Why not Splitscreen? if L4D can do it, why not other games?

Come on, our decent rigs can perfectly do splitscreen as the weaker consoles can do...
I mean, why not just throw in two kb/m or something?


Is it that hard to implement it? i wish to see this as i got a whole lot of games on my computer, but they can only be played with ONE person. Bullshit!

ok, i can't get L4D splitscreen to work right... it's always my controller doing the wrong player... how the hell did you do it?

what, it doesn't work on vista 64? then i'm screwed.
what controllers, the xbox 360 ones?
do they have to be the same controllers?

i got two, only problem is the one of them is xbox 360, the other one is a Logitech PS2 knock-off...

First of all, it would be cool if more PC games did it. I think L4D was more mistake than intended to have split screen (they rushed the game out and just left a console feature in the PC version).


As for getting it too work in L4D it's not too difficult once you figure it out the first time. Here's a few notes from my experience:

It does work in Vista64, but some of the extra apps which make it easier may not.

You don't need two controllers if you use the right extra apps to emulate a joystick. Also you can us those apps to dictate which controller is for which player.

Most game pads will work. Basically if the game detect yours and the buttons are recognized it will work (test this out by going into the controller setup in the game menu).

Personally for me the hardest part was getting my config file setup for my particular controller. I was able to get split screen w/KB&M on one side and gamepad on the other pretty easily, but it took a while to get the mapping correct for my gamepad to work the way I wanted it.

ppjoy is the app for emulating a second controller (so you only need one). The other app is JoyIDs (from wingmanteam) and it let's you set the order of your joysticks. So if you have 1 real gamepad and an emulated one you can set the real one to #2 so that it is the second player.

As for the config the biggest thing I got stuck on remembering to set all gamepad maps to player 2. That means using the "cmd2" command in front of each command in the config file. Some configs don't specify this so instead of
+jlook
you should use
cmd +jlook

Really the biggest pain of the whole process is that the various "how-tos" are not very good. For example the most popular one from the Steam forums (and #1 on a search of "Left 4 Dead Split Screen" ) says to do some stupid unplug-plug-back in during startup rather than using programs I listed above to get the right setup.

That's exactly what I said. The extra apps are not needed, thus why it can be done in Vista 64 even if the extra apps won't run. But they are nice if you want to change the config around (like which player uses the controller) since the game does not have any way of assigning controllers to specific players.

Tried an expert campaign?
Or indeed versus against a decent opponent

I'm not interested in l4d online..and the campaign is on the highest difficulty...