Overview
This guide will help teach you how to change your captions to make them appear how you want them. You can remove all the survivor chatter and leave only the SI notices and music if you desire. All you will need to do is install l4d authoring tools and text editing software like notepad or notepad++.
Installing Authoring tools
Go to your steam library then search for Left4Dead and you should see the authoring tools underneath the software/tools section and install them.
Finding your Closed Captions
The easiest way way to find the closed caption files is to go to your steam library; right click on l4d, properties, local files, browse local files.
Then you will open the left4dead folder, and then open the resource folder. Here you will find all the close caption files open the file that corresponds to your language.
Editing
Now open the .txt file with your text program of choice. At the top it will show you how to format any new captions that you add.
“testcommands” “<clr:255,0,0>This is red<I> and italics<B> and<cr>bold<B><I><clr:255,255,255> white again.”
You pick what color you want text to appear by changing the RGB Decimal numbers R G B the number can range from 0 to 255.
You comment out the lines by adding // in front of the line.
//”player.biker_choke02″ “<clr:130,147,148><norepeat:15>Francis: [Choking]”
Now it will not print this text when Francis makes the choking sound effect.
Now if you want to add captions for when the game plays certain music or other game events. navigate to the scripts folder and open the game sounds music file.
Now you can find all the events that trigger music in the game. Here you can find event that plays music for when tanks spawn or die, as well for all the infected.
Now to turn this into a subtitle, you just have to follow the example the developers left for use. Go back to captions file and add this line.
“Event.Tank” “<sfx><I><clr:255,255,255><norepeat:15>[Henry is so Salty!]”
Now every time the tank music starts it will print “Henry is so salty!” as long as it doesn’t happen within 15 seconds of the last time it printed. You can do this for any sound in the game if you can find it in the scripts folder.
Compiling the data file
There is a lot more in depth things you can do with the caption compiler tool. If your making captions for your custom map, which you can learn more by following the guide valve made Here . I am just going over the basic of changing the text or adding the game music to your captions.
Now to find the compiler tool your going to navigate to the root left 4 dead folder and enter the bin folder.
This will only be here if you installed the authoring tools. Now that you made the edits that you wanted to your captions.txt file. you will want to delete the .dat file corresponding to your .txt file. now you will drag the text file over the captioncompiler tool and it will convert your text document to binary for the game to read. Now you can enable your captions in game, and enjoy your creation. Make them your own and have fun.