Source: The Promised Land

Today Chris and I visited Valve's offices in Bellevue. We got some interesting pictures, and learned some new information.
[images omitted from post]
Sorry there arent actual game pictures. We will be having a playtest sometime next week, so we will have some more interesting pictures for you. Here are some factoids. I hadnt heard of them before, so maybe they will be new to you guys as well:

- VAC 2 will be released with HL2. It will be created for general use among mods and HL2.

- Collecters Edition will be available over steam as a "Special Version"

- There are some new bink videos they showed us. They were trailers with collections of all footage from the E3's, etc, and a new promotional trailer. They all looked awesome. These will be released prior to HL2 and will be in publications at first, then will be available for download.

- The SDK will be released the same time the game is released.

We talked to a lot of different people. We sat down for quite awhile with Cliffe and Gabe, who were really supportive and offered some great insight. Its always nice to see developers who have actually HEARD about your mod, and they had lots of valuable advice.

We also saw a demo that highlighted HL2's HDR technology. Trust us, this is going to be awesome.

The people at Valve are awesome in general, its a very friendly place. Have to thank all of them for showing us around, and answering our questions. And the T-Shirts and autographed box art.

Right... anyway, Promised Land itself has an update. First is the new staff additions. Jarnail Bhachu and Jordan Ratzlaff. Both are awesome concept artists and we are glad to have you fellas aboard.

Source: Resistance and Liberation

As everyone knows Juggz, Sarge and Hendy went to the Valve Headquarters in Seattle. The meeting started with Gabe Newell ushering us into a meeting room with a large screen. He showed us some of the E3 videos and a new video showing some new spectacular mapping and bump-mapping of an alien that players will confront in HL2. We then discussed RnL and the status of the mod, Juggz and I explained the polishing of our current work and when we get our hands on the SDK, we will then start on coding and mapping.

We then were passed on to a guy named Marc Laidlaw who is the Writer/Game Designer of HL2. He automatically showed a great interest in RnL, asking many questions about our progress and what our site was, promising to check it out later when he had more time. He told us a bit of what is involved in Half-Life 2 and how the new sequel will have a more graceful end for more possible sequels or entrances for mods wanting to elaborate more on the HL2 storyline.

We then made our way to Doug Wood, he is the guy to talk about XSI. His job was working on voice syncing and animations and he showed us the basic operations of the facial animations in XSI. If anyone has seen the XSI videos, he showed us pretty much what was in those.

We then were passed on to one of the mappers of HL2, John Guthrie. He showed us some amazing stuff with the new version of Hammer. He demonstrated how easy it is to create terrain and texture it. He also showed us how well the blending tool works when creating transitions between two textures, like rock and grass. It was very impressive how quick everything can be created. The new version of Hammer is far more user-friendly than the previous versions.

We then went with Gabe to see the DoD team. We met Matt Boone and Kelly Thornton and Jakob Jungels and discussed fellow ups and downs in modding, joked around a bit and then we even got to suggest some ideas for DoD: Source. Some of the ideas were basically wider areas/bigger maps, more enterable buildings in order to avoid fire fights (to avoid being trapped in predictable choke points like most HL1 maps).

With that we said good bye to the DoD team, and Gabe showed us back upstairs. There we thanked Gabe for his time, but before he left he told us that although they work on HL2, it’s the mods that they really look forward to and that he really wants to see how RnL turns out.

For those of you wondering about the HL2 release, we were impressed by the attitudes at Valve and believe the push to have HL2 completed in August will become a reality.

Source: Leave no Man Behind

We hired a few more teammembers in the past few days. Switchblade is our newest modeler, Zigg is our newest mapper, and bent is our newest song creator. Switchblade has also finished his Galil which will be avaliable to the Skinnies.



He is currently working on the Walther PPK which will also be avaliable as a Skinny pistol. The Walther PPK and other misc. weapons will be avaliable at the Black Market of Somalia.

Source: Half-Life Radio

This is just a reminder that we are heading up to Valve Headquarters tomorrow to meet up with Jess Cliffe at Valve. We are playtesting Counter-Strike Source running on the Half-Life 2 engine! Our very own Louis Cyphier and others will be making the trip. Listen to Half-Life Radio on Friday @ 8pm EST for our exclusive review and news from Gabe Newell & Jess Cliffe.

Things might be slow on the week days untill after next week. I have been working alot more at my day job. I will still be posting news. Just it might be delayed by a few hours. Should be back to normal after next week.

Source: The CPL

Come see NVIDIA at the Cyberathlete® Extreme World Championships at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, Texas from July 28th to August 1st.
Over 4,000 gamers and spectators from 55 countries will congregate for five days of intense competition and entertainment. Experience the NVIDIA exhibit, which will feature over 50 of the latest performance PCs available powered by the new NVIDIA GeForce 6800 graphics processor. Available for free play will be some of the hottest video games developed on NVIDIA, to be played on NVIDIA. Compete against your friends for bragging rights or even a graphics card on games like Battlefield Vietnam, Far Cry, Call of Duty, Painkiller and Unreal Tournament 2004.

NVIDIA is the official graphics processor of the Cyberathlete Professional League, powering the tournament systems with the performance, compatibility and reliability that the competitors rely on, and this is why NVIDIA is graphics processor of choice for PC Gamers worldwide.

Details:

** PLAY THE HOTTEST GAMES ON THE NEW GEFORCE 6800! - See what the critics have been raving about! Test drive the new GeForce 6800 on systems built by Compaq X, ABS Computer Technologies, CyberPower, iBUYPOWER, Monarch Computer Systems, Velocity Micro, Marauder PC, and Alienware.

** CHECK OUT THE WORLD'S FASTEST PC! - Come see NVIDIA's SLI(tm) (Scalable Link Interface) Multi-GPU technology in action. Run the demos, play the games and see for yourself the mind-blowing performance of multiple-GPUs in one PC.

** COMPAQ X LAN PARTY AREA - 20 state-of-the-art Compaq X PCs linked up for free play and mini tournaments. ** FREE GEFORCE 6800 T-SHIRTS AND GRAPHICS CARDS! - The ever-popular NVIDIA T-shirt Spotting Contest makes it appearance once again! Fill out a survey and get a free t-shirt. Wear your t-shirt during the event and you could win a GeForce 6800 GT on the spot, courtesy of eVGA and PNY!

** FREE LOCKERS! - NVIDIA will make available security lockers for free in the BYOC. Lockers will be BYOL (Bring Your Own Lock) and spaces are first-come, first-served.

** COMPAQ X DREAM MACHINE GIVEAWAY - One Compaq X dream machine powered by the new GeForce 6800 will be raffled off at the CPL raffle, courtesy of HP and NVIDIA.

** LIVE RADIO BROADCASTS - The Ticket SportsRadio and 105.3 Radio (Dallas-area rock/alternative station) will be onsite in the NVIDIA booth to broadcast live from 11am to 3pm on Thursday and from noon to 3pm on Friday. Come by for cool giveaways and meet "The Ticketchicks!"

** PIMP MY RIG - On display will be the coolest, most tricked-out case mods competing for cash in the NVIDIA C3 (Consummate Computer Competition). For the first time, these case mods will be available for you to test drive.

** WORKSHOPS: More informative than ever! NVIDIA will host the following workshops open to all attendees:

Thursday 7/29 at 9:00pm - "Beginner's PC Workshop": Tips and tricks on what to look for in a PC, what the latest technologies are, and how to build your own.

Friday 7/30 at 9:00pm - "Advanced PC Workshop": If you're already familiar with your PC, come and find out how to tune it to keep it in top condition.

Friday 7/30 at 10:00pm - "How to Go Pro Workshop": Hear from Craig Levine of ESEA/Team 3D on what to look out for when starting your own team...from incorporation and legal matters to pitching new sponsors. Also hear from NVIDIA on what sponsors look for when considering sponsorships.

Source: Resident Evil: Shadows of Fire

We have a main hall update today and a slew of new images to show it off. Myself and BiGToM have spent quite a while fixing up the hall and i have to say the it looks very nice indeed, But while we have been busy working on this Termin8tor has been cracking away at the rest of the mansion so we should see updates on that later in August i guess.

Check out the website for the images.

Source: Science and Industry
I have to make this one short

Version 1.0 of Science & Industry is finally being released today! You can download the full installer, or if you already have SI 0.97b, a patch will update you to version 1.0. Grab the file you need

• Improved netcode (client side weapon effects)
• Improved HUD (status HUD, cloning HUD, notices)
• Improved map briefings
• Updated maps: si_deep (Chaos), si_depot (Chaos)
• Added new device: the EMP Cannon
• Added new player model "Yvan", companies now have different player models (MCL is Charlie and Yvan, AFD is Vinnie and Butch)
• Added high definition models for the scientists and the administrator
• Added "glow" visual effect option
• Added detail textures for each map
• Added Team Panel displaying the location and status of your teammates on the HUD
• New techtree and voting system
• New HUD font for the AFD company's employees
• Added secondary mode to the Cloak: it makes you completely invisible and you can move freely for a short period of time
• Tweaked many weapons
• Added more hints (mindraying players, looking at a breakable, touching your admin, touching a dropped scientist from your company)
• Added breakable HUD identification
• Changed the "Ammo Replicators" researches: they now also increase the maximum ammo you can carry for each weapon
• Reduced start player death cost from $1,000 to $800
• Tweaked the default value of some gameplay settings
• Fixed the "remloc" command, it wasn't removing the location from the map .loc file
• New Client CVARS:
  • cl_votemenu_lightmode (default=0) : if set to 1 only the vote buttons will appear in the vote menu.
  • glow_blur_steps (default=0) : if set to >= 1, a glow effect is applied to the screen. The higher the setting the more passes are applied, a good setting is 4. For high end computers only.
  • hud_notices_filter (default=0) : set to 1 to remove most of the notices and keep only the few important ones. Set to 2 to remove even more notices and keep only the ones that give information that isn't already somewhere else on the HUD (team panel, scientist number).
  • hud_teampanel (default=1) : displays a list of your teammates with their locations. White background color means the player is carrying a scientist. Yellow = carrying a resource, Grey = just dropped a scientist or a resource, Red = just died, Blue = just killed an enemy carrying a scientist.
  • You can now define your own weapon slots, positions and weights by editing the weapons.cfg file.
  • And more new client cvars, the whole list is available in si/doc/cvarlist.txt.
• New Client Commands:
  • sirecord: starts recording a demo to the file "date-time-map.dem" (eg 2004_06_25-22_14_47-si_laser.dem)
• New Say Text Commands:
  • ^x (where x is a number between 0 and 8) : colored text. See si/doc/cvarlist.txt for the list of colors.
• New Server CVARS:
  • si_clanmatch (default=0) : when enabled, player stats will be retained for a short period of time after they disconnect from the server so that their score will not be lost if they lost connection for some reason. If set to 2, the game will automatically be reseted once the pre-match time is over. If set to 3, the pre-match warm up will be done with everything researched.
  • si_c4briefcase (default=0) : set to 1 to enable the C4 Briefcase research.
  • si_nobcthirdperson (default=0) : if set to 1 players won't be able to switch to third person view when using the briefcase.
  • si_action (default=0) : if set to 1, players can bunnyjump faster when leg implants are researched.
  • si_fastweapons (default=0) : if set to 1, players can switch weapon right away after firing with the Shotgun, Colt or Rocket Pistol.
  • si_forceteam (default=1) : if set to 1, players can't join the company with most players. Automatically disabled if si_clanmatch is set to >= 1.
• New Server Commands:
  • startmatch : resets the game after a countdown of 10 seconds.

Browse files section or click on the link to the right to download it.

Source: modDB
ForKmaN posts on modDB the proper way to submit a mod to the database:

Hi guys, I just wanted to have a litte chat to you. Since no one seems to read their PM's, here's the latest goss for you.

Basically, people obviously sign up here to chat about mods, or even add mods and so I want people to understand the 5 simple, easy to follow rules on adding a mod into the moddb:

1. Site – Does your mod have a publicly visible site containing basic details? More than a page saying ‘Coming Soon’ is needed.


2. Idea – Is your mod’s idea unique? If not, change it until it is! Blatant rip-offs will be ignored.
   
3. Leader – Do you really have the time and commitment to lead a mod team? Making a mod may seem like a 2 week job, but most have been going for at least a year.


4. First Steps – Have you done the first step of your mod? This could be as little as some concept art, but make sure something is done!5. Motive - Are you just doing this to be famous? If so then give up now. Try to make mods simply for the art and the challenge, not for personal reasons.

Now, number 1 is the main issue we have these days. I just went though 10 mods, and 8 didnt have a working website, so if you added a mod in the last 2 weeks and was wondering why It's hasn't been authed yet, well there is your reason.

BigBird and myself are the usual mod authers around here and we usualy like to give mods a chance by sending out a PM to the mods that haven't done simple things like a website, or lots of juicy info in the about section. We then give a week or so to fix it before we delete it.

From this day forward, thats not going to happen, if its not right first time, it gets deleted right away. PLEASE make sure you add the mod right first time!

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to PM me.

Source: modDB
Related: Valandil

Valandil is a new HL2 modification that aims to bring medieval themed warfare to the multiplayer community.

Taken from our website:

"Valandil is a class based multiplayer total conversion of Half-Life 2, set in a fantasy medieval universe, players fight in teams against each other in various different game modes, fighting with all manner of medieval weaponary, swords, spears, bows and arrows, fighting on foot and horseback in rich medieval surroundings"

To view more information about the mod, please visit our website at http://www.hemp-blog.com/vmp/ and have a look around.