Over a year has passed since the community-founded Valve-centric podcast, Steamcast, closed down. However during August this year, a countdown clock appeared on a sub-directory of the website with the title ‘2013’.
Steamcast was originally founded back in 2009 with the aim of supporting the Valve community by offering frequent and direct participation with listeners, however in 2012 the podcast closed indefinitely.
Ever since developers got their hands on the Oculus Rift developer kits earlier this year there has been a steady stream of incredible videos appearing on the internet showing what this piece of technology can do for video games, it was only a matter of time before someone would start working on a Half-Life mod that utilised the new kit.
I’ve seen a couple of videos of people playing Half-Life 2 with the Rift but this latest show case by Nathan Andrews has some very important differences that really change the experience from simply playing Half-Life 2 with a Rift, to actually experiencing Rift VR in Half-Life 2.
We’re currently in the process of wrapping up the latest release of Half-Life VR, which will include HL2: episode 1 VR support. This video was made in a single playthrough with my oculus rift dev-kit and razer hydra, I cropped the video to make it easier to view for those who currently don’t have a rift so keep in mind that the vertical field of view is probably twice what is shown in the video when wearing the actual rift.
Interested in giving this a shot? Check out the official web page for the mod here.
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.
Hello, and welcome to the new ‘Creations’ section of LambdaGeneration. With this new category we hope to establish a series of weekly articles rounding up the best fanart the Valve community has to offer, and you can help by submitting your own! Remember, fanart just doesn’t mean drawings and paintings, the term art can take many shapes and forms, here are some examples of what you can submit:
Creation images can be emailed to creations[-at-]lambdageneration.com or submitted to the LambdaGeneration Tumblr http://lambdageneration.tumblr.com/submit
I must state that we cannot accept any fanart that is not safe for work, it’s not that we don’t appreciate it, it’s just that we want LambdaGeneration to be accessible to Valve fans of all ages.
Thanks for reading, and get creating!
Two years in development, a jump from the Portal 2 branch of Source to Alien Swarm, and six months of voting by eager fans, this total conversion mod has been given the Greenlight from Valve to go on Steam!
Infra is a self described “gun free exploration game” where your goal isn’t to fight off monsters or some shadowy organization hellbent on world domination. No, you take on the role of a pencil-pushing, structural analyst fighting the war on poor construction…..whilst being trapped beneath a city with a collapsing infrastructure. As you attempt to stay alive, you will explore through the city’s underbelly and solve puzzles that will force you to make a choice: will you restore the city’s structural integrity, or ensure your own survival?
Released in July of this year, “Exit” by Fredrick Nordstrom is a somewhat scatter shot map release for Half-Life 2 Episode 2. This series of maps tries out a lot of different ideas in a very short space of time and while some are pulled off with some success, others definitely end up hurting the overall experience.
The year was 2005 (you know it’s gotten bad when even 2005 has a quaint and nostalgic ring to it), and the first episode of a little Half-Life 2 mod series charmingly titled MINERVA: Metastasis was released. Metastasis itself only represented the first chapter in a planned MINERVA trilogy (the next chapter, Out of Time, never materialized, though creator Adam Foster isn’t afraid to hint at a possible return in the future), and it was a sequel to Foster’s earlier Half-Life 1 release, Someplace Else. Through exceptional level design, an intriguing narrative and remarkably well-paced gameplay, MINERVA was universally acclaimed and praised not just within the Half-Life community, but all around the greater gaming world.
The Metastasis “trilogy within a trilogy” concluded with the release of the last two episodes in October of 2007, and a year later, Foster began working at Valve, on a strange little game we used to call Half-Life 2: Episode Three. Since then, he’s done significant design work on Portal 2 (and god knows what that means about the aforementioned title), and presumably neglected little old MINERVA, which like many other HL2 mods, did not survive Valve’s May 2010 update for Mac support. Neglected, that is… until now!
