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Welcome to the first Halflife2.net Sunday mod round-up in a long time. In these articles we will put together the most important happenings in the mod community for the week just gone. These will include new mods, media, patches, requests for help & new releases. If you're involved in a mod and want it covered, email us at news@halflife2.net. Also add your mod to our new mod database section which you can update as you please. This week:
1. Overheid Released - There was more going on in City 17 than what Gordon Freeman and Alyx were doing. Follow a new recruit as he struggles to find his place in the movement, and see just how sinister the Combine can be. Requires: HL2 Ep2. More info and download here
2. Dead Before Dawn Released - Awesome add-on campaign for Left 4 Dead, a tad buggy but worth the download for any true Left 4 Dead fan. Download here
3. Flesh Mod Announced - A new mod on the scene with promise of plenty of horror. Will be a single player Horror Mini-mod for the Halflife 2 engine. More here
4. Dino D-Day Released - You have to check this mod out for yourself and be ready for epic dinosaur Nazi action. From what the developers have said, expect dinosaurs to fall the from the skies. The models and textures look fantastic. More info and download here (HL2.net pick of the week).
5. Firearms: Source - Another video and some screenshots - The team are busy with map tweaks, weapon tweaks and bug fixes. In the video, you will see domination of other testers with the M14 on ps_sand. More here.
6. Jailbreak Source Update - With only weeks to go until the release of Jailbreak: Source 0.6, we're bringing you another gameplay trailer showing footage from the new gamemode Deathball. See video here.
Our pick of the week is Dino D-Day, who doesn't love dinosaurs. Stay posted for next week's round up. Also. a quick reminder - our Left 4 Dead 2 competition closes on 17th so enter before it's too late!
The Off Limits team really is picking up pace as they promised at the end of this year. They have released a selection of new screenshots showing their final version of the Russia map (originally made for Nuclear Dawn, ha!).
It looks wonderful in Off Limits, you can get a tour around the map by checking out the Off Limits website.
Lost Hope is a lesser known mod breaking through with an incredible atmosphere and art direction. This mod is a total conversion and takes place in war worn China under a military regime. The team behind this mod are hugely talented and dedicated.
Check out some of the exclusive media below andour interview with Felix and Victor from Lost Hope as they discuss where they are going with the mod, what they hope to achieve and where they could use some help. This is one to watch, see more at moddb.
Team NeoTokyo have released their latest patch adding some new content and tidying up up some bugs. NeoTokyo is one of the best looking mods out there and worth a try if you haven't ever played before. You can find the entire changelist for this mod here, and a brief summary below:
7 New Maps
Fixes to current maps
Weapon balancing and fixes
Removed knife exploit
Gameplay improvements for squads & team mates
You can find client & server patches in the NT Downloads section, which also now includes a .fgd if you'd like to try your hand at mapping for this mod.
The assets from the Meet the Sniper video are now available in the SDK for anyone who wishes to play around with them. The Team Fortress Blog goes through the assets that are available including the bobbleheads and the camper van. One thing to bear in mind, these assets were made for the movies and aren't optimised for use in maps. You have been warned. More info.
This huge and impressive mod will be on general release from 11th October, however you can get it on early from PlanetPhillip.com today!
CSS SCI FI 3: Hardwired is a single-player modification for Half-Life 2. Waking up to find himself an augmented clone of Gordon Freeman, the player must fight time-travelling Combine forces and other enemies across 42 unique and replayable missions.
Missions are set in 18 retail and 24 custom Counter-Strike: Source maps, which are installed intact to the player's CS:S game folder. The mod edits the entity data for each map as it is loaded, adding and modifying entities to create a seamless single-player experience. The maps remain unchanged and are fully playable in Counter-Strike: Source. Maps have been contributed by established designers, including Bluestrike, Schuzak and d00ds.com. Combat locations range from a snow-covered country church to a dense pine forest to a sun-baked tropical island.
Players enter each map through the mission hub and can choose to play each one at a time or all in 3 linked campaigns. Each mission features a series of goals, such as to rescue hostages or destroy targets, which must be completed to move on to the next map or return to the hub. There are multiple approaches to each goal, and in each map the behaviour and armament of enemies and the distribution of resources are randomly determined within defined parameters. Thus, no two plays are the same, making CSS SCI FI a truly replayable single-player experience.
Download mirrors can be found on PlanetPhillip, who have rated this a must play. Check out some media below.
After asking the community to help him with The Fly Gabe Newell Fundraiser, Joe W-A managed to get Gabe Newell to agree to fly to Brisbane, Australia.
Today in Sydney, the great meeting took place. Gabe spoke about the value of a community and how it flies people to Australia, He was also talking about how Valve are part of the community and how they're always looking for feedback.
Joe is also planning to get Peter Molyneaux down there as he got "a few things to say to him". You can watch the meeting right here.
Korsakovia is a mod by The Chinese Room team, who were also responsible for the well acclaimed mod Dear Esther. Just like DE, Korsakovia is a frightening survival horror mod and is about delusion, paranoia and the end of the world.
It is based around the simple question - what happens if you turn off the visual representation of agents, the normal cues players use to predict behaviour and motive? Around this experiment, Korsakovia mixes the abstract story-driven experience of Dear Esther with more traditional gameplay. The result is a survival horror FPS that will trap you in the splintering fragments of a destroyed mind.
Off Limits mod is one of those names which has been around for a long time now, but the team are still pushing on adding updates to their site as they move closer to a finished product. They are currently working on weapon balancing and tweaking the juggernaut class but have also added a large media blitz on their website.
The Belgian born mod is looking great and hopefully we won't have to wait too much longer to see the mod released! Check out the full update on the Off Limits website.
A huge patch for the Team Fortress Classic remake on the Source engine has been released. 2.4 has a massive changelist, including new maps, map tweaks, class improvements and changes, visual enhancements and bug fixes. Fortress Forever has come a long way since it's release and if you have never played before you certainly should.
You can download Fortress Forever 2.4 from the Fortress Forever website. (Requires Source SDK Base to be installed)
Valve have revealed to OXM that they want to see user created content for the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 appear on Xbox Live. However, because Live isn't set up to allow this kind of free content delivery Valve are thinking about charging for user campaigns and giving the money back to the makers. Valve's Yasser Mailaka told OXM:
"One of the things I'm thinking about is how we work within that [Xbox Live] system," "and one of the things I'd like to do is to allow these modules that are being released on PC to somehow integrate with Microsoft's system...perhaps we can shepherd the really popular campaigns onto 360. And you know, if they are a paid system, perhaps that could go back to the authors. I think that would be a great story."
An update for Garry's Mod has just been released which adds an initial 15 Steamworks Achievements to the game. Here's a list of the changes in the update :
Added an initial 15 Steamworks Achievements
Fixed TF2 player and hat models being black
Fixed some server lagging exploits
Look for the full list of achievements after the break.. [Read More...]
Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat (now available on Steam) has received the Player's Choice 2007 Mod of the Year award from ModDB, as well as the "Best Source Mod of 2007" Gold Award from Steamfriends. With all the success they have had the team is hard at work on Beta 2 and Beta 3.
Spielmann, leader of the mod needed a break from all the work to spend some time promoting the popular mod. We even got a quick interview along with some exclusive screen shots for you to take a look at. Beta 2 expected in August has some awesome improvements including: bug fixes, visual updates, map updates, audio updates & new features
We at Insurgency Team believe that the community has every reason to be excited about this update. This is a major milestone in the development of the mod that will address an extensive list of long-overdue bugs and that takes into account valuable suggestions from our community. This is not a small patch or a minor content upgrade like the ones we have released through Steam in the past. We really wanted to make sure Insurgency 2.x will be updated to a point where it can be fully enjoyed by everybody without the need of much intervention from our side so that we can concentrate all efforts in the development of the next major version. Because of the outstanding expansion of INS as a competitive multiplayer game in the past year, we were able to gather outstanding feedback that has helped us add extra functionality and improve its gameplay, making it a better game in every respect.
The Insurgency team have already started work on porting their mod over to the Orange Box engine with countless new features. You can read about this development in our interview and see the new media below.
For the time being, see the end of our interview article for a full changelist of the upcoming August Upgrade for the current verison of Insurgency on Steam. Below are a few videos showcasing some of the new features & updates:
Craziestdan has put some awesome effort into Dreamball 2.0 and I decided to make this post to offer him some applause for making a mod with balls. The mod does have bugs but it is fun. This is like Marble Works except 3d and you're the marble.
Dreamball is a fun relaxing physics-driven game made up of puzzle compilations. Roll through the various uniquely themed 'Worlds' completing different puzzles you traverse across using the dynamic environment to beat obstacles encountered, while also shifting into other Marbles and powerups at your dispense.
You can head on over to our reviews section to check out our two most recent reviews. The first for Killing Floor, the zombie killer co-op game by Tripwire Interactive reviewed by Ennui. The second is a review of Matt Bortolino's 'Research and Development' a puzzle-centric mod for Episode 2 put through its paces by Pi Mu Rho.