If you see this then I will be posting some news very soon!

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RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA, CA (March 01, 2010) - Welcome to the new Half-Life Gaming website. The aging PHP backend has been replaced with ASP.NET C# 3.5/4.0. The backend for the site was originally done about ten years ago and was starting to show its age. If you have not heard, Half-Life Gaming and edgeNetwork are splitting ways. Half-Life Gaming thanks Shawn Harkin for the years of patience and support in providing countless websites hosting over the past decade.

To put it simply, there is no money in hosting websites for free. IGN shut down all free hosted sites last year for this very reason. Half-Life Gaming is in a position now to help keep a part of gaming history alive and well. For that reason we are going to keep Half-Life Gaming open for the foreseeable future.

Over the next few weeks, hosted sites will begin to move over to the new server.

About Half-Life Gaming / MJCS Studios

Headquartered in rolling hills of Rancho Santa Margarita, CA, south of Los Angeles and North of San Diego, MJCS Studios is an Independent designer and developer of websites, videos, and provider of game servers. The owner of Half-Life Gaming / MJCS Studios has been credited with supporting the Half-Life community since 2000 with the launch of GlobalTFC.

About edgeNetwork / GTA Gaming

Located in Australia, the edgenetwork - also referred to as "Edge Network" - has served the gaming community in some form or another since April of 2000. Originally, their focus was providing quality hosting services exclusively to the gaming community. The edgenetwork once hosted many fan sites including: Black & White, Day of Defeat, Deus Ex Series, Devastation, Games-Fusion.net, Ghost Recon, Halo, Jedi Knight, Legend of Zelda, Need for Speed and many more. In summer of 2009 edgeNetwork announced the closure of all fan sites except for GTA Gaming and HL Gaming.

Source: Kotaku
Related: L4D Maps

Source: Dystopia

Ever wondered what it would be like to see 10 developers of Dystopia all in one castle, pushing, shoving, drinking beer and generally being weird?

Now's your chance! 10 Developers (including two from Australia) have all flown to meet up here in the USA and will be hanging out for one week. Get a chance to see our triple camera stream on Stickam!


Or check out all the cameras here!

Hurry, we won't be performing tricks for too much longer! And don't forget to join the developers in #dystopia on irc.gamesurge.net.

Source: Stargate Legacy

As I'm sure you know, at the end of last month we had an incident regarding release of rather private information by a mythical character. Given the circumstances of the situation we decided to get on with it and just tell you more about what we have. In fact, we will even be announcing a contest with really nice prizes including a free edition of Half-Life2 regarding it! so make sure to read the whole news
However, let this not mislead you into thinking that we will tolerate any similar events in the future, even if you happen to be a fictious imaginary character from a different video game. So be warned.

But we shall deal with stats a little later, because returning to our regular news program we have something from our 3D artist Noodles. If you happen to be in mood where you enjoy to be told what everything is- than below is a WIP (Work In Progress) render of our Serpent guard helmet animation:

Moving along we'd like to share with you a very nicely looking shader effect made by one of our coders klusark. It is still WIP but looking good, don't you think?

And now we have slowly returned to the matter with which we began. Statistics.
We indeed already have our very own Statistic system operational. Of course it is not fully finished yet, but many of the planned features have already been added.
What you saw in our previous Moddb post was the personal profile page. Now you can view the front page of the stats (at it's current stage) :

As I said it is not fully finished, so if there are any features you would love to see in the stats this is the time to make suggestions

And now the question that might have bothered some of you trough these last few days. Will SGL have achievements? Well, I can proudly say yes!
Of course due to Stargate being trademarked and all SGL being featured on steam is very unlikely, meaning that we can't really hope for steam achievements even in the future. So instead, to allow our community the joy and happiness such things can bring, we have created our own achievement system.

And this leads to the promised contest (with prizes!):


SGL Achievement Contest

The contest will be held in 2 categories:

• Best achievement


• Best achievement Icons.

Best Achievement is rather simple. Think of the most awesome, fun, Stargate related achievement you would like to have in SGL and send it to us! Of course the achievments must be reasonable and should represent capabilities of the game, so e.g. destroy a fleet of Ori motherships with a drone chair wouldn't work out here (simply because we wont have these things. at least not in the Beta2 ).
Once you have made up your mind send your idea to

contest@darkflarestudios.net

Your e-mail title should be "[SGL Achievement Contest] entry" and it should contain:
Your Name:
Your SteamID (in case you win this account will get the free copy of HL2):
Achievement Name (should be short- no more than 4 words):
Achievement Description (should be precise):


Best Achievement Icons is a little more complicated and requires Image creation/editing skills. If you have seen Steam achievements for other games, such as HL, TF2, UT3 etc, then you know that they all have a unique style in them. Here you have the chance to design SGL achievement Icons.
Once you have created something that pleases you send your work to

contest@darkflarestudios.net

Your e-mail title should be "[SGL Achievement Icon Contest] entry" and it should contain:
Your Name:
Your SteamID (in case we decide to use your icons this account will get the free copy of HL2):
Achievement Icons (A minimum of 3 images, 128x128 pixels):

The contest will end November 1st, 2009. After that the best entries will be gathered and posted to the public. Then everyone will have a chance to vote and decide the winner.

Even though only the winners have the chance to receive a free Half-Life 2 game, other worthy contestants may receive bonuses, such as mentioning in our next news release or even a guaranteed spot in out next internal Beta tests (these awards will depend on how many participants we will get), so don't waste your opportunity ;D

If you have any questions or you are unclear about something don't hesitate to ask


Well then, I suppose that will be all for this month. Hope you enjoyed it and we're looking forward to your achievement ideas Have fun

Regards
Stargate Legacy Development team

Source: Tremor

So far, I've gotten a few of the weapons working again, all pickups are working, movement is working(Better then before!) and more maps are being made, teamplay may be closer then I had previously thought. All in all, things are going fairly well. We've also been adding more members to the team, including Shmitz(Creator of the TF2 map tc_meridian) and Eulogy(Poster on Planet Halflife).

Expect more progress reports in the near future.

Source: Off Limits

There’s an interesting article on Blizzard development strategy on gamasutra. They use a process of endless iteration & playtesting to get their games just right. Sometimes they throw in features, let them percolate for a few months, see what they like and what they don’t, and keep only what fits the picture.

There is a striking resemblence with what we are doing for Off Limits. It’s the true “when it’s done” game development mentality, that has been all but lost in the now adolescent game industry. Development time is no constraint to us, we’d rather get the details right, and make a game that we are proud of, where each piece has earned its role in the game, or has been discarded in the playtesting process. A part from a utopian perfect design, it is the only way to have a game that is feature-rich, true to the core game idea, and consistent end-to-end.

It’s also funny to read the comments on the article. Most commenters point out that this mentality is a luxury that only Blizzard and a few other big players can afford, since they have a lot of capital backing them and are relatively free of investor pressure. I’d like to make the point that they are but one kind of developers that can develop this way. You do not need to have millions and millions of dollars to spare to free yourself from the industrial constraints of game development. Simply developing your project outside of the industry suffices. If you do go commercial, and are in the phase where a single project becomes your company’s single point of failure, you give up the right to the “when it’s done” mentality.

We’re not there yet though. This alternative model is only available to the passionates among us. It is near impossible to attract a group of hobbyists large enough to develop a serious, polished game in a timeframe that does not outdate the game on its release. I have high hopes for the near future here, where more and more techniques will become available to build scalable assets, and where the graphical improvement of games will cease to be the core focus of developers and the core desire of gamers. As for Off Limits, we hope to have made a game that is fun and timeless enough and with a visual style sufficiently detailed and coherent to compensate for our lack of next-gen textures or production-quality animations. If the fun we had in developing and have in playtesting it are any measure, we should be OK :)

Source: Zombie Panic
Related: Prop Modeling Contest

The ZP Development team has been hard at work for the past few months, working on a major milestone in ZPS development. This update will include several new maps, new features, and a new game mode.

But first, I want to talk about a new competition that we are hosting.

That's right. In honor of Halloween and Zombie Panic's (HL1 Mod) 5 year anniversary, we will be hosting a prop modeling contest! The duration of this contest will be 2 weeks starting now and ending October 17th of this year, and the rules can be found here.


Now, with that out of the way, we can talk about ZPS 2.0, which we hope to release on October 31, 2009! That's right, we're aiming for a Halloween release! Included is a new game mode, which is currently codenamed as "ZPA". As we get closer to release, we will detail more about this game mode. But we aim to release ZPA with *two* new maps, as well as a slew of features and enhancements that are ZPA-exclusive.

ZPS 2.0 will include:
zpo_shreddingfield

zps_clubzombo

zpa_town

Objective beacons

That's not all though. We've got a list of major and minor features, which you will see us post as we get closer to release. Here's our changelog with some items hidden allowing you all to ponder what else we might have going in game:

=====Zombie Panic! Source v2.0=====

• Added ZPA gamemode.


• *****


• Added Objective list for levels.


• Added Phong shader to models (All characters, hands, some guns, some props).


• Grenade cooking added.


• *****


• *****


• Added Zpo_Shreddingfield


• Added Zps_Clubzombo.


• *****


• Added Zpa_Town


• *****


• Updated Policestation.


• *****


• Updated Asylum.


• *****


• *****


• Updated Tanker.


• *****


• *****


• Removed Deadblock (ZPS version).


• *****


• *****


• Fixed Unload weapon bug.


• *****

So get excited! Get in-game to see more weekly sneak peek screenshots and twitter updates! And get ready for a massive update to ZPS!

-ZP Development Team

Source: Resistance and Liberation

Today is the 1st of October and it certainly is a good day. Eric Murphy has lately been putting in some extra time to pester the developers into helping him out with a special plan.

Well, we have one heck of a treat for you today! The plan was being put together, but we then made a last minute change to the 1st of the month update. Through Eric's nagging, he managed to get a hold of some sneak peak screen shots from a brand new map. I can't tell it what it is, but I'm sure you can figure it out.




Stick around for the October 15th RTTF posted on the forums for more news and information on the plan.

Source: Steam Powered

Oct 2, 2009 - Valve, creator of best-selling game franchises (such as Half-Life and Counter-Strike) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced pre-order details for its upcoming action thriller, Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2).

Starting now, those who pre-order L4D2 via Steam will receive early access to the Left 4 Dead 2 demo (currently targeted for October 27) plus an exclusive in-game item - the American baseball bat, one of the 10 new melee weapons included in the game.

In addition, Steam is offering a 10% savings to those who pre-order.