C&VG have a interview with Doug Lombardi from the floor of the ECTS show

Here's a snippet

C&VG: What's the atmosphere like over at Valve Software at the moment? Is there an excited buzz or is it more knuckles to the grindstone?

Lombardi: Well, a little bit of both. You know, we hadn't shown the game, ever, and we didn't even talk about it - we didn't even acknowledge the fact that we were doing it for so long.

But after a while I think that put a certain taxing on the team, and I think bringing it out and showing it to yourself and to everybody else at E3 and now at this show, and seeing people write great things about it and saying, "All the five years worth of labour that you've been putting into this project was worth your time", that sort of energised everybody.

Also, the fact that the end is in sight, that just makes any situation better. When you can see the finish line, you always get that adrenaline rush to charge forward, and I think that's where folks' heads are really at right now

You can read the rest of the interview at C&VG

The Fire War Mod have updated with some renders of there H&K G-36

The people from Natural Selection have decided to release 2.01 ahead of scedual because 2.1 is taking a little longer than planed.

Change Log:

- If an Onos redeems while digesting a player, the player is left behind
- Changed "lastinv" so that it's preserved between upgrade gestations
- Resupplying at armory only goes into reserve (addresses end-game grenade spam at marine start)
- Made offense chambers less accurate against fast-moving targets (jetpackers)
- Marine resource tower cost lowered from 20 to 15
- Aliens are now able to walk slowly when cloaked via the cloaking upgrade (allowing them to sneak past turrets, and even build and use buttons while cloaked)
- If you get disconnected while playing aliens, and you rejoin, your resources will be preserved

To read the rest of the change log head over to there forums

You can download the patch here
ns-v201d.zip (1.62MB)

Note: this is ONLY for server operators

Half-Life Invasion have released v1.1.

It fixes most of reported bugs, adjusts weapons accuracy, and the whole mod has been translated into English, Spanish and German ( subtitles, in-game messages, menus and controls configuration )

HL inveasion is a single player mod that offers 44 new maps, 16 new weapons and 2 new enemies.

You can get this mod here
invasion_full.exe (57.10MB)
invasion_patch1.1.exe (2.72MB)

Band of Brothers have created a coupple of grate renders of the M1919A4 .30 Caliber Browning Machine Gun, and the M1 Carbine,

The Japaneese gaming site 4Gamer has some video's from the Softimage booth at SIGGRAPH.

These video's do not contain any ingame footage of HL2 they focus on how eliments of it is edited

You can get the video's from here
Alyx Movie.zip (54.07MB)
Mapping Movie.zip (54.99MB)

Half-Life 2 Online Source has interviewed Gabe Newell

Here's a Snippet

Hoaxer: What kind of shadows are used in Source engine - are they fully dynamic, or are they partially static lightmaps - do you use a combination of lightmaps and dynamic shadows?

Gabe Newell: We use a combination of dynamic and static lighting. Objects that move cast dynamic shadows whereas static objects cast, well, static shadows that are cheaper. On DX9 you get soft dynamic shadows as well. We also have a full radiosity solution for static bumped lighting (bump maps work with static lights). If you were to put a static light next to a bump-mapped object, the light direction would be correct (traditionally light maps and bump maps have been mutually exclusive).

You can read the rest here

In Limbo release date has been set for Friday, September 5th. Visit the site for more info. In Limbo MoD

Heres an exclusive image released from the map il_levels, created by Pete

High Octane has posted a new visual style on their website!

Well, there is only one new update today and it falls under the category of Windows XP. Someone I know made a visual style a while back, we modeled the site after it and now he has come back to make us a full blown visual style for Style XP or you can use it in Windows Blinds, whichever you prefer.

Anyways, I would like to personally thank Wood E Hall for making this style as I'm sure he put a lot of work into it and it just completes the whole High Octane look from the RPM gauge to the carbon fiber look!

You can download the visual style HERE.

PS. On a more personal note I have got ridden of the virus, for all you who don’t know how to remove it, go to http://www.symantec.com and download the virus remover and then download the blaster patch from windows update site if you have Windows XP.



Visit High Octane HERE.

The Steam beta is now drawing to an end. This means that there are some significant changes coming to the way that Steam will be run.

The next major release of Steam will be the first step towards converting the entire Half-Life user base to Steam. This means that we will be resetting the Steam account database from scratch. After this, you will need to have a valid CD-Key to access games via Steam, so you will want to treat your Steam account as permanent. One CD-Key will grant you access to all of the games currently available in the Steam beta. The Friends database will remain intact, so if you create an account with the same name when the beta ends, you will retain your Friends list.

The next step will be to release the remaining three Half-Life 2 movies, fix the remaining issues with the Riot Shield in Counter-Strike, and any remaining issues with Steam. This will happen almost immediately after the Steam beta ends.

Some of the other features coming after the beta resets are:

• New version of Cobble reworked by David Johnston.


• Full Skin support in Steam.


• More detailed information regarding the cache file on your drive.


• Vastly more efficient use of disk space and bandwidth in Steam.


• New conversion wizard to make better use of existing content on your drive.

After this, we’ll release an update to the entire user base that will convert them to Steam. Hopefully, the majority of the community will have converted before this. This will happen roughly two weeks from the time that the beta period of Steam has ended. Keep in mind, this does not mean we will be stopping or slowing development of Steam or our games that run upon them.

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the beta up until now. I’ll let everyone know when we’re ready for the next release here.