Source: The CPL

The online registration for the CPL Winter 2004 event was scheduled to launch Tuesday, June 29, 2004 but the CPL has decided to delay the registration until after the completion of this summer's Cyberathlete® Extreme World Championships.
The Winter Event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Dallas from December 15 through December 19, 2004. The CPL will host three official tournaments at this event, with about $200,000 in cash prizes. A $100,000 Counter-Strike tournament sponsored by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies has already been confirmed.

Other tournaments will be confirmed before the registration is launched.

Source: HL Nightwatch

For a long time, everyone involved with Nightwatch has associated the project with original creator Andrew "KungFuSquirrel" Weldon. Things, however, change over time, and his outstanding leadership in directing the mod coupled with his extensive previous level design experience have secured him a professional game development position at Raven Software working on Quake IV.

As a result of his new obligations, Andrew has been forced to step down from active participation in the administration of Nightwatch in order to concentrate on his duties at Raven. He had prepared a statement for release along with the media update that will occur later this week, but I don't think it does justice to his contribution to have the statement drowned out in the frenzy of a content release. The statement follows in its entirety.

When I first formed Nightwatch as a concept in my head, it was a simple map pack with two level designers and a single programmer. I had no idea that 2 1/2 years from the formation of that first concept I would ever see it develop into what it has today... In particular, I never imagined that my work in building Nightwatch to what it is today would play a great part to land me a position as a level designer at Raven Software.

My employment at Raven begins June 24th, and as this happens it is with great disappointment I announce my departure from Nightwatch. This has been a huge part of my life since its inception and as incredible an opportunity as Raven offers me, it is still greatly saddening to leave the project now when it has come so far. This project has grown on a fine line between evolution and feature creep, bringing itself to the point of being the largest SP episode attempted for Half-Life, dwarfing even Opposing Force and Blue Shift in total content.

People often have asked me how I've made this mod what it is, or what (if anything) will become of it when I'm gone. The answer? I haven't made it what it is. The team creating it has. Countless people at one time or another have contributed their talents to this project, each one building upon what was there before in a constant cycle of improvement. The Nightwatch of now is far beyond the early days. It is this same team of people that will carry Nightwatch to its completion. I'm merely the administrative figurehead that put together a few crappy pieces of some maps and set the stage for the rest of the team to make the evolution it has to this point. My ideas set this in motion, my work formed the base for later works, but the biggest changes and improvements have come from the sometimes ignored team members, the real heroes of this endeavor. This team is among the most talented group of people I have ever been involved with and it has been a great pleasure working with them and getting to know them over the course of development. I have not only worked with these people, but come to call them my friends.

To those of you who have been following Nightwatch: Keep it up. Your support has been pivotal in getting the project this far and, as time goes on, will become more and more important. The word of mouth spread on this project has been unbelievable, and I thank every one of you who has ever said to another, "Hey, check this out."

And, of course, to those working on Nightwatch now and who will work on it in the future... All my best. You guys are making something really special and I would give anything (except a job at Raven, heh) to stay with it to the end.

Ladies and Gentlemen, it's been fun. I'll see you around.

Andrew "KungFuSquirrel" Weldon
Nightwatch Project Founder

Source: Black Dragon

Welcome back. As promised, I have the updated backstory ready for your viewing pleasure. Just click on the "About" choice in the menu to your left. It has a few more details just to make the Black Dragon universe seem a little more interesting. Please, post any feedback you may have about it.

Source: The CPL

On Saturday, June 26, 2004 the CPL will celebrate its 7th birthday. In observance of the seventh anniversary since the CPL was launched in 1997, Hitachi and the CPL staff invite you to join us in an online celebration.
The festivities will begin at 7pm Central in channel #HappyBirthdayCPL (GameSurge IRC network) with the Hitachi Scavenger Hunt. The first 100 participants to complete the scavenger hunt will be eligible to play in the CPL Trivia Contest. Only the most hard-core CPL enthusiast will win this contest, for which Hitachi is providing the prize: A Deskstar 180GXP 180GB Drive.

Following the scavenger hunt and trivia contest, CPL staff and tournament managers for the Cyberathlete Extreme Championships event will challenge 5 randomly chosen community members to a CPL Staff vs. Community Counter-Strike match. Win or lose, the 5 players will receive messenger style computer bags, courtesy of Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Team Sportscast Network will provide coverage of the entire event, including broadcast coverage to accompany HLTV for the CPL Staff vs. Community Counter-Strike match. TsN will also be unveiling their latest technology in broadcast coverage, the Playcenter. The Playcenter has been in development for approximately a year and is guaranteed to bring online match coverage to the next level.

Rules and procedures for the Hitachi sponsored CPL IRC Birthday Party can be viewed on the CPL forums.

Source: Game Jack

There is a new way to creating MODS! 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.

Update: Now supporting 3 party projects such as anti-cheat development for MODS such as CS.

I forgot to mention a new hosted site the other day.

I would like to welcome Last Breath, a Resident Evil based mod for Half-Life 2. Be sure to check out their brand spankin new website here.

There are a few more hosted site that I have omited from this news post because those sites are not complete yet. When they are finished I will let you know and the right Hosted Sites menu will be update.

So check out our Hosted Sites listing as it keeps growing.

Source: GHOST OPs
A bit of an update after I have interviewed them. Don't forget to check out the interview by selection Interviews on the left.

Still is need of player animator help, if you have any animation experence with halflife models, and the blending process, please do not hesitate to send me a email. We are so close to completeing the game, all that really remains in some code, and the player animations. it would be great to close the graphic side of ghost, and concentrate on tweaking the game, and building maps for the final release.

I was interviewed by Half Life gaming, you can read the interview here. Thanks to them for doing the interview, and thanks to planet halflife for posting the link, hopefully, this will drive some animation talent our way so we can finish the game, and get this out for the public to give it a try. Im looking forward to playing with everyone. Other than that, we are just working. cardinal is working on code between exams, which is taking a bit of time, but we are moving. Stoffe is making good headway with code and changes as well, so its just a matter of time now. As soon as find an animator and get this stuff done, we are good to go. Thanks, and more later.

Source: The Somme Valley

Ok the time has come!! Would you to be considered for taking part in the closed beta testing of The Somme Valley? We will be reviewing all applications that are submitted so that we can put together the team that we feel would be best to test The Somme Valley before the full public beta. We are currently aiming for The Somme Valley to go beta late 2004 - we will announce an official beta release date nearer the time.

Please take the time to complete as much of the requested detais as possible. The more detail you are able to give us the better the chance you have of securing your place as one of the first people to test the game. All information given will be used by The Somme Valley team for the purpose of picking and choosing the first beta test teams. We will not sell or pass on any of the details to be used for any other purpose.

For information on what to send, where to send it, and when to send it by, please direct your attention to This Post on our Message Boards. Also, if you have any questions, you can simply add a reply to that thread, or stop in our IRC Channel, and ask one of the operators.

Good luck to everybody!

Source: Born of War

Jared has got a new concept art image for everyone to feast their eyes on, enjoy. Click on the small image to give light to the bigger and better one ;p. Expect some more work from Jared; he's a recent addition to the team.



Well the team is a bit distracted the past few weeks, Half-Life 2 still has no solid release date so most of us are just sticking around and slowly working on things. The summer is coming up fast (myself, Drew and Dustin graduate this week) so we'll have a lot more time to actually work on Born of War. Gabe Newell was quoted in an interview (and despite the fact that Valve has lied, misled, and disclosed information about the release date before) he announced that they expect to be giving Viviendi the game in August. We're looking forward to the SDK Gabe - and if you guys hold a Mod class of some sort we'll be there.

We are still looking for team members, Animators, Modelers and Texture Artists (weapon/model skinners) the most! We're in real need of people that are looking to work on a dedicated mod team, and not just people who are here to screw around. If you're interested, don't hesitate to send me an email.

Source: Chaos Ops

Im proud to announce our mod projects 1 year birthday. Time has passed quick, and before we knew it, the 1 year birthday was around the corner. We have made a lot of new content since last time, but were going to batch it up into smaller releases more often now instead of big ones. And unless something goes terribly wrong, you might expect to see a concept design in a short while.
Here are some models we made recently.




Please have in mind we have a lot of different models to come in a few days, both vehicles, guns and skinned models, that needs a little bit more preparation. We have also spent alot of time improving existing material in which we thought needed more detail.