Things are going well in the Nuclear Dawn camp and we've recently stepped up a gear with internal playtests now to be held twice weekly in preparation for the coming closed beta. If you've read our FAQ, you'll be aware that we're fully prepared to take advantage of the latest technology the Source engine has to offer if it fits our needs, and the recently introduced Phong shader technology introduced with Half-Life 2: Episode 1 is no exception to the rule, as you can see below: (members of our forums can expect a forum-exclusive video showing the Phong effect in all its glory in the near future)

I think I speak for the whole dev team here at Nuclear Dawn when I say there's really no other experience quite like modding. With powerful, free editing tools provided by an increasing number of games companies with their major titles, more than ever modders have the freedom to make almost anything their heart desires. The main stumbling block is the technical know-how required to fully take advantage of this seemingly limitless potential. And it's no secret that really familiarising yourself with the tools of the trade and the game engine you're modding for can take a very long time.

It is in this vein that a lot of people contact us for advice on how to get started with modding for Half-Life 2. Whether you're an absolute beginner to modding or you're simply a newcomer to the Source engine in particular, we always recommend that your first port of call should be the Valve Developer Wiki, which houses an indispensable compendium of knowledge from both Valve and experienced modders in the Half-Life 2 community.

You can never have too much help, though, which is why we have created the new Focus feature for our forum community. As well as giving those interested an insider's sneak peek at the inner workings of a total conversion mod, Focus enables our fans to see just how much work goes into each aspect of the mod we're all waiting to play.

Beginning with the LCM-7 Avenger assault rifle, we will be chronicling a series of assets through their development lifecycles, including weapons, props and map sections. Day by day, step by step, Focus gives you the unique opportunity to follow several of our art assets from their initial conception and design right through to the finalised product. Interested? - well it's your lucky day, the first edition of Focus is already up on our revamped forums! See here for details and be sure to stay tuned for more ND news before the month is out.

Media Update - We've added two new previously unannounced weapons, a fully skinned Remington 870 pump-action shotgun and a M84 Stun grenade. We have also updated all of the map shots for Orange Park ( 5 in total ) and have released 1 new Purity shot and 1 new Grime shot. Stay tuned cause we've got plenty more updates on the way over the coming weeks including in-game action and HUD shots. Check out the latest release on our media page.

Introducing the Consortium Stealth Trooper. A marvel of modern day technology, the stealth suit uses advanced nanotech and ultra-sophisticated optics to ghost its wearer against his surroundings, the result a shimmering mirage of muted murder hell-bent on gutting a pesky pointman or two. The trade-off is that the suit doesn't offer much protection from even your average weaponry, and so the stealth usually spends his time crawling down corridors riddled with bullet fire and explosions, where one foot out of place will confirm his own swift demise in red scarlet cinematics. This professional is calm and collected, slicing a path through the opposition and venturing deep behind enemy lines to unleash maximum chaos by laying traps at his foe's own front doorstep.


With a low calibre pistol packed in the rare event of a muffled cry for help reaching his next target before his blade does, this deadly assassin usually performs his duties undetected, weilding his high-tensile steel blades with surgical precision. When you cross paths with a stealth trooper you don't dice with death, death quite literally dices with you ...and then some!

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Bellevue, WA, July 14, 2006 - Valve®, developer of the blockbuster series Half-Life® and Counter-StrikeTM, unveiled Team Fortress® 2 and Portal, two new games to be included in its next release, Half-Life® 2: Episode Two. In addition, the studio announced its plans to deliver these products, plus enhanced versions of Half-Life 2 and Episode One, in one tremendous package for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

"By evolving our development process to an episodic approach, we're able to reduce risk from things such as schedule and funding and invest more in new types of gameplay," said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "This allows us to produce innovative titles such as Portal and Team Fortress 2 and deliver them in a timely fashion to customers along with Episode Two."

Episode Two advances the 16-million unit selling franchise, as Valve's trilogy of episodic single player releases continues the award-winning story of Half-Life 2. Armed with new weaponry and vehicles, Dr. Gordon Freeman must race through a countryside riddled with an increasingly feirce Combine threat.

Team Fortress 2, an all-new version of the title that spawned team based multiplayer action games, features the most advanced graphics of any Source-based game released to date. Players choose from a range of unique character classes such as medic, spy, sniper, or engineer and must work together to complete a variety of tactical objectives.

Portal is a new type of single player game that changes how players approach, manipulate, and surmise the possibilities in a given environment in a manner similar to how the Gravity Gun changed our approach to how an object may be leveraged in any given situation.

Team Fortress 2 and Portal will be included with all retail and Steam versions of Episode Two for the PC. In addition, these products plus Half-Life 2 and Episode One will be available in one tremendous offering for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. New videos from Episode Two, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 will be released next week.

"You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade..."

Sixty-two years ago, many brave men threw themselves into harms way by partaking in the liberation of Normandy, either via parachute, glider or landing craft. Many didn't make it home, while many others did. Today we honor the sacrifice thousands of brave soldiers from all over the world made in this righteous endeavour, D-Day 1944.

We ask everyone who reads this post to think of all the people who fought during Normandy and the Second World War and to thank them for what they have done to protect the freedom we have all come to expect as a birthright in this day and age, a mere sixty-two years later.

From the Resistance and Liberation Team, we'd like to thank all the veterans for protecting what they believed was even worth dying for, on our behalf.

Now onto what you've all been waiting for the last few weeks.

As in our last update we gave you a run down of everything, everyone's been upto. Well we won't go into such detail this week as it's pretty much the same as then, basically everyone's been working very hard in their respective departments and pulling together as a team to overcome some nasty bugs we've had in the code.

Our trialing members as per usual are working hard upon the assignments we've given them and are producing some very neat work so far.

I'd like to welcome Travis Christie to the team, as you know he's our newest Level Designer and is working hard upon his map. We'll give you some more information on what he's up to in later weeks.

Lastly our resident do-gooder Dan has been slaving hard to get the new website up and running, and my what a job has he done!

Go check out the new media section and see what you all think, remember though everything in there is work in progress and could change over time, though we welcome any constructive ideas you may have!

Once again, thank you for all your continuing and growing support, it motivates us to work immensely.

The Resistance and Liberation Team.

The month of media May-hem is officially over, and what a way to finish it. The Nuclear Dawn community is bigger and stronger than ever. Thanks to mentions by PC Zone, Computer Gaming World and Valve Software (to all of whom we extend our gratitude in the customary style of the "double thumbs up" salute), we have increased in number by 35% over the past month. But sheer numbers are meaningless if the community's deader than the Sony E3 Conference's after-show party! That's why Wii're proud to reveal that forum activity has doubled since this time last April.

The Fan Fiction forum is a shining example of community involvement, with almost one new story cropping up every day since it was opened. You'd be surprised at the quality in there, too (I know I was), so to illustrate this point we've chosen to feature Gatecrasher's One Minute To Midnight as an outstanding short story worthy of true recognition. With community projects like the ND Multiplayer Pickup just around the corner, there's never been a better time to join in with the forum fun and frolics.

And if you're wondering what all the fuss is about, our next item will most definitely help you make up your mind. Yes, the wait is finally over! The exclusivity period has terminated and the scans you've been waiting for are here! In our three page spread in Computer Gaming World our project manager Dave waxes lyrical on how the capture points and resource system will work in ND, some of the team's industry professionals explain what motivated them to work on a mod outside of their studio hours, and there are brand new alpha screenshots of the commander's view, some of the RTS structures and a sneak peek at the stealth suit in full effect.

[Scans Available At The Nuclear Dawn Home Page]

The alpha screenshots in these magazine scans are clear evidence of just how far along Nuclear Dawn is in development. With the beta stages this summer fast approaching, we are looking for a few talented level designers to prepare some new maps for this period that can be playtested right up until public release. If you think you have what it takes, drop us an email with examples of your work to contact@nuclear-dawn.net

So the mayhem's over... or is it? Next month promises to be bursting at the seams with media and game information. We'll be revealing more on the commander and stealth classes, releasing the rest of the story timeline with additional information about the factions, and to top it all off we'll even throw in an interview. Add to that a bunch of community activities for you to get involved in and you've got yourself one jam-packed June to look forward to!

Troy: Divine Playground will be released in one week! The team has worked hard for this to happen, and I would first want to thank all of them for their support on the project.

Here are today’s goodies:

• A manual, explaining some core concepts of the game. For information on weapons or skills, go in the mod info section.


• A truck-load of new screenshots and map concept arts, all available in the media section


• We now have our official server setup on www.clanservers.com, and there will be a server running 24/7 for you to try out the mod with others at launch.

The game still needs polishing, which means that it still has known bugs. The reason we are releasing T:DP now is because the main staff cannot continue forward with the project. We all got started on real jobs, and cannot continue working on it. This means that we will not release further versions of the mod. The only way the mod is going to improve and get support is if a team with previous mod experience offers to take over the project.

See you ingame in one week!

Here are some screens, most of them are available in the media section

Ok, so we are moving this big'ol website to a new host. First we want to thank PHPwebhosting for everything they allowed us to do and not complaining. Also, we want to give a huge thank you to Branzone.com for supplying us with what we need. You all should look into these outfits for your webhosting. Both are fantastic and customer service is top notch.

Now on to the meat and potatoes! Well first things first, good and bad news. Yes, you get the bad first... As always, no matter how hard we try to plan on getting all our ducks in a row to get a nice media package out for you all, it never fails that we run into problems.
If any of you see the person who created Murphy's law, please beat him severely. We have 3 major bugs we are stuck on that are causing us not to get the media we want to put out.

Anyway, I'll go ahead and break down the departments again and give you all an insight of what’s going on.

Coding: John, Stefan and Andrew.
Andrew is a new addition to the team, I hope you all welcome him with open arms. We are also currently trialling another programmer, Brad Smith.

Grenades are in. You have to pull the pin/unscrew the cap, release the spoon/pull the rope, and you better get rid of it before the times up. Umm did I mention the fuse is variable? (Evil laugh). We also have smoke grenades in, which after some problems now have the correct colors. Also, we have a working form of climbing in. But it needs to be looked at more; we may have to redo it. Finally, JonM managed to fix a major performance reducing and crash bug, which has reportedly improved gameplay immensely.

Modelling: Ryan, Ac and Toni.
Ryan has made the 6th FJ player model, M5 Stuart and has optimized the world weapon models that are in our internal beta so far. Ac has been working on church props for the mappers and fixing some errors. Toni is in the process of unwrapping the FE16 10,5 Leichte Feldhaubitze which will be in Sainte Marie Dumont.

Texturing: Val, Tim and Toni.
Val has almost completed all of Eglise's church models. She will move onto the FJ player model and 105 once they are UV unwrapped. Tim has been knocking out more prop skins and world textures than I can count. Also has completed more than 8 face skins. Toni has made a few new world textures as well.

Animations: Naseem and Geoff.
Naseem finished the Garand, K98 and Thompson animations for the player. Geoff finally got a working rig in Maya, but has been too swamped at school to do much development work.

Sound: Brian.
Brian has been doing a ton. P38 sounds, footstep sounds, grenade explosions, and the list goes on. I honestly don't remember all of them, there’s so many.

Mapping: Rick, Toni, Mike and Stefan.
We are currently trialling another mapper, who is in the final stages, Travis Christie. If you spot him, make him feel welcome!

Rick’s map is coming along, and man this thing is HUGE! I mean, there will be plenty of long distance shots in his map for sure. Stefan has actually found sometime to work on his map. Although he needs some weed killer for some of those pesky weeds in his road. Toni's map is almost done; he's just redesigning the trench system for the 105s. Lastly Eglise's church is about done and the C47 jump area is looking great, as seen in the recent exclusive images on IRC (#resistancemod @ irc.gamesurge.net).

Website: Dan
Well, once we finally do move the site over and release the expected huge media update in the process, you will be able to tell when you look around how things have changed. Dan has been working feverishly to redo how things are put together on the page, and he has made the backend a lot more user friendly for the team. - Until then you will just have to guess how the new media page looks.

On the list to be done:

• Geoff to get prone animations done.


• Naseem to finish the MP40, fix up some animations and move to grenade throwing.


• Get the 105 and FJ skinned.


• Bring on another coder if he makes it in and also another mapper which both are fantastic looking prospects.


• Get our internal beta test team assembled.

We are still looking to expand our player animation department. So if you have experience animating player models put your application in, we won't bite!

Oh, for some good news, we have a few screens for you guys. We hope you guys will be satisfied with this for now till we can get our build less buggy to show off some better media.

As always, THANK YOU ALL for the support you give us. Without you guys we aren't what we are, please keep spreading the word about us.
-RnL Dev Team

We are still working on getting the expected media update finished off, however until then we cannot give you all an exact date but we promise it will be soon!

Bellevue, WA, June 1, 2006 - Valve, developer of the blockbuster series Half-Life and Counter-Strike, announced Half-Life 2: Episode One is now available via Steamgames.com for just $19.95 and at retail outlets around the world.

The first in a trilogy of episodic games, Episode One reveals the aftermath of Half-Life 2 and launches a journey beyond City 17. Episode One does not require Half-Life 2 to play and also includes a first look at Episode Two, which will ship by year's end.

In addition to the new single player experience, two multiplayer games are included. And those who purchase Episode One will have free access via Steam (www.steamgames.com) to Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, the interactive technology demo that introduces High Dynamic Range lighting to the Source Engine, Valve's award-winning game technology.