We've been hearing a lot of things circulate throughout the community recently, so, to clarify: we're NOT dead. We're working behind the scenes and Black Mesa is really starting to shape up. Our weapons are in-game, skinned and undergoing the animating process. Our levels are filling up with custom textures and world props. Instead of ERROR signs, we now have houndeyes and bullsquids to play with. Instead of Kleiners everywhere, we actually have some of our own scientists standing about: sadly, not yelling profanity at Gordon just yet.

We're really proud of the progress we've made since January and a lot of that work has been made possible by a fresh batch of development talent and overall team dedication. In the Character Modeling department we're welcoming cman2k & CGJeff: both of whom model and skin their creations. In 2D Art we're welcoming Piks3y and Redmotion, both well experienced in their areas of talent. In Level Design we're introducing kol, already working on his respective chapter. For Prop Modeling & Skinning we're welcoming grudge, Kobi, vertthrasher, Evolution, and tremulant. Finally in the Animation department we have Damian, already working on a small assortment of weapons. On top of all this we have several individuals on the applicant list showing great promise.

With all of the new faces, we're still looking to secure some more developers. Our biggest need is in the prop modeling, prop skinning, texture art and character animator areas, but as always we are willing to look at applicants to other departments. For anyone interested, make sure you send an e-mail to jobs@blackmesasource.com with a bit about you, your past experience and some examples of your work.

Also worth noting is the work on the Black Mesa script. It has been going on for little over two months now and we are beginning to prepare for positions in voice acting and experienced FacePoser users. We do not want to see any voice acting applicants just yet, but we will make a public announcement when we are as well as how to apply.

For anyone who missed the notice in the January update, we are in a development crunch. During this period no new media will be released and we will be turning down any interviews/previews with Black Mesa. This allows us to focus directly on everything as a whole, rather than on a few areas to bring them up for public-release quality. In this development crunch we are moving to secure our custom textures, models, weapons, characters, levels, code, sound and other such assets into Black Mesa.

Hopefully this stops the rumours for a while so we can focus more on our work and less on the "Oh no, Black Mesa is dead!" messages we're seeing. As always, our official forum community at http://forums.blackmesasource.com is the place to chat with developers and to get the latest on what's happening with Black Mesa.

In a closing note, we would like to thank GamerNode & HLGamer, our webhosts, for their continuing support of the mod project. They have provided us with bandwidth, webspace and any service or assistance they can provide. We hope that you will stop by their websites at http://www.gamernode.com and http://www.hlgamer.com and check them out.

Half-Life 2: Episode One, the first in series of episodic games from Valve, is now available for pre-purchase and pre-load via Steam. Those who pre-order the game before it is made available on June 1st will save 10% off the $19.95 price. For more information, visit www.steampowered.com.

After we issued the graphical redo several months ago, we went back to the drawing board and our concept artist David came up with some new designs.

These last few months have been hectic, with many more new designs pouring in, and the art team struggling to keep up.

Here are some renders on our new Rahmos infantry forces. Note the Grenadier Sergeant is not yet completed.

First of all, the Conscript:

These will be the first infantry troops you can build as RTS General. They are part of the main City Defense Forces, often acting as local police forces.
They are weakly armored and carry light weapons.

The officers of the conscript:

The Rahmos RTS general can select these units, and switch to FPS controlling them directly.

After purchasing an upgrade you will be able to construct more heavily armed Grenadier troops.

These are the main infantry forces of Rahmos, available in many forms. The ones you will be able to build; will be the City Legion Grenadiers.

They have heavy armor, are armed with a sub machinegun and carry grenades.

Last but not least, we’ve finished another map-model. This is another skymap super structure which will decorate our maps.

That’s it for now. Stay tuned as more updates coming shortly.

Throughout April Team Dystopia have made huge advances in the creation of Dystopia Version 1. To top off this months progress, we have the unique Punk heavy class. This walking powerhouse is based on blue prints for a now out dated Corporate security augmentation. Based on time tested designs the Punk's scuffed up old heavy's earned their scratches being proven in the field.

We'd like to share with you two great desktop background images captured by GraFix. The first is titled, Punk Hideout and features the new punk heavy along with his comrades.

The second is called Corp Field Ops and paints the scene of Corporate forces preparing for an operation.

As an added bonus we have an awesome piece of poster art created by DaaDaa, titled Warehouse. This is an example of the amazing concept art our team uses as a base for Dystopia's environments and action.

I'd also like to pimp out an incredible fan video made by Raven, showing off action from the Dystopia Demo. It weighs in at 135 meg and features some excellent highlights from Vaccine, all edited together very well. Another example of the fantastic community which has grown up around Dystopia already.

Finally to round out this media release are a few in game screenshots snapped during our closed beta testing sessions. The map being played is Abandon.

Well another 2 weeks has gone by. They've been going by quickly as of late. There won't be much to this update, no art or anything. We're working hard and we have a planned release schedule. We are aiming for June or July at the moment and we will keep you posted on progress and give a more definitive date once stress testing has started. Things are moving along well as we slowly bring this mod to a releasable state. It's close ladies and gentlemen. We also hope to bring you a teaser video sometime soon, we're just waiting on our first capital ship skin to come through to show off the transition properly. Have a nice week, and I promise some screens next week.

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Time for an update. First off a bit of news: We're really sorry for missing our scheduled update last week, I hope you will understand the team has been going through some very tough changes and an update just didn't seem appropriate. We were thoroughly pleased with all the great responses we got from those two space screenshots we published, but the feeling was bitter sweet.

Along with the slew of positive comments and the great morale boost those have provided us, a lot of very important things happened. Most notably, our art lead, Raz, has left the team to pursue personal projects, this has left a gaping hole in our current organization. Fear not however, because a successor will be chosen soon. I have taken the opportunity of this change in leadership to rebuild the art team from the ground up. We have gotten lots of comments on our interior environments and the general concensus is that they lack art direction, as a result we have gone out and hired on some more concept artists to fill in the blanks. We're also cleaning house with most of our art and deciding what stays and what goes. Basically the art team is heading in a whole new direction, and it's going to take some time to adjust, however I'm sure you will all appreciate the benefits of this.

Our coding is still going steady, slowed down a little by all the management changes happening, but we are working on some new impressive engine effects for the ships as well as fixing up the few lag problems we have been experiencing. Things are going smoothly and we expect to get you some action shots of some more space fighting next week.

On the art front, we don't have much this week, but tweek has been working on the NGM Interceptor low-poly model and I just thought I would share with you a progress shot of that. We also have some great concept pieces coming up from 2 new concept artists, we will be showing you those soon. Here is the NGM Interceptor low poly and high poly models:

That's all for now. We appreciate your continued support and we should bring you an update next week as well. We're still going strong, and I think the changes I have told you about further up will benefit the team in the long run.

A few new positions have been made available for applications on the Jobs page, including two administrative ones -- the Community Liaison and the Character Design Lead. Both of these require individuals with above-average skills and regular availability, as they include additional responsibilities beyond what would normally be expected. There's also one additional level design spot and the newly-opened Sound Engineer position. For more information, visit the relevant section and have a look for yourself, and if you think you'd like to apply, you can use our convenient online application form.

Also, we'd like to officially welcome Rasmus "Ramses" Borkamp of Germany to the team; he is the first of the latest round of applicants to be approved. He'll be joining us as a concept/2D artist, and you may be seeing some of his work soon. Ramses has been involved with Nightwatch for quite a while, and is notably responsible for the fan-produced "box art" that appeared in the forums some time ago. There will likely be some other approvals coming in the near future, but as usual the environment design ones tend to take the longest to evaluate.

The NS team has just finished testing NS v3.1.3 which we are now making available to the public! This is a server-side patch, so only server-operators will need to download it (both Windows and linux are included).

NS v3.1.3 changelog

• Gorges only get 50% health regeneration from their own healing spray


• The alien resource tower "hull" has been increased in height to reduce the effectiveness of players hiding inside the model


• The message printed when a player joins a team will not be displayed during the warmup. After the round has started, the message is not displayed more than five times a second to prevent client disconnects

In other news, lots of stuff is happening behind the scenes. The new site back-end has been a nightmare to get working but looks like it is finally getting close to release. We know how much you want to post to the forums again (and believe me, no one wants the Constellation program up again more than I!) but we are getting close to having things working smoothly again. The last thing we want is to be hacked again as soon as we go live so we're trying to make sure the site is as solid as we can make it. Once the site is back, we'll be announcing the changes in NS v3.2 as well (which will include some bigger improvements).

Also, we are talking to a few serious investors and I'm quite hopeful that at least one of those will pan out soon. We also have some other revenue sources falling into place so we're hoping to start serious work on NS:Source very soon.

Hang in there folks!

One year ago, Plan of Attack was released as the first total conversion Half-Life 2 Mod. Today, on our first birthday, we are releasing our entire source code back to the community. We do this as a way to thank our dedicated community and to give other MOD teams an invaluable learning resource to use when creating new games.

We hope this gives aspiring MOD teams a huge step up in creating games for the Half-Life 2 engine. The art assets alone will save teams several man-months worth of development time. The source code includes all of our raw art assets for player models, weapons, textures, and props - all in Maya. Also included are all map source files, including a few unreleased maps.

The Plan of Attack Source Code is released under the Creative Commons license. This means anyone is able to copy and distribute modifications of this work, as long as they are non-commercial in nature and you credit the Plan of Attack Team.

We will be opening up a new forum section dedicated to folks using our code base to modify and create new MODs.

Well, it is time for some new news on this page, don't you think? With Morphew unable to update the site regularly, I will be filling in a bit to keep you all informed on our situation.

We are currently still working dilligently on getting 1.1 released, and we are honestly closer than ever. To hold you all over for a bit, I figured I would make this news release a 2-part facet.

One is the release of tp_city, made by our mapper extraordinaire Hawk. It can be downloaded here or you can browse on over to the Downloads page and get it there as well. Remember, this is a custom map for The Trenches 1.0b.

Now to the other part of the post, 1.1 media. While we have been fairly skimpy with the media on the front page, we have been posting more and more on the forums. I figured I would share a few of those pictures with you as well as one never before seen outside a few select people. Here they are:


Top-left: Launching a signal flare into the sky.
Top-right: A flare that has gone out, floating down. The Luger is jammed.
Bottom-left: A misguided flare on the ground lighting the immediate area.
Bottom-right: Carrying the Bergmann MG-15nA LMG.

Remember! The shots of 1.1 should be considered as work-in-progress. The content shown within is subject to change before release

Ben Goldberg took a moment to sit down with D6Veteran from http://tacticalrealism.com/ to talk RnL and give some info on our features as well as how development on the mod is progressing. In addition we provided Tactical Realism some exclusive eyecandy for all you RnL fans. You can read the interview here. Also keep in mind that the irc channel is still the best place for all your RnL info.

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It's been sometime since we updated. We appreciate everyones confidence and support in our project even when we are silent for a bit. We were going to release a few ingame vids/screenshots, but since we are replacing our player models, we felt it didn't represent what we thought was good. So in the mean time, I just wanted to give you a little info on whats been going on behind the scenes.

Coding: The NCO map has been done. The NCO can choose it, objective areas are marked, and other classes can view the map if they are close enough to the NCO. New respawn system has been started, and you can find more info on that if you've been following along in the forum. A lot has been talked about on how it's going to work.

Artwork: Tim, our new texture artist has hit the ground running. He has completed all our new faces for our player models. He has also knocked out all sorts of prop models that we where waiting so long for a skin artist without a ego.

Val and AC have been working on Eglise's church models, and the stain glass looks incredible. This treat will wait till we release,it's that cool. :D

Ryan has completed 2 wrist watch models that will be added to the game and serve as a neat feature. He has also completed a NCO map model that will serve a certain purpose. I'm sure you all can guess. ;)

Animation: Well, to be honest, this was what was hanging us up. Since we decided to can our old player model animations, we moved to XSI from Maya. So that required Naseem to learn XSI in a hurry. Well I'm happy to say, we are almost complete on our base set of animations. Right now we are starting prone, and once that subset is done, all we have to do is minor, or we hope so. ;) The new player models will have eye tracking, and in the future we hope facial animations. :D

Geoff has been extremely busy at school, but has managed to work on the NCO map first person animations. They're not finished, but if it goes well, it will be a very unique way to view the map for the NCO.

We've been trying out other first person animators, but I have a feeling most people that apply, don't realize the amount of work required to be a developer for a mod, or at least ours. We have one candidate we are trying out, so far he's doing well, and we hope to bring him on.

Sound: Brian, our main man has been strapped with work. Real Life has almost taken him completely away from us, but good fortune has fallen apon us, and he's back to working with us on a limited basis until work slows for him. Some new things hes worked on make it feel like you are really taking ammo out of your pouches instead of it suddenly just appearing on screen. Very convincing.

Mapping: Toni has really optimized his map and has increased the FPS by at least 10% in all areas. Eglise has been optimized more, and has more room now for the jump effects, were it was sitting pretty tight beforehand, a welcome change. ;) Stefan has added on more houses to his map. It feels more populated than ever before. Rick's map, the causeway to carentan has been completely scraped and is getting remade. So far from the pictures, and test versions, this map is going to be awesome. There will be, with some luck, some very nice shots taken in some areas. ;)

Ok time to spill some beans. We are in the process of working toward our first solid test beta, which we will be using outside help to test. What this means is, we will be selecting about 10-12 community members to do some internal testing with us. It will not be a public test, so please do not misunderstand that. Along with testing, you will have a vote on what features should be implemented as we go along. More on this as we get closer.

We are also looking for more coders, and a second player animator. If you feel you have what it takes to work on this team, please fill out an application. We definitely need the help, so dont think for a second you couldnt make it.

Again, thanks so much for all of your support. We all know its hard to go on just words alone, and do not think this is some sort of vaporware. Trust me, we wouldnt be here working this hard on something that doesn't look like there will be a end to it. So please be a little more patient with us and you will be well rewarded.