| | | HL2: Episode One website launches - Garmer | April 8. - 2006 | |
 With more than 4 million copies sold and 35 Game of the Year awards it's no wonder that Valve continues the succes with Half-Life 2 in several new additions. The first one, entitled Episode One, continues the story where the original left off and sees Gordon and Alyx fleeing from a City 17 in complete chaos.
The official website for this episode has now been launched and features the background story so far, news, screenshots and the first trailer showing what to expect from the game. It is set to be released on June 1st and will be available through Steam and in retail as well.
Visit the new site at http://ep1.half-life2.com.
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| More CS: Source content coming - Garmer | April 2. - 2006 | |
 Counter-Strike: Source players can look forward to more goodies during this and the next month. Besides preparations to launch SiN Episodes and Half-Life 2: Episode One on Steam, Valve are preparing new content for CS and DoD: Source.
First of all the next map to get HDR lighting added is good old de_dust and besides that Valve says that two new player models will find their way into CS:S as well. For DoD: Source a new map is under development and it should feature an entire new playmode.
When the new content will be available exactly is not known, so stick around for more info on this. | | |
| Half-Life 2: Episode One delayed - Garmer | March | |
 A Q&A on gameinformer reveals that the upcoming expansion for Half-Life 2 has been slightly delayed. Originally planned for a release in late April Gordons new adventures will now be available on May 31.
The action in Episode One takes off where the original left and is the first in a series of expansions. It boasts about 4-6 hours of gameplay for a price of approximately $20.
More on this expansion soon. | | |
| Friends almost complete - Garmer | March | |
One of the new features when Valve launched their Steam software was the 'Friends'-system. As you probably know this was supposed to give an easy way to keep track of your friends and jump into the same games as them, but unfortunately the system has suffered from a lot of stability problems with more down- than uptime as the result.
Nevertheless a new and improved 'Friends' is in development and according to Valve Software this is currently nearing the end of the beta-phase. In other words it should not be long until the Friends-system is back and this time it should be working as intended. If you want a peek at the beta Valve has promised to provide an easy way to do this in the beginning of this week. Keep an eye out on your Steam-client...
For a nostalgic flashback you can read our first look at Friends from all the way back in 2002 where it was known as "Tracker". | | |
| Misc. News - Garmer | March 7. - 2006 | |
The Friends beta has had several updates lately and it seems to be progressing well. The latest update was released just a few days ago and contains the following changes:
- enabled new version of the Valve Hardware Survey
- fixed regression with sending chat text when having multiple chat windows open echoing the sent chat text to the wrong place
- fixed regression where expand affordance on vgui dialogs was invisible
- changed chat windows to flash their taskbar entry on receiving a new chat message
- changed 'click here to join' url, shown in the chat dialog when a friend being chatted with joins a game, to only show if the IP of the game server is a joinable ip/port
In case anyone should have missed it Counter-Strike Source was updated too in the beginning of this month and among the changes are improved ragdolls and the promised new SAS and Leet player models:
- Added Leet and SAS player models
- Fixed players being able to run up very steep slopes for short distances
- Fixed low-violence models not animating properly
- Improved player ragdolls
The AMX MOD X version 1.70 has now been released to the public. AMX Mod X is a versatile Half-Life metamod plugin which is targetted toward server administration. It has a wide array of scripting capabilities so people can write "plugins", or files which add on to a mod's functionality. Plugins can take form in administrative services (adding new admin commands), statistics generation (StatsX), fun additions (godmode, etc), gameplay changes (WC3, CSDM), and a lot more.
In version 1.70 a new menu system has been added, HUD synchronization are improved and on top of that there are some serious performance improvements which will improve CPU usage. This release is thereby the fastest and most flexible so far. You can find the entire changelog and download the tool from http://www.amxmodx.org.
The founder of the Cyberathlete Professional League, Angel Munoz, has been interviewed by the free american publication Sports Page Weekly. The questions (which are few) deal with CAL, CPLs future and the 10 year plan made by Munoz. Interested can read it with this scan. | | |
| Friends enters beta - Garmer | February 3. - 2006 | |
As you probably know the Friends system on Steam has been down for...well, quite some time, but now it seems to finally be on the move. The Valve developer community is currently running a beta test of the new and improved Friends system and anyone can participate. All you need to do is add the following to your Steam command line:
steam.exe -clientbeta steam3friends -beta steam3friends An update to the beta was released just recently where some of the known bugs had been fixed. You can see the changelog below:
Friends:- fixed right-clicking to bring up a context menu not working if the context menu was already open, in the friends and games lists
- changed it so any unanswered friendship requests in the game show outside the game after the user quits
- changed the saved config name of the friends dialog and added a default position, to solve some users having old super-large saved dialog settings for friends
- fixed missing word in Friends 're-login' string
- fixed issues selecting text in chat dialog; off-by-one selection overdraw, indent-ignoring hit detection and unicode-mangling
- changed double-clicking on a section header in the games list / friends list to collapse/expand the section
- fixed 'paste' context menu item in vgui::TextEntry not deleting selected text before inserting clipboard contents
- fixed case where menus wouldn't immediately resize if menu items were hidden
- fixed missing newline after '%friend% is playing %game%' chat message
- made chat window flash in taskbar more than once after receiving a chat message
- fixed case where URL's in the chat dialog wouldn't be clickable
- changed text input in the chat dialog to be capped at the max network size (255 bytes, will be upped at some point)
- changed friends name input in friends->option->edit profile to allow a max of 127 characters for the player name
- fixed crash in localized string construction due to an off-by-one error in it's string manipulation code, yielded a crash on entering a long friends name
- fixed chat dialogs stealing focus when receiving a new message
Steam: - changed Steam when on system startup, to not show the retry connection dialog immediately, but to wait 20 seconds and then retry - this is to give systems with networking that takes a while to start a chance to
- fixed regression where launching a game would delete its launch options
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| New dedicated server beta - Garmer | January | |
 Valve Softwares Alfred Reynolds has sent a message on the HLDS mailing list that a new dedicated Beta release is now available. The new dedicated server is for both Source and the HL1 engine: We have a beta release available for both the Source and HL1 engine. This beta fixes the steam id swapping problem amongst other small fixes. You can apply the beta by running the hldsupdatetool and adding "-beta swapbeta" to the command line.
A couple of users in an initial test reported a server hang and associated assert (pipes.cpp line 298), if you see this please send me your OS configuration and hardware.
- Alfred All server admins can freely take part of the test and any bugs encountered can be mailed to Alfred at alexbeginin@gmail.com | | |
| Two new CS:Source models in February - Garmer | January | |
 The latest Steam marketing update from Valve Software talk about the upcoming two new models for Counter-Strike: Source. There will be one model for each side, SAS and Leet Krew, and according to the news they will be made available in February:
In February we'll be releasing two more Counter-Strike: Source player models. Those will be the Leet Krew and SAS, one for each side in the game. They should be ready for a screenshot next week. When the screenshot is available you can of course find it right here. | | |
| Militia Source screenshot - Garmer | January | |
As you know the next old school map that will make its way into Counter-Strike: Source is cs_militia, and Valve has just released a sneak peak at what the conversion will look like.
A lot of changes has been made both visually and gameplay wise, so it won't just be a port of the CS 1.6 version of the map. As you can see below the visuals looks great and de_militia will be the 2nd map to support the high dynamic range lighting technique.
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| Small Source update + Aftermath dated - Garmer | January 6. - 2006 | |
Valve has released a small update to the Source engine with a single fix that concerns people with ATI graphic accelerators:
Source engine
Fixed problem users with ATI cards were experiencing with overly shiny cube maps In more interesting news both the Aftermath expansion for Half-Life 2 and the HL2: Platinum pack has been dated. According to Doug Lombardi they are aiming to release both on April 24th. Platinum will include HL2, HL2 DM, CS: Source, DoD: Source, and Aftermath while the awaited Aftermath expansion itself should include HL1 DeathMatch: Source as well.
Stay tuned for more info. | | |
| Militia coming soon - Garmer | January 6. - 2006 | |
The first Steam marketing update this year has been released by Valve and both Counter-Strike Source and Day of Defeat Source players can look forward to new playgrounds soon.
Starting with CS: Source we will soon have a remake of the good old cs_militia but it seems that it will be fairly different from the CS 1.6 version. Also, just like the recently released de_nuke, Militia will support the new high dynamic range lighting technique.
DoD players can look forward to a rebuilt version of Kalt with new custom rendering to make the snow and ice look awesome. Should be interesting to see...
Both maps should be out this month.
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| Happy New Year! - Garmer | December | |
 I wan't to wish all readers a happy new year and I hope you will have a great 2006.
When we enter 2006 it will be the 7th year that Counter-Strike has existed and it continue to be the most played online first person shooter by a large margin. It is truly unique that a game manage to stay so popular for so long and I'm confident CS will maintain this position throughout 2006, even though CS: Source probably haven't been as popular as Valve hoped for. There's about three times as many playing CS 1.6 compared to Source and more than twice as many servers according to the statistics.
Hopefully the new design for CS-Extreme will be ready sometime soon and the sections updated with some fresh content. Many of you are eager to get the skins section up and running, so I'll see if I can find a solution to this as soon as possible.
Also, I wan't to thank our trusty readers and hope you will continue to stick around in the upcoming year as well.
Have a happy and safe new year! | | |
| Merry Christmas! - Garmer | December | | 
Just wanted to wish all readers a Merry Christmas and some Happy Holidays. Remember to take good care of yourselves and everyone around you whereever you will be to celebrate Christmas time.
As some of you might know we bring out the same Counter-Strike Christmas wallpaper every year for you to use on your desktop. The wallpaper is from the very early CS-days where Counter-Strike.net was the primary site and de_dust was the map everyone played the most. It comes in a resolution of 1024x768 and you can get it below.
Also, I just want to mention an update from Valve saying that Lost Coast and Half-Life 2 are now available in native 64-bit versions. They have been working with AMD to get this done, so everyone with a 64-bit CPU running a 64-bit operating system can now take full advantage of their setup. According to the newspost this is just the first step for Valve into 64-bit.
That's all for now folks - enjoy the holidays and the temporary break from gaming.
CS Xmas Wallpaper. | | | |
