We have our heads down around the office here, cranking away on some important deadlines, but we wanted to give you guys a little something while you wait. So, here's an environment concept painting put together in wallpaper format. In it you can see the central drilling room, one of the landmark areas in a mining map currently being worked on. This is one of several maps in the overall Refinery themed set.

Hi, I am Olly, one of Nuclear Dawn’s two lead coders. This month, I’d like to talk to you about how the best things in life are those that you just take for granted every day, such as your sanity, and working power distribution systems.

The most challenging aspect of Nuclear Dawn is that there are no hidden mechanics in the game. There are no magical buildings mushrooming out of the future’s scarred concrete soil, and no elves that come out at night and restock your ammo supplies.

Nearly everything with a physical presence has been represented and coded in-game, so that buildings are produced in actual factories and need to be placed, and deployed according to specific logistics mechanism. Ammo depots have to be restocked, and everything needs to be kept powered up, else the enemy are going to be ramming rockets down your throat before you can finish admiring the detailed, apocalyptic landscapes.

The most challenging aspect of Nuclear Dawn’s coding odyssey has so far taught me an important lesson: lasers are hard to kill.

The Empire uses relay towers to transmit power across its web-like base. Every Imperial forward base has to be placed within range of these towers, which use focused laser beams as a way to power everything from turrets to the gravity sleds that deliver new structures.

Each building can be powered up by more than one tower, every tower can be connected to the main power plant in a variety of ways, and after a few relay nodes are established, things can get pretty hairy with keeping track of everything.
The first shot we took at solving the Imperial power system resembled closely the packet systems that are used to route data through the internet, and while that solution sang to our coding souls with its clean lines and neat code, it carried way too much overhead and work to be made practical, and just didn’t have the kind of robust adaptability that we needed.

Second up, came a simple solution that was staggering in its magnificent elegance, and proved to be just as spectacularly flawed. The laser shows were pretty, but just a tad distracting, and more than a bit seizure-inducing.

Finally, we did what every good coder would have done, and cheated our way through it, by implementing a system that has each new structures send out messages for power, hoping that a relay or reactor nearby takes pity on it, and decides to grant its humble request. In this new system, the power grid is only updated when a structure changes status (such as when it’s switched off, or blown to bits by Consortium artillery barrages), and that keeps things nicely balanced between giving us the flexibility we need to update the power grid often, and just keeping it as is to reduce net overhead when the Consortium just can’t get their act together.

The catch? Of course there was one. For some devilish reason that had half to do with new code grafted on an older system, and half with the fact that all programming languages were basically invented by the devil, the lasers would not go off. The initial versions of our power system had permanent lasers that would just not die, even after both the power source and all relay towers in a mile radius had been obliterated. It made for interesting, albeit creepy forests of ghost lasers, which looked kind of pretty in the ghost town of old Manhattan.

That particular issue was solved, and now Imperial forces can safely use their lasers without fearing their ghosts, so that they only have to worry about those pesky Consortium forces and their Star Crush orbital cannons...

Hi, Keen here, just giving anyone who has been working on the mapping contest a heads up that we will be extending the mapping contest to the end of the month.

We have decided to give you folks a few extra weeks because a lot of you seem to be having some trouble wrapping up your maps, fixing bugs, and may have needed some extra time due to school or other unforeseen consequences. If you have any issues with your map, please make a post in this thread. Otherwise if you have any other questions about the contest, want to check out some screenshots of other peoples work so far, or have any other questions or comments, please don't hesitate to check out or post a thread in the official contest forum.

So all entries are no longer due by September 9th, but will be due by:

September 30, 2009

This is the only time we will be extending the deadline.

If you still think you won't have enough time to complete your project by yourself, you are allowed to team up with other people to seek additional assistance if you wish. Those who have already submitted entries are of course free to make alterations and re-submit before the 30th.

In the early part of June 1944 the US Paratroopers jumped in to France. After securing the area behind the Beach Heads the Airborne moved to the City of Carentan. This city was a key link, with it the Beach heads of Omaha and Utah were united. The battle started early in the morning and was raging battle for 3 days.

This is the subject of our tour today. So with having said that here is your tour guide:

Fall in soldiers! Today do we have a treat for you, so listen up! We have been given the opportunity to give you a small tour of Carentan Causeway. Therefore, put on your boots and grab your weapons, because we are about to take a sneak peak of enemy territory.


Maybe next time we can give you a look around LaFiere. Don't mention that name to the brass, as it is currently confidential.

In the real battle the US Paratroopers were victorious over the German Paratroops! Can you change history? Can you beat the oncoming Americans? Can you repeat history and route the Germans out of the city?

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Fixed issue with scroll bars on HTML pages not showing after javascript DOM modification changed page height


• Fixed issue where Steam can not be closed after playing Section 8


• Fixed Champions Online keys not always being available when Steam first starts

Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2), the sequel to the best-selling and critically-acclaimed action thriller from Valve is being shown this weekend at The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) in Seattle, Washington.

The game is available to play, by the press and public, at Valve and Microsoft's Xbox 360 booth.

After debuting "The Parish" campaign (set in the New Orleans' French Quarter) at E3 and "Swamp Fever" at Comic Con San Diego, Dark Carnival is the third of the five campaigns shipping with L4D2 this fall.

Valve is also unveiling a new Boss infected monster coming in the full version of Left 4 Dead 2. Known as "The Jockey" this is the third new Boss infected from L4D2 revealed thus far (the Charger was revealed at E3, The Spitter at Comic Con). The Jockey lets you attack lone Survivors and wrestle control of their movement away from them-into fire, off ledges, or straight into the middle of a zombie horde.

In addition to the new campaign and boss monster the PAX showing of L4D2 marks the debut of the "Zombie Clown," the "uncommon common" exclusive to the Dark Carnival campaign, and a few more of the 20-plus new items coming in the full product (electric guitar, machete, and the American baseball bat being offered as a pre-sell exclusive with select retailers).

Coming exclusively to Xbox 360 and PC on November 17, Left 4 Dead 2 promises to set a new benchmark for co-operative action games and become one of 2009's marquee titles.

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed "not on camera object" particle effects appearing while spectating in-eyes, and not appearing when in thirdperson


• Fixed inventory bug that caused some item pickups not to be shown


• Added support for client explanations of backend inventory manipulation

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Added "tf_allow_player_use" server ConVar to control players executing +use while playing (defaults to 0)


• Fixed a bug where full backpacks resulted in an item being repeatedly found each time the game is started


• Fixed being able to burn players/buildings that are in the water while standing outside the water


• Fixed teleporting Spies getting stuck in enemy players standing on the exit


• Fixed server log not listing telefrag kills as weapon "telefrag"


• Fixed the Pyro's airblast pushing Spectators in free-look mode


• Fixed Pyro's Hadouken killing Scouts that have used Bonk! and are phasing


• Fixed freezecam screenshots sometimes being saved outside the Screenshots folder


• Fixed deathnotice and server log entries not using the unique item names/icons when buildings are destroyed


• Fixed a case where the weapon selection menu wasn't drawing the images of non-standard items if the player was using hud_fastswitch 1 and using slot7-10 to view the panel


• Fixed CTF HUD not centering the flag panel if there is only one active flag

Community requests

• Added the ability to set a parent for the item_teamflag entity


• Added OnPickUpTeam1 and OnPickUpTeam2 outputs to the item_teamflag entity


• Added intro movie .mp3 files to the sound/misc folder

Updates to Garry's Mod have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Garry's Mod

• Fixed crash when loading/saving


• TF2 Arena and KOTH maps are now organised properly


• Added sbox_weapons, set to 0 to spawn without weapons


• Fixed jigglebones on NPCs


• Jigglebones now works for ragdolls tool

Over the next few days we'll be removing all TF2 items that were earned using external idling applications. We're going to adopt a zero tolerance policy for external applications used to manipulate the persistent item system. Due to us not having a policy in place prior to today, this time we're only removing the items earned through cheating the system. Going forward, if we find users using external applications, we'll remove all of their items. If you're interested, only about 4.5% of the players in TF2's community will be affected by this cleansing process.

Meanwhile, everyone who took the moral high road will soon be finding a new hat in their inventory. We've also significantly increased the chance of finding any of the existing hats.

We realize there is a high level of demand for items, and we're still working on systems to allow you to find them in new ways (via Trading, and crafting duplicates into desired items). However, we need to draw the line at running external applications.