Source: Steam

Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source updates are available and will be applied automatically when Steam is restarted. The changes include:

Half-Life 2

• Fixed sound stuttering problems caused by thread contention in sound system

Counter-Strike: Source

• Fixed missing models when running the Video Stress Test

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Today Valve disabled more than 30,000 Steam accounts which had been used to try to illegally gain access to Valve games without a valid purchase.

Valve takes such activities seriously and reserves the right to disable Steam accounts engaging in piracy, cheating, illegal activities, or any other activity in violation of the Steam Subscriber Agreement. The accounts that are disabled today will not be reactivated.

Source: Citizen 132

The winner of our winter contest is channie, who submitted a very great concept called "Escape." He had all of the aspects we were looking for when evaluating the entries: gameplay, weapons, players, environment, characters, and the C132 Factor. He scored full points on all aspects.

We will be contacting him today to send him his prize, a copy of Half-Life 2.

Thank you to everyone who submitted, We at C132 loved reading them all, and there were some great concepts that could have scored better if they had been explained in a little more depth. Great job to all of you, we hope to see you at our next contest!

Thank you to Epit0miz3 and Iceshaft07 for sponsoring the competition.

Some new news just rode on in! Exciting for me as well since I am a fellow paintballer and am a big fan of DPB

I want to keep this breif, but I want to tell you what all is going on. Over at Xtreme Paintball
we are starting a new Paintball MOD for HL2! Paintballers, this will be your game of choice as we have put a lot of thought into this game. Check out our FAQ's section to see what all this game has to offer!

Sounds like a very good MOD indeed. I just hope they can release it before I graduate college :-)

Source: Steam

Half-Life 2 Portuguese text closed captioning system and Game UI and Steam in Portuguese are now available through the Steam Options dialog. CounterStrike: Source and Half-Life: Source will be made available in Portuguese soon.

Source: Stargate Total Conversion

Today is a bad news with a good ending.
Some lil funny guys thought they could feed upon SGTC. Many stuff were stolen, such as weapons, characters models, and even the gate. (Brophis calm down! Hey! Where are you going with that gun in your hand? Come back heeeere!).

Click here to see by yourself After a long explanation with the only 2 guys team, they assured us they didn t do such a thing, and that we were "not obliged to visit [their] website"...

StargateTC has been copied a quite good number of times - happily for us, without a success. It has never been a real issue, and actually we may be proud beeing a model for others. But this time, this is different: they intend to release a beta within 2 weeks, and of course with a lot of our works, and of course with the latest released version of the gate, wich took more than a year
to our own Ancient,

BROPHIS, THE LAST & ONLY ONE ALIVE GATE BUILDER OF THE GALAXY!

As it was told in the .txt given with it, the gate prefab was to be used only by SGTC mappers community who wanted it for so long. This was the first public release of it...

Rex (solo game leader) accepted (after doubts and feering some leak of that kind) to allow the release of the multiplayer gate before the release of the solo game.

The entire Dev-Team feels really bad of this. This could have done some harm to our mod. So we asked responsibles for explanations, wich they refused us first, but then, trying to justify themselves, they barelly insult us and showed absolutely no respect for the long time spent building StargateTC. The fact is that they thought they could do in a couples of weeks and with only two guys what we made in 3 years with more than 20 people!!!

But the fun part of the news is here.
We know a lot of people in the french HL community, and actually most of them are friends of Dev-Team staff. We told them about the problem, and shortly all the biggest french websites were showing support posts to the SGTC mod. In less than one hour, the entire french HL community was aware of it.

But you know what? They still deny... The world is a vampire...

SGTC & SGM staff

The final word of this news belongs to Keger:

In our disclaimer:

All the elements created by the StargateTC development team and not already copyrighted are property of the development team.
Nobody is authorised to use any intellectual property of the Stargate TC development team in any project without the authorization of the StargateTC game leader or of its author.

Source: Steam

A Source SDK update is available and will be applied automatically when Steam is restarted. The changes include:

Source SDK

• Fixed "bCloseSuccessful" bug in Hammer with directory trees too deep


• Added faceposer


• Included view model sources for Half-Life 2


• Revised directory structure - content and sources are kept separate


• Added presets for expert compiles within Hammer


• Fixed problems with launching the game from within Hammer


• Hammer's Game Configurations UI now displays the active configuration on entry


• Hammer now displays paths in a more readable manner


• Create a Mod puts the mod content into the SourceMods folder (shows up in Steam's games list)


• Added vconfig - a tool to handle specifying the current game you're editing


• Fixes for various cases of path environment variables not working


• Buildcubemaps fixed


• Improved startup speed of the SDK launcher


• Simplified debugging under Steam (eliminated the need to copy steam.dll and make steamapp.cfg)

Visit this page for more information on this release.

Source: Hostile Intent

The time has finally come. After 5 long years, the original map for Hostile Intent has found its way toward this release. Sarge, the original level designer of Basque, dropped by the other day asking about this map. When one of our Admins posted screenshots of them, I had to share with everyone.

IkusaGwai: so Bic, what can you tell me of you work on Basque? You gained the map after some downtime by the original creator Sarge. Was it hard to resurrect?

Bic-B@ll: I started work on the map after many of the testers and dev team hinted that they desired to play the map, but hated it because it was very out dated. Its one of the original, if not the oldest map in HI. I figured that I could take the map and just fool around with it, update the terrain, add new textures and objectives and be done. It’s turned into a huge project, partially because I'm slow, but also because I had to remake the entire map. The map didn't exist in .map form on anyone's computer by Serge’s and he was away in the military. So i had to go through the extremely tedious process of recreating the map from a decompiled version, it took a very long time to do that, and then for a long time after that I constantly remade the terrain to my liking. The map had a beach for a while, it had a garage, a pool, many things, I opted to delete them and have come up with what I thought was a good premise.

IkusaGwai: I noticed there where some great changes from the original version, as to what you prepared for 1.4. What influences did you have to make this updated version?

Bic-B@ll: To start, personal preferences, there were some things in the house that I personally didn't like and I changed them. One of the biggest things that influenced the map was the performance of it, because it originally had some huge hills, you could stand on top of one and it would bring your computer to its knees. Things like this made me change the outside of the map entirely and forced me to make some changes inside the house to tweak gameplay.

kusaGwai: Can you explain a little about the objectives for Basque?

Bic-B@ll: Basque, being a region in Spain known for rebel activity, is an interesting place for the map. Since it is a house based map I had to be a bit creative in the objectives, I didn't create the original theme so I just pulled out of my head. Basically, the rebels have a plot to destroy a building in Madrid, knowing of this from valid sources, it is acted upon. To make game play interesting, there are three objectives, but only two are necessary. The three include a map indicating the location of the building and bombs; the bombs themselves; and an arsenal of weapons. All three are hidden away in the house and you’ll have to find them.

IkusaGwai: Any hints to where they may be?

Bic-B@ll: Maybe inside a pool table or unsuspected couch or even a corner closet.


Bic-B@ll has also been assisting Squad finishing the map hi_efreeti. He has added some great objectives and some great effects into this map as well. I’ll have some more images coming including some weapon renders coming in the next few updates.

Stay Tuned!!!

Source: Chitan: Hardboiled Killers

We have two new maps for you to look at today. 'City on Fire', a trashy urban skirmish map by ComplexZ and 'Rush Hour', a map I am working on. TheOtherChris has also supplied us with more guns, this time an AK47 and a Colt 1911. To finish off this update, some great fan art by Orgun.



In addition, we are still looking for another skinner. If you have experience and you are interested in skinning characters or weapons, send us an email.

Source: Hostile Map Database

This week we have 2 new maps for you all: hi_sands_v3 and hi_elysium_b3!
MapUpdater 0.2b [0.2.1.4] has also been released.

The author of hi_elysium_b3; torch has released a new version of his map for some more testing. I have fixed the bug where changing from Nato to Tango would crash the client in this build, so hopefully torch can release the map as a final version when he gets back in a few days time!

I've released a new version of hi_sands. I've been working on this new version for quite some time now, and I felt that it was time to get it out the way, so here it is!

The new version of MapUpdater has a few major additions and many bug fixes, most of which are additions for server-side support. The biggest additions are the more noticable Settings dialogue, and the hidden support for game file patches.

Firstly, you can grab hi_elysium_b3 here and hi_sands_v3 here.

You can download the new version of MapUpdater by clicking the Update button (in the program) or from the MapUpdater information page.

Source: Jess Cliffe from Valve via mail

[UPDATE]
The Demo has now been released and can be downloaded from the ATI site. More information and a download link to the 700 Mb big Demo can be found here
[/UPDATE]

Jess Cliffe from Valve send in the great news that a Half-Life 2 Demo will be released later today:

Half-Life 2 Demo Coming Today at 1:00 p.m. PST

A free demo of Half-Life 2 will be released later today. Featuring some of the amazing digital actors and physical gameplay that has made Half-Life 2 the leading contender for Game of the Year 2004, the demo takes players through some of the early levels of the game and later transports them to the area of the game known as Ravenholm. The demo will debut on ATI.com, and requires a Steam account to install. For more information about Half-Life 2, please visit www.half-life2.com.

A great chance for all that have not yet played Half-Life 2 to try out the great game themselfs. We'll keep you up to date on this.