I'd like to say that we're back from the downtime and we'll be sticking to schedule from now on, with a media update every week. Today I have for you a new concept piece, the Dreadlord. This is the leader of the vampire faction in Bloodthirst, and as such is a force to be reckoned with:

Just recently I was interviewed by the s-man from hl2central, regarding the mod. I’m told it’s an interesting read; you can take a look here.

Below you can see the bar map that quicksilver is working on.



Next you can see the concept image for the euro terrorist by Viscera.

MASSIVE UPDATE: Dire is now running a contest for all music creators out there! It's called our Small Band Contest! The purpose of this contest is to allow small bands (or digital music composers) to send in a song that they think will fit Dire's theme. Now, you can write and record a custom song, or use one you previously made. As long as it fits the theme, it is ok.

The Rules: First off, you need to have the song ready. Then make a .txt including your Band's Name, the song's name, an E-mail address that you can be found at, your band's website, and the lyrics to your song. PLEASE name this .txt file the same name as your song so we can stay organized. If you don't include the .txt file then we can't use your song.

Also I know what you may be thinking "What if they like a digital song that was sent in over a band's song?" Well don't fear, if we get a lot of digital composed songs along with band songs, we will choose one of BOTH to win.

The people over at Game Jack MOD Dev Center are still looking for help! If you know PHP & MySQL, head on over and apply for a position as a webdesigner! For you who don't know...This new website, Game Jack is a website were people looking to create a MOD can create a project and higher programmers who can post their resume in our gallery, to the team. Members that are added to the team will be granted certian permissions to the source code. This website is sure to boost MOD creations through the years of Half-Life, and Half-life 2. Now supporting 3 party projects such as anti-cheat development for MODS such as CS. Be sure to check it out!

An update to the Steam client has just been released. Steam will update itself automatically when you restart. Here is a list of the changes:

STEAM CLIENT CHANGES / ADDITIONS:

• Improved converting from old cache behavior


• Improved how Steam updates to new content versions

I have already had a number of entries from our Fans and I'm going to be looking for a winner soon so keep those names rolling in!

If you haven't heard of the competition yet go here to check it out. I would have to thank PHL for doing a news post on us and giving us a huge amount of new fans. But now onto the real news I have been doing lots of tweaks to the site today as u can already see I have put up the beginnings of the new Nav Bar, and I have removed the links from the header. And I have also made some more tweaks to the forums found here.

Ok now we have a small preview of the Guard House (do take note that this could change at any given time)

I have quite a bit of good news to report today. First off we have 2 new staff members, RichyCunningham who is our new uploader (and doing a fine job so far) and Gremlin who is our new forum technical moderator.

The other good thing is that we now have our very own game server, thanks to the excellent folks over at http://www.fragdemons.com. You can grab the IP address and see live server stats on the Game Servers page on the left nav bar. I will be getting a forum up for it later tonight (when im done playing hehe), so If you would like the server to run custom maps, please say so there, along with what special map(s) you would like.

I'm going to be wrapping up my work on ZHLT this week, attempting to work out the currently reported bugs with entity shadowing and improving HLRAD performance. I'm also going to publish the full source of ZHLT p16 (once it's finished) for download since I'm no longer going to be maintaining it myself. I'd like to leave the tools without any known issues, but unfortunately I think that the intermittant HLBSP clipping problems are going to be a task for the next coder who decides to work on ZHLT.

I'm going to be having lunch with Flayra tomorrow and talking with him about the level of my future involvement with NS. If EA asks me to sign a no compete clause including work on community game projects, I'll no longer be a member of the NS dev team; either way I'll still check in on the forums every once in a while to see what's going on. Flay is going to be interviewing programmers to take over my work on the mod; if everything works out I'll be sitting in on the interviews as well.

Half-Life 2 publisher Vivendi Universal Games has laid off 350 staffers, or 39 percent of its total North American work force, as part of a turnaround plan to reduce costs and position the company for growth. The cuts included about 180 employees in the Los Angeles area, 110 at the company's Sierra Entertainment division in Bellevue, Wash. and workers at a game development studio in Boston.

In light of the recent acquisition of both NetFire.com and GameDaemons, the CPL has decided not to assign the sponsorship agreements to their new parent company.
The CPL and CAL express their gratitude to both NetFire.com and GameDaemons for their support. Special recognition must be offered to their former CEO, Mr. Matthew Jones, which dedicated many hours of his day to help the CPL in different aspects of its online operation. His contribution to the CPL's success will not be forgotten.

The CPL and CAL have received a few offers from different companies wanting to provide similar services. Next week, the CPL will announce its new online partner.