Progress is going as it's been going the last few months, at a nice pace. Our coders are trying to squash them pesky bugs and adding new features. One of which is a way of punishing and voting out TKers. When we get this in HI can finally be played the way it's meant to be played, with FF on!

Because of the succes of release of our first detail map, hi_alandalus, we decided to add these textures to all the maps in HI. So now our mappers and texture artists are working together to create the so call 'detail textures' for all the maps in HI.

And as you all know our modellers and skinners are redoing all the weapon models for a future release and we thought we'd give you a little preview of that. Here's a sneak preview of the MP5SD5. The model was made by BIZL and the skin made by Crazer.



That's it for today, check back soon for more weapon models.
Back to studying for me...

This is going to be a short media update. We've got 3 new pics to show off and a bit of news that should encourage our fans. First of all, the media:

UTF Bomber Concept

UTF Battleship Concept

Militia Hi-Poly Interceptor

Very sweet art here. Now heres the second piece of good news. We have decided to post weekly updates similar to this one (since we have way more than just this to show you). So next sunday you can expect another 3-4 pics with some more great work from the team. Iced_Eagle will be posting most of these updates, so stay posted.

The success of “The FRAG” resulted in a murmur of excitement within game communities across the world about the new concept of professional competitive gaming. Could this hobby become a sport? Is it possible that skilled computer game enthusiasts could one day make a career of this pastime?
But while others were questioning this potential, the CPL staff committed to achieving it. Preparations for the next event, to be held again at the Dallas InfoMart in July 1998, were already underway. This event, simply called “The CPL Event” had an expected attendance significantly higher than that of The FRAG event.
Scores of competitors registered, new sponsors were brought on board, workshops with prominent figures in the gaming industry were scheduled, and unofficial tournaments were being organized for the BYOC. This and other early events would determine the basic components for future CPL events.[...]

Half-Replaced is now (finally) open to the public!

While our selection of replacement files is fairly limited at the moment, we hope that with an increase in community size, our database of files will grow as more submissions come in.

With that said, if you've got replacement files that you, or someone else has made just sitting around on your hard drive, share them! Submit Them and well post them here on the site for others to download and enjoy. You dont even have to be a registered user to submit files! There is no rating system, all files are posted regardless of how they look. (Yes, you can even submit nude CS hostage models..you sick bastards..) : ).

In addition to this, we will soon be expanding the site to incorporate some tutorials for those who want to get their feet wet in the world of custom content design. More information about the new sections will be up at a later date. (expect to see some re-appearances of tutorials that were previously on Polymorph).
To save you the searching, ill also list the following sections which DO have content.
The Specialists, Natural Selection, Half-Life

Enjoy it guys!

Here we are releasing some of our newer vehicles by Abdi. Firstly we present our amphibious vehicle, an 8x8 ATV (and yes it can also float). Next on the list is another creation of Abdi our dirt bike. The dirt bike and 8x8 Amphibious ATV will hopefully add new dimensions of play to Jurassic Rage. Last but not least one of our heavy duty cargo trucks! Enjoy!

At time of Posting, You are listening to the_s-man (Team Leader) and Epitomiz3 (Head of Programming, Tech Adviser, Demo PM) on Half-Life Radio!

For those that aren't listenining, shame on you! We are giving out some new information about our Half-Life 1 Demo. Our team has been hard at work recently with a Half-Life 1 demo, and it is looking extremely good. We won't give a release date, but you can rest assured, it will be in the very near future. You can check out two pictures of our official demo map below. This map was done by evert, and is shaping up to be the best map i've ever seen using the HL Engine.

I've received alot of feedback on our Half-Life 2 Model Renders, that they look low-poly. The reason for that is the models were "Flatted" during rendering, so look blocky. Mitlancer, that devil him, re-rendered all of our Half-Life 2 Weapons in 3D Studio Max 5 to look nice, sexy and smooth, like they're supposed to, and here they all are:



A bit better from our previous renders, wouldnt you agree?

3.1 is progressing fairly well, though we're a bit short on man-power this time of year due to Real-Life™ issues. Hopefully a few of the team members will be back in working order not too long from now. This time of year always seems to play out that way.

Several new features and gameplay types are planned for 3.1. While still in the early stages, new entities like info_monster_goal will allow allow mappers to have better control over the AI to do various tasks, and flags like "Guard Mode" will allow the AI to guard and repair (if able to) different structures and fellow AI. We're also planning on giving mappers more control over weapon behavior, animations, sounds, etc. through script files.

Another addition of the next update will be the new Tor monster. Tor, the Xen character that helps you in the Sven Co-op map series, will finally be making his appearance as a unique monster class. Tor is still in planning, and is scheduled to have new attacks and new AI behaviors which will allow him to get an advantage over his enemies. For now, you can get a sneak preview/animation of the new Tor below, while he proudly walks:

[check it out at Sven Co-op ]

There are so many things planned/finished for 3.1, that we're thinking about calling it 3.5 instead. We did first say the update would be just for fixing a few bugs, but we're now focused on getting out something more substantial. That's all for now, I hope everyone is enjoying 3.0.

Our latest addition to the edgenetwork is FarCryGaming specializing in the upcoming FPS hit: Far Cry!
The island of Cabatu is vast and dangerous. FarCryGaming is aiming to become the largest FarCry community offering everything from mapping tutorials, gameplay walkthroughs, mod developments and community events.

There are a couple of Steam-related things that I thought were worth bringing up.

#1) We've been re-running the hardware survey as we do periodically. We're up over 500,000 respondents. The running tally is at

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

The previous survey is at:

http://valve.speakeasy.net

There's lots of interesting info, for example Windows 98/Windows ME users going from 62.8% down to 8.25%. It will be cool when more people realize they can play localized versions (Chinese, Korean, French, Italian, German, and Spanish) of the games over Steam.

#2) We've been able to increase the level and speed of our Steam upgrades by direct reporting of client bugs back through Steam. If a Steam client reports a problem, we can replicate it on our machines and jump directly to the line of code in our debugger. This is hugely valuable, and just a fundamentally better way of supporting our customers than we've had in the past.

#3) We've started taking pre-orders for Counter-Strike: Condition Zero over Steam. It is way cool that the people who have been supporting us over the years can now buy our games directly from us. When the first pre-order went through, we all cheered. We're going to be contacting the person who did it and doing something to commemorate the occasion. I was trying to be first, but couldn't type fast enough and ended up #6.