't moan. The game was free after all. Yet Valve simply don't seem to be able to get it right.

In turns out that the HLD Dedicated Server is broken and Windows-platform only. We're not too worried about the Windows-only bit, as that's what our server is.

The 'broken' news is less cool. It transpires that the only way to run it at the moment is to have the Steam client running in the background (which is not going to happen in the short term) or to run the server via the Steam GUI interface (which again needs the Steam client).

Hopefully Valve will release an update soon and we can get this running on our server. Until then, it's client hosting on someone's machines (remember to do your port forwarding) or using other people's servers.

We'll keep you posted.