We are starting an innovative new mod and looking to recruit talent. It's called BASE Conflict, and it seamlessly blends the first-person shooter with real-time strategy. A fully functional version has already been completed and extensively tested using the Quake 3 engine, but we recently decided that Source will be the engine for their major release. As a result, we are now making the "Quake 3 Alpha"
version available for download for people to check out. Mappers, modelers, coders, and testers are all encouraged to examine the website, download the alpha for evaluation, and apply to be a part of the project of porting this baby. Visit baseconflict.com to check it out, and go
here to download the alpha!

Anyone interested in becoming involved with BASE
Conflict may contact Xistic (xistic@yahoo.com)

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Source SDK, and Source Engine updates are available and will be applied automatically when Steam is restarted. The changes include:

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch

• Players now play grenade throw animation and RPG fire animation
  
• Items and weapons punted from their original spawn position now return after x time has passed (sv_hl2mp_weapon_respawn_time, sv_hl2mp_item_respawn_time)
  
• Improved player crouch animations

Source SDK

• Included support for making HL2DM maps
  
• Included sample source HL2DM map: dm_lockdown.vmf
  
• Added xwad, vtf2tga, and glview tools
  
• Fixed problems running vrad on certain machines
  
• Fixed bugs adding game configurations with long paths
  
• Improved detection of bad game paths

Source Engine

• Fixed server plugins not loading under Steam
  
• Fixed rcon kick failing
  
• Fixed UDP logging functions not working properly with quoted strings

Finally, Valve has released the Half-Life 2 SDK and the Source Software Development Kit.
We are looking for coder, modeler and texture artists!
For additional info check the about section.

If you are interessted joining the team, please join the forums, or contact us via moddb.

I updated a few things on the website, but mostly I just took off the out of date information. The bigger piece of news is that I simplified the game design to specialized classes and capture the flag as the core.

The trend in mods right now is to come up with a crazy new game design in hopes that they'll become the next Natural Selection, or even Day of Defeat. My community (mod teams) are forgetting that a new and obscure gameplay idea isn't guaranteed to be fun. Making a great game takes a long time to perfect, and is still a huge risk for those making the project.

We were heading down the path of "new-age gameplay", but when things got messy I decided to focus the gameplay and make things clearer. As fashion trends and social trends go, old things get re-invented to be new and popular. We're re-inventing CTF gameplay, or specifically Team Fortress gameplay meaning specialized classes and capturing the flag.

Don't worry though, we're retaining a lot of the old game design elements and our goals are still way high. With this new game design we can have more characters in the game, and Analognovelist (the team writer) is perfecting an amazing backstory he wrote. I'm not a fan of online stories and object to Kingdom Lost having a backstory, but Analognovelist's story is Genius.

The only things that got cut were NPC's and a complicated RPG system. The source engine (it turns out) can't handle such a a huge load of models. Bots however, are on the agenda in single player, and perhaps (in a long time) we can incorporate NPC's in the game.

Down to site news, Overlord is designing a new (flash) website. The major change will be our gallery section, which won't be on the forums, but on an HTML page as is the proper thing to do for games. The WIP art and audio sections are staying on the forums however.

Expect in-game screenshots soon, we're starting animating and the SDK (software developers kit) for HL2 is expected to be out this week.

I've made up vector images for each of the three main ASUN infantry weapons. These will be used for the HUD's weapon selection system.

As I said before, I am going to produce some low-poly weapon models and maybe skin them. At the moment I have completed one of them, the ASUN S2-A2 SMG. There is a screenshot in the gallery.

As for other weapons, currently I have pretty much all the infantry weapons concepted and drawn out. most have been scanned into the gallery. Only others I can think of that I didn't scan are the NWI infantry weapons. Only one of those has been drawn, which is based off of an OICW. The handgun has yet to be concepted.

In other news, I don't think I will be able to compose the mod webpage by my self, so I am asking someone on the Mod team to do it, which means a little more delay. Thats okay though, I'm aiming for progress and not speed. If anyone reading this would like to, they can compose a site for the Mod and submit it to me for review; you'll be put in the credits and offered a staff position and *may* be allowed to beta test. A lot of that depends on the quality.

I cannot stress enough that we need a more substantial staff team; our current resources won't be able to complete the mod. Its odd that almost no-one has contacted me, perhaps we need more PR (I showed it to some other clanmembers who hadn't seen it and they really liked the idea, they were surprised as well about the staff problem).

Anyways, once that website is composed and online, we will probably contact and recieve the hosting I mentioned a few posts back. Those include forums, which will be redireced to thru our main forums on the clan website (www.wastefactor.tk)

To give a rough estimate (and this is probably the roughest estimate ever made, as its the first TC I have ever made), we might aim for a late 2006 first-public-release. That gives us about two years, but as I have mentioned above, we are working for progress, not speed. "When its done" is the closest thing to the truth for a release ;)

The latest version of Wizard Wars is now available for download. The changelog is WAY too large to post here, but we've added a new HUD, new maps, sounds, particle effects, models, and animations!
Of note in this release is a major change to the gameplay, the Enchantment Seals - they bring a whole new twist to the WW gameplay!

We'd like to thank all the WW fans for all their patience for the relase of version 1.2 after numerous setbacks and delays, we hope it was worth the wait!
Please post any comments on what you liked and didn't like about the new release in our forums.

It's not every day that you can wake up and instantly feel the months upon months of sleep deprivation ahead of you. That's right, we've all waited so long, we've lost team members because of it, but finally throughout all of the delays Valve has come through. We have the SDK!

The past few weeks have been hectic getting the new website running, polishing our ideas and design plans for game modes, and just keeping the team members that are still with us in line. Sadly enough though, we weren't able to keep all of our members from finding other things to do in the months that we've had to wait. So I'm here, once again, asking for talented individuals who are looking to make a great modification.

We have a small but dedicated fan base, they have been with us all the way. I want to make them proud for doing so, I want to make sure Born of War sees the light of day, and the moon of the night. The design is there; we programmers are already buying our caffinee supplements (red bull, bawls, caffinated soap, etc); but we the need the rest, the select few.

The new website is nearly finished http://www.bornofwar.net and our (once again, small) dedicated fan site is up as well http://hq.bornofwar.net. So if anyone out there is interested in joining a team, don't hesitate to give shoot me an email. Our forums are online for all of your discussion as well, http://forums.flipsidesoftware.com. Fans are welcome, we'll be very good to you, we'll love you long time.

Bring on the mods! Good luck to all! It's a great day.

Last night at about 9:00 PST, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch was released. Earlier today there were about 12,000 simultaneous HL2DM players. People seem to have gotten the hang of tossing toilets and radiators and cars at each other pretty quickly.

Immediately after the release of HL2DM last night, users who run Source Engine games (including Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source) under DirectX 7 or who run with less than the recommended amount of RAM were affected by a game crash. This caused them to be unable to run HL2 or CS:S for a short time. Shortly after midnight PST, we released a fix which cleared the problem up.

We're planning a small dedicated server release soon to improve weapon re-spawn behavior.

Also, If you're handy with Hammer (Valve's level editor), be sure to enter the HL2DM map contest.

We hope everyone's enjoying the game.

Today, graphics manufacturer ATI announced its new Radeon X850 series and two new Radeon X800 video cards. The new Radeon X850 series includes the $399 Radeon X850 Pro, the $499 Radeon X850 XT, and the $549 Radeon X850 XT Platinum Edition. The Radeon X850 XT and the Radeon XT Platinum Edition replace the Radeon X800 XT and X800 PE cards as ATI's two fastest video cards.

ATI also introduced two technology demos at its Radeon X850 series launch event held last night in San Francisco. The Ruby "Dangerous Curves" demo places the ATI heroine in a tunnel chase scene where she must fight off robotic pursuit droids. Crytek was also on hand to show a new demo titled The Project built on the CryEngine--which serves as an extended prologue to the Far Cry story.

The new Radeon X850 series consists primarily of incremental engine and memory clock speed increases, but improved manufacturing techniques should help increase product availability which has been a problem with the sometimes hard to find Radeon X800 XT PE.

All of the new cards feature the Radeon X series technology which includes 3Dc for normal map compression technology, advanced GDDR3 memory, and Pixel Shader 2.x support, and hardware video processing. Specific card variations will also offer dual-DVI output to support multiple LCD displays as well as video-in, video-out capabilities.

ATI has also expanded its Radeon X800 line with the Radeon X800 XL and the Radeon X800. The two new Radeon X800 series cards, priced at $249 and $349 respectively, will compete directly with Nvidia's $299 GeForce 6800 and $399 GeForce 6800 GT cards.

The new ATI video cards will initially only be available in PCI Express format. ATI has not announced AGP versions yet, but industry observers expect to see units in the first quarter of 2005.

The Radeon X800 XT PE is shipping now, and the rest of the cards should begin shipping late December to early January

We are looking for someone who could possibly make linux compile of our server code. We are trying to get some servers up and running for you all in the release date, and for that we need the linux version made. Scott (our coder) might be able to make a linux compile, but he can't test it.
So if you can do either the compiling, or testing the build, or know someone who could do either of those, then gome to our irc channel #snow-war at irc.gamesurge.net or make a post in our forums.


Also since I've got some questions about this, I will tell this again: We don't use any material from HL2. The models are "inspired" by the HL2 ones, but I made the from scratch. Meaning, I didn't use any mesh or skin made by VALVE, or copy anything from screenshots of HL2. It's all painted by me, to make look like the characters in HL2. "Why", you ask?

Umm...

To Be Continued..