Natural Selection have released a 4 minute video giving a fly through of the 4 new levels in v2.0.

The NS video

Half-Life.org have interviewed John_Matrix from The Specialists team.

Here's a snibbit:

abaz: When the mod was started did you think it would be where it is at 2.0?

John_Matrix: Let's say that neither 2.0 is as we wanted it to be.. we've added some weapons that weren't planned but still miss some others, we've added many new features but still we miss few more... hopefully we will get back working on itafter summer for a definitive patch. But as Morfeo said: "this could be called 1.0".. The meaning is that this is a very advanced version, more than we planned.

You can see the rest of the interview over at Half-Life.org

I got a nice little e-mail about natural-selection tonight:

As promised, during the next two weeks before the NS 2.0 release on July 31st, we will be sending you plenty of NS 2.0 media and info. To start things off, here are *exclusive* screens for your site - no one else has 'em! We hope you'll be able to post them up and let us know what you think! If you could also send some people over to our official news site http://www.readyroom.org you will also find 9 more never-before-seen images of ingame NS action!

Also, if you hadn't noticed, we released the first in a series of movies tonight! This one was a 4 minute long flythru of all the new maps included in 2.0. You can find a list of mirrors at http://www.natural-selection.org as well as http://www.readyroom.org, and you are free to mirror it if you have not done so already!

ShackNews is reporting an interview with Gabe Newell at GameDaily. It doesn’t contain a whole lot of new Half-Life 2 info, but it’s still pretty interesting. Here’s a taste:

GameDaily began by asking Newell how the company managed to keep such a tight lid on the development and unveiling plans of Half-Life 2. Leaks were all but sealed shut until a few weeks before this year's E3Expo, when advance scans of future magazine covers featuring the game made their way on to the Internet.

"The announcement was handled by a small group of people, which made it a lot easier to keep it quiet. The development team itself was pretty highly motivated to keep leaks to a minimum since they wanted to have as much time to perfect the game as possible, " answered Newell, adding, "Doug Lombardi (Valve's director of marketing) was responsible for the overall launch and marketing plan. By concentrating the launch activities in a narrow window, it put a lot of stress on those involved, but both the fans and the development team seemed to respond well to it."

Valve has released their third high-res Half-Life 2 video. This one takes a look at Kleiner's Lab. It is available through steam or here.

Valve has released another high-quality Half-Life 2 video, this one features the short scene with the zombie on the docks. You can get the file from here.

Happy birthday to me...happy birthday to me...I am now one year older than I was last year. Mabey if I am nice ill will put a new present on the site tonight...Try and guess what it will be.

HalfLife.de has just posted a Sven Co-op interview, which includes some information on both Sven Co-op 3.0 for Half-Life/CS Retail and Sven Co-op for Half-Life 2.

Halflife.de: Hi Sven! Thanks for this interview. Just introduce yourself and tell us something about your Mod “Sven Co-op”?

Sven Viking: Hi Mathias!

I'm the SvenCo-op Team founder/team leader. SvenCo-op is a co-operative multiplayer mod for Half-Life, in which the players fight together against a horde of computer-controlled enemies. The mod also works with CS Retail (and possibly DoD Retail), though of course you will not have access to Half-Life's single-player storyline unless you own the original Half-Life.

Read the rest Here

The Spesialists have released a 640x480, 28 second teaser animation that was created by 3D_Mike. Its well worth 3MB download aswell although it's not ingame footage.

You can get it here

Taken from www.adminmod.org

Admin Mod version 2.50.56 has been released. The main goal of this release is to bring support of VALVE and STEAM IDs, which are used in DoD Retail and CS 1.6. Password encryption now works under Linux and Windows and also supports MD5 hashes. Admin Mod will now convert script binaries between Linux and Windows format on the fly when loading them.

Please note that while this lets you load Windows scripts on a Linux server and vice versa this does require a conversion on each loading of the script (i.e. each mapchange). It is thus recommended to still convert the script binaries offline with the AMX converters. But it will prevent crashes that resulted from using the wrong format. The AMX converters have been updated to work with the new file format that came with the update of the Small scripting engine to version 1.8.4. If you still have old versions of the converters, download the news version from the Tools section on the download page.

This version also includes some minor bug fixes and other changes. The MySQL version has better support for encryption with MySQL PASSWORD(). Please make sure to read the Change Log or the NEWS file in the package.

There is one known issue with the default adminmod.cfg file. The default maps_file line is incorrectly set to maps_file "" instead of maps_file 0 to turn the maps_file off. Pleas check and correct this if you encounter problems.