Hello there Half-Life community,

I have bad news for all RCS users. I'm closing down the service. I've hosted the service for almost two years, but now that Half-Life 2 has been announced, it's time to quit. Half-Life 2 will contain distributed compile tools, meaning that you will be able to compile with virtually anyone. This ofcourse will render the RCS useless.

The Half-Life 1 community may still need this service after the release of
Half-Life 2, but I'm not able to keep the service up for a shrinking group
of people. Another reason is the fact that I'm done studying and ready for a real job. I simply won't have the time anymore for keeping the service going and enhancing its features.

But why this news post? I'm not just giving up on the RCS. I hope there's
someone out there who's willing to continue this service for the Half-Life
community. Or maybe some mod-team who is willing to setup something like this.

I am on a roll today. Here is another interview of kami from banzai maps click here.

HLGaming.com: What is your favorite HL mod and why?
Kami: TFC by far because it is quite tongue-in-cheek and has a great atmosphere. TFC was the initial mod that hooked me to online game play and I’ll never forget that. I suppose i also like the cartoon aspect of it in that the characters don't have to look realistic or have realistic attributes, everyone's just there to have fun. i also love the team-based game play of TFC... i haven't found anything quite like it in any other mod I’ve come across
HLGaming.com: How do you come up with these ideas for such great maps?
Kami: Films, books, other games, TV, dreams... absolutely anything. For example, aliens (one of the best trilogies ever) were a big influence for colonyx and planet3c and tomb raider was an influence for artifact. Obviously as a mapper I like to add my own twists to the theme and surprise people. I get inspiration from absolutely anything and try to incorporate real-world structures/ideas and my own imagination into the maps I make.
...

Click here for the entire article.

Check it out over at Jobabob Maps

I have also been able to interview Jobabob (his first interview ever) and have uploaded it to the website.

HLGaming.com: What's inside your head for mapping?
Jobabob: Flowing Venetian canals, most of world war 2, prefabs, large outdoor areas, a random jumble of ideas that came to me in dreams and a total disregard for how people will view the map. I map for myself alone, purely for the joy of mapping.
...

For more on this interview please check out the interview right here.

Overlord is based on (incase you haven't guessed), the Normandy beach landings, specifically the days immediately before, during and after.
Capture point one is based around the night before the d-day landings, where troops parachuted behind enemy lines to assault key targets, in this case, an axis seaside base. The allies must infiltrate the base and 'capture' the grappling hook in order to ascend to the higher levels of the base and destroy the main objective, two seaward facing guns.
Capture point two is the landing and the omaha beach itself the next morning, where the allied objective is to move up the beach and break the seawall with a detpack. After this they must move the flag into the axis base and onto the capture point in the basement.
Capture point three is set in a town a few days after the landings that was bombed the previous night (Caen), with some of the fires still raging in the areas hit. The allies must move through the town through several choke points and then place the flag on the capture point at the top of a hill to win the game!
Taken from the readme:
Attack, Defend, Normal and reverse Capture the Flag. Overlord is all of the above, a large 'theatre of war' map for tfc based around the overlord campaigns before, during, and immediately after the D-Day landings.

Screenshots
Download

I was going through the old archive backups of the site and i found some interviews that were never posted along with the old design of the site (I will post that at a later date). Here is the link to the interviews page. You might like it. http://www.hlgaming.com/community/interviews.php.
Also i just recently intervied K-Dub of the SecurityServices team for Gamesnet, so head on over and read up on the hype.

The Steam Beta is entering its final phase, and is now open to the public. To enter this beta, simply download and run the 500K installer. Steam, a broadband platform for the deliver and management of digital content, currently features a variety of Valve games including Counter-Strike 1.6, which introduces the new riot shield, the official CS bot and more. For more information, visit www.steampowered.com.

I have had the honor to get an interview with K-Dub the head developer of SecurityServ a new services bot for GamesNet still in development stages.

HLGaming.com: What is the purpose for SecurityServ?
K-Dub: The prupose of SecurityServ is to reduce the dramatically rising level of spam and advertising on GamesNET. As owner of #Script I have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of people ask for anti-spam or anti-advertising scripts, and I have seen tons of good ideas. SecurityServ's aim is to take all of those great ideas I've seen over the years into a single "God-like" bot which can handle the networks top channels.
For more information head over to http://www.hlgaming.com/community/int_securityserv.php

http://www.halflife-files.com. has released a new interview of the Hybrid Theory:
"Timmay: Thank you for doing this interview with HalfLife-Mods.com. Please introduce yourself, and tell us more about your role in the development of the mod.
Donkey81: I’m Donkey81, director of Raw Digital Entertainment and project leader of Hybrid Theory. In English: I do a bit of everything, and ensure that the whole project runs smoothly.

Timmay: What other mods have you worked on?
Donkey81: Prior to Hybrid Theory, Raw created Solo Operations (under the guise of Zero Development), which can be found on this month’s (August 2003) PC Gamer UK disks. I’ve also done a bit of work on a mod called Sex, Drugs and Beer Can, as a mapper."
To read the rest please go to http://www.halflife-files.com/E/article.php?77.255

BoomTown have written a preview which can be found here.

Heres a quote:

"The latest version of Counter-Strike will be included with Condition Zero when it's released. The price will be fairly reasonable and actually a lot cheaper than a lot of todays releases and should be in stores from September 2003."

and here's some screenshots:

[url=http://i.boomtown.net/pics/6/8/5/38586/640x480.jpg][/url] [url=http://i.boomtown.net/pics/9/9/5/38599/640x480.jpg][/url]

The BattleGrounds have updated with a few little fixes to some v1.2 problems. They include a transparency fix, custom metamod compile and a Linux server fix