As described in our Roundup, due to SteamPipe a lot of Source mods are in a pretty dire state right now. Whilst there is a lot of information on the topic in various places, the aim of this post is to provide a general fix for Half-Life 2, Episode 2 and Portal 1 that you can use to easily patch up the majority of the casualties and get them limping back into action.

It’s been a while since the last trio of “Ville” mapping competitions ended over at PlanetPhillip.com (Beginning, Middle and End Ville) and Phillip has been busy collecting feedback about the events and making changes to enhance future competitions. The competitions charge level designers with creating a single player Half-Life 2 level in a set time period which Phillip then packs up into a handy mod for everyone to download and play. The freshly announced 3×10 mapping competition, with three separate competitions running for ten days each, will start on the 11th October 2013. Details after the jump…

Hello! Welcome to the Modding and Development section, where we hope to bring you more news, reviews and discussion about the latest maps and mods than you can shake a Hammer at.

I’m MisterAddy, one of the new editors at LambdaGeneration. You may recognise me as a regular at PlanetPhillip.com and this very site, as well as being a long-time lurker on the Steam Forums. I am mostly a single-player gamer so I love everything Half-Life and Portal, and will help keep you up to date with community content to help ease the SP drought.

And I, hscsguy – co-editor of Modding and Development here at Lambda Generation – am assisting in the development of this monster of an article. Like MisterAddy, I too am a fan of single player games and mods alike with a fascination of Half Life 2 multiplayer mods on the side. I am pretty active over at the forums on Steam and avidly watch over the Source modding community to an embarrassing degree. And without further ado, I leave you with that exceedingly cliché phrase as we move on to the news you came here to read.

Over the years we’ve seen some truly stunning fan-made movies, based on pretty much every major Valve game. Everything from low budget Counter-Strike videos in first person to live action masterpieces like “Portal: Outside Aperture”. One of the more famous ones, when it comes to Half-Life related films, is the Purchase Brothers’ “Escape From City 17”, a guerrilla styled short released back in 2009 as the first of two episodes, both made on a $500 budget.

Now the creators have surprised us, with a teaser for a new episode.

Things haven’t been the same since. The doctors say my addiction to Team Fortress 2 (and by extension, my addiction to hats) may never be cured.

To call Jack “Gauss” Monahan a mapper or a modeller would be doing him and his skillset a grave injustice. He’s an artist, a game designer, and I can only assume, a few others. He occasionally posts his thoughts on his blog, Gausswerks: Design Reboot (as well as the Gausswerks forums), and his very own Twitter. Back in 2009, he served as the level design lead for the time-travelling cult hit Darkest of Days, and at the moment he’s cranking away on Animal Memory, an indie shooter of his own design, built on the Unreal engine.

He’s also a Valve enthusiast. He once did an excellent dissection of Left 4 Dead and TF2’s character designs, and long ago he created a delightful little design reboot of Half-Life, titled: “Doctor Ivan Just Won’t Die”. But we’re going to take a look at something he once cooked up way back in 2005 – a gallery of artwork and game designs based on the Half-Life 2 universe. These constitute his early “Valve Portfolio”, which represented a section of a larger job application he sent to Valve.

As you can tell from the enticing feature image, it looks really good. Well, let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Late last month, A Call for Communication announced “A Red Letter Day”, a group event that would bring tens of thousands of Half-Life fans together in playing Half-Life 2, for half an hour on the 4th of February. That was yesterday, and it turns out… it did!

The oh-so-long wait between Episode Two and… whatever the next Half-Life will be, is starting to be very tough for the Half-Life fanbase. During the 6-year wait between HL1 and HL2, we at least had the modding community and the active HL1 multiplayer scene, but we also had official spin-off games like Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Decay. Whereas now… we’ve sort of got… well, nothing. I’m sure some sort of Half-Life game released during this wait would have tided everyone over a bit.

But maybe that was the plan. Sure, the plan has changed, but what if Valve did intend to do just that? Well, today, we might have evidence pointing towards that.

The 2003 Half-Life 2 leak caused ripples in not only the community, but the world as a whole. It shaped our community into what it is today, yadda yadda, and more importantly, it allowed the creation of the world’s first Half-Life bubblegum.

Using content and screenshots from the leak itself on its packaging, this Russian/Ukrainian bubblegum seems to have been created sometime in early-mid 2004. Check out a community-made video showing its ground-breaking opening, after the jump.

IF YOU ARE READING THIS AND YOU HAVE NOT RECEIVED THIS ITEM FROM A PERSON YOU KNOW, PUT THIS DOWN IMMEDIATELY AND CONTINUE WALKING AWAY.

Hello and welcome to the Resistance Bulletin. I’m your same old news editor and part-time refugee, Vic, reporting from the inside of an abandoned coastal house just outside of City 17, in mortal fear of a Combine patrol which has stopped nearby.

Excuse if my writing is poor, but I have been forced to drink from the polluted seawater nearby, and some discarded cans of Private Reserve. I can feel my brain cells slowly dying.