This month was rich in improvements for the PDark: Source Devteam. Loads of annoying bugs were finally corrected and hopefully we will soon get something that should deserve the name of mod. Many maps are just about to be finalised and it is a real pleasure to wander in them. Enough talking for now, let's have a look at the media.

Gectou4 sent us an artwork showing what he was currently working on for the map Temple. No more screenshots of Temple available yet.

Moreover Jahrain, our modeller thought he had it wrong with Joanna, her new look is terribly awesome. Don't you like it?

Some new models were added to our Weapon base. On this screenshot, you will be able to see the RCP120 and the MagSec4.

Now please discover our textured Shock Trooper :

Now another model that was made by MaVmAn, the Shotgun.

We have finally decided what maps were going to be in our very first beta release. Let's have a look at their names and enjoy them. If you don't show the checklist page :
Felicity - Villa - Ravine

We are now pleased to announce, that our website is now avaliable in german! By expanding the languages we support we hope the community will grow and flourish even more than it has currently! Id like to thank everyone who is currently signed up and active in our forums its great to have you arround and share interests.
If you havent already signed up to our forum you can do now by visiting www.stargatetls.net/ipb or if you have already signed up, but havent make and posts, make a new thread and call it Hello! Ill tolerate the spam...

We are allways looking for more talent, especially in the areas of mapping, even more for those that are especially good at entities, displacement and optimisation!
We would also like to take on more model skinners and those that are good at UV mapping and texturing. Those who enjoy modeling props and those good at animation. We are also still looking for a composer to create us a personal soundtrack! If you have any interest please visit our "Join Us" section on the website for more information about jobs that are currently avaliable and then you may go and apply in our "Recruitment" forum under the correct language category.

We would also like to present to you some of the things that have been going on behind the scenes! I will start off with the progress on the weapons:

Firstly we have the beginnings of the C4 detonator which you will be able to use ingame to blast your enemies with the c4 packs you planted earlier. Also a knife to stealthly kill your enemies while humiliating them at the same time.

Here we have a revised version of the gouald hand device, optimising it for in-game use while also making it look, in my opinion anyways, nicer.

We have also made modifications on the serpent guard making it look a bit more realistic, of course we have to add our own personal touch! Our horus guard has just come off of the production line to! Im sure you wont disagree with me when I say its looking very good!

The Anti-personnel mine you may have seen posted before is now textures and ready for deployment!

Soon we will have a public teamspeak server where you will be able to chat to the developers of the modification and fans, the server will have dedicated areas so you can even play games with the other fans and the development team! Maybe even get the chance when SGTLS is released to gloat that you knifed them to death! Keep tuned to this page where the Teamspeak Details will be revealed within the next day or two.

If have any suggestions or comments regarding the modification we will be glad to hear them at our Forum or at our IRC -> irc://quakenet.org/stargatetls

I guess it's that time of the year, huh?


The first trio of screenshots is from Prowl's map of the Bajina Basta hydroelectric power plant and dam near Peruac. Teams will face linear battles on each bank of the river, intersected by bridges where men and equipment can safely cross.

The second trio of screenshots are also the work of Prowl. These screenies depict the Danube River Valley, where American and Soviet forces will fight their first battle of the war. How will it start? How will it escalate? Who's to blame? Keep watching the War Stories section for some good ole World at War fiction.

The final three screenshots are of the Sava River Valley (gee, we really enjoy our rivers and our valleys, don't we?) I premiered this map several months ago, and since then it has been expanded and revamped. New foliage and more props have improved the landscape.

For anyone who's interested, you can get a semi-3D sneak peak of what our maps will look like in game, courtesy of these panorama shots:
[LINKS AVAILABLE VIA THE WORLD AT WAR WEBSITE]

It's been awhile since our last press release, soooo... let the hits keep on coming! Would a new desktop wallpaper from Steve "Sulsa" Jackson help rectify things?

And one last tidbit of information. Sulsa has been fiddling around with some methods of creating photorealistic faces for our player models. The concept of photorealistic faces dates back to Max Payne, but the execution has never quite flown. Half-Life 2 did a very good job, whereas recent games like Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion opt away from photorealistic faces. Well, Sulsa used profile pictures provided by himself, my roommate Brian, and my own stunning visage to render some 3D prototype faces. These are works-in-progress, but please take a gander anyway:

You'll have to forgive the render of Sulsa's own face: all he had available was a webcam. But don't worry, we'll just stick it on the pasty, sun-starved complexions of the Soviet soldiers. Problem solved.

Well, hope you enjoy!

Since our last media update a few months back, insects-infestation has been quietly burrowing away at a steady pace, away from the eyes of the public. But now its time for us to raise our heads again, and show you what we have been up to.

Before moving onto the media, we would like to announce that we are looking for experienced sound designers and hud/icon artists. The sound designer must be capable of producing sound effects for attacks/abilities, and possibly ambient sounds for maps. The hud/icon artist must be capable of producing original 2D hud designs, preferably in organic forms, and also various icons for use on a mini-map and other places.

The following in-game screenshots were taken during the latest play-test on our WIP map, ii_deadcow, which pits ants and termites against each other as they fight for control of the cow's insides!

These screenshots show three important chambers at different times of play, with player made structures attacking and being destroyed over time.

In insects-infestation workers can choose to create pheromone trails for NPC workers to help out with the collecting of resources, here's a few shots of this in action.

Here we can see an ant worker collecting resource from an area heavily defended by ant cactus, which are player made structures. (Please note at this time, termite and ant NPC workers share the same model)

[MORE INFORMATION FROM THIS UPDATE IS AVAILABLE VIA THE INSECTS INFESTATION WEBSITE]

It has been quite a while since out last update, but rest assured- despite the occasional periods of unproductivity, we have been hard at work. The amount of changes we have gone though since our last update has been enormous, and this post is my attempt to give a brief overview of what has been happening with us over the past few months.

First of all, I am sure you are all wondering the big question- when is PVK II going to be released? The news is good or bad depending on how you look at it. We members of the team have dicussed this, and have come to the conclusion that out original plan of having 9 different classes and player models implented in the first release is just a slight to ambitious. After all, when Counter-Strike:Source was first released, they only had two models for each team, and it's a commercial game! The fact is that it takes an immense amount of time and effort to make a single unique character, and that's time and effort we don't have. Instead, we are going with three classes- One for each team. The good news here is that we can release PVK II relatively soon, and while it may not play as well as we imagine, we hope that it's status as a "released" mod will fuel our own personal motivations and attract additional talented developers as well.

Did I mention that we already have these three classes more or less implemented? The Heavy Knight, Skimisher, and Berserker models are all "in-game" and complete minus a weapon and a few animations. To demonstate this, here are some screenshots from a recent playtest.

Notice the functional HUD with health and armor bar, skinned by the talented texture artist Xealous, in the upper left hand corner of the screenshots.(It looks small because the screenshots were originally taken at 1600x1200) Also of note is the skirmisher's pistol and the Heavy Knight model, complete with two-handed sword of doom. You will also see our most prolific mapper, YeeHaa, with his latest creation, pvk_crossroads, as well as updated versions of pvk_saints and pvk_temple. Skjalg has also allowed us to show a pic of the early development of his map, pvk_fort. Looking good!

Also in development is pvk_piratehaven by new team member EvilTaxi. You may remember him from his work on Brawl and The Specialist mods. We're happy to have have him lending us his talents.

And while we may be concentrating on a smaller release for now, don't think that we are not planning ahead for the future. Hengishammer has made a new concept of what will become the second Viking model- The Huscarl.

So you have something to look forward to, I am going to be putting together a trailor of some gameplay footage featuring the music of Rejenorst. For those of you anxious to see more updates, I apologize for the lack of them. I will be posting more frequently.

Well, it's that time again. We promised a lot for April, and this is only the beginning. We decided since we have been practically torturing our community that we'd release a couple of new screenshots. These new screenshots are from INS_Almaden, created by Erratic. These screenshots were taken in collaboration with our new beta testers acquired for our second phase of testing. The new testers have given us an overwhelmingly positive response and have the team motivated to keep producing quality work at an increasingly fast pace.

Oh, and if you think we're going to just dissapear for another month before we release media again, you could not be more wrong. Expect something very special within the next week or two.

We're currently looking for 1-2 new, experienced, coder(s) to help us finish off the mod. If you feel qualified, head over to our team page and scroll down to Available Positions.

In January we promised you a full blown movie "in about a month". In gamedev terms, we're right on time :p. This month we're showcasing a trailer built from scenes we recorded during our alphatest sessions. This trailer shows our deathmatch only, we don't show off the alien yet. It's alpha, so there's still work to be done, but the vid should give you a pretty good impression of where we are in development:
[DOWNLOAD AVAILABLE VIA OFF LIMITS WEBSITE]
We know we keep saying our vehicle system isn't relevant to our gameplay, but it's hard maintaining that, they're just too much fun. We hope to have a second trailer by the summer, showcasing our real gameplay, complete with alien, hunter, and railgun. If you see that vid popping up, public release won't be far away; for now, we still have a lot of polishing to do.

On to a status update of the team. The biggest news here is Purerage, our lead mapper, got hired as level designer for a major game company in NYC. He submitted one of the maps he made for Off Limits and got the job. Gamedev in NY was his dream, so we're very happy for him. That being said, we could use a new excited level designer, so if you have an excellent view on Hammer and are able to make custom textures/props for your maps, feel free to apply for a position.

Our audio positions from our last recruiting wave have been filled, Rautio and aaron are at it at full speed producing new weapon sounds on a daily basis. The rest of the team is also at it: Simon started on ol_styx, an ideal place for a car-chase, Loom finished the superb Vanguard hands skin, Jake is perfecting the player anims, etc etc. Summing up everyone is getting too big a list, but rest assured that the team is working hard to get Off Limits out asap.

We also met HardCoil, the creator of the Omnicol XA-23 airsoft gun that has become one of our main assault rifles. Check out the creation process on his site. A whole different kind of modding, but very cool to watch.
Stay tuned for more!

Well everybody, time for a quick little diddy explaining what the heck we've been doing for the past few weeks, and to toss out a few development screenies of stuff we're currently working on.

First, some production notes:

• Work continues on thorough documentation. Boring stuff for the unwashed masses, yes, but vitally important for any kind of software development. Our technical design document is pushing about 75 pages now, and this doesn't include our Art Bible, Development Plan, and a Master Task list that summates every single niggling detail for every project and every task that needs to be completed for Closed Beta, Open Beta, and Retail Release (an 8 meg excel file!). Arduous work, but such is the life of game development.

Personally, I can't wait to actually get back to making the dang game. ; )

• We in the higher echelons are about to start evaluation of a few new technologies that will help us bring BoB to fruition. More on this as it develops...


• And of course, work continues on our technology demo. But you've been hearing about that for a while now, so I won't bore you with more of the same.


• Work continues on the the new website. The data model is pretty much finalized, the default stylesheet is around 80% done, and work continues on the midtier apps.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff:

WIP: Koester Forge FA-112 View Model
Here we have some orthographic and perspective shots of the FA112 assault rifle, the primary infantry weapon of the EU/GPA members of the Martian Expeditionary Force.

WIP: GPA Soldier w/ Diffuse, Normal, and Specular Maps
Here we have Carnavore's marvelous EU/GPA soldier model, completely textured.

WIP: Autotek IFV28 "Lancer" Adaptable Infantry Fighting Vehicle
And here we have the WIP Lancer, being put together by bnaude.

Concept Art: R331 "Virago" Multirole Light Armored Vehicle
More concept art from our beloved Nick. :) This time we have some roughs for the R331 "Virago", the GPA's direct counterpart to the IFV28.

Empires 1.04 Beta is now available for download. Both clients and servers will need to download this update as usual. Besides bug fixes, this update also includes one new map, Badland, and fixes to Escort and Canyon! Badland is a milestone as it is the first fan created map to be included as an official map. Gobanzo Mon is the creator and deserves recognition for his excellent work. If you're a mapper, you can get started mapping by using the included Empires.fgd with each public release, and visit the Mapping section of our forums for help. We look forward to including more fan created maps in future releases.

Important note to server admins: Emp_badland will have to be manually added to your "mapcycle.txt" file to place the map in your server's map rotation.

The Swarm team is working away hard at Infested and making good progress. Things are falling into place and looking promising. We're happy to show off some new in-game action screenshots and two model renders:


We'll also be running a competition soon, where you can get your name featured somewhere inside Alien Swarm: Infested! More details to follow.