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.

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?

I have returned from the dead to ensure that each and every one of you gets to look at some of the greatest moving pictures I have seen this side of the Source Engine!

The only time voting has ever been exciting, terrifying, and completely nerve-wracking, (all at the same time) in the history of humankind… was probably when Valve had us shooting the hell out of each other like never before, then patiently re-editing the footage into a cinema masterpiece (also like never before), all in the name of attaining a foot-high Australium bust of Saxton Hale. Evidently, I’m referring to TF2’s First Annual Saxxy Awards, which took place in May of 2011.

Well, I hope you’ve been keeping your voting finger in good shape, for it’s all going to come rushing back very soon. And by “very soon“, I mean “literally right now“.

UPDATE: In the very same interview, Gabe also revealed the fate of one of Valve’s most secretive game projects. Check it out, right here!

Earlier this summer, we found traces of code within the Source Filmmaker that clearly indicated Valve is actively working on “Source 2“, a next-gen game engine built on Source’s foundation. While the news made quite a stir all throughout the Valve community, it didn’t have the same effect it would have had, if Valve had officially confirmed Source 2’s existence.

Well, some months later, it appears we finally have been given just that. Read on!

This is a review/critique of Black Mesa: Source (a free fan-made remake of Half-Life), co-written by Mimaz (co-host of the Steamchat Podcast) and Vic (previous lead editor of LambdaGeneration).

Black Mesa is a difficult game to judge.

Update: This article has been updated with further information on the upcoming first release of Black Mesa: Source. Check it all out, within!

You may or may not know that the work I do, especially here, tends to demand some pretty crazy late night hours of me. Consequently, I might sleep in worse than Gordon Freeman himself (after all, we can all imagine why he was late for that faithful experiment).

And sometimes, it so happens that the universe itself will directly conspire against my sleepy ways.

Like now.

UPDATE 3: Facepunch member J*Rod has created an insightful and very informative explanation of how Source 2 might work, based on what we’ve seen in the leaked code. If you can’t read code (or as I like to call it, hieroglyphs), then this is your lucky day.

UPDATE 2: LambdaGen fan 3rrorVirus has made this hilarious little video about this whole Source 2 debacle – check it out!

UPDATE: Facepunch member DevinWatson has compiled a full list of just about every single Source 2 reference in the SFM files. Take a look!

Yeah, it gets better. Waaay better.

A year and a half ago, in late 2010, Michael “DemonStrate” Yanni created a jaw-dropping 9-minute speedrun of the original Portal, titled “Portal Done Pro“. It was the new world-record time for the fastest playthrough of Portal 1, and understandably, it was widely publicized at the time.

But you know what they say: records are made to be broken. And yesterday, PDP’s world record was not only broken, but smashed wide open. Read on!

Yesterday we let loose the news of Peter Konig’s departure from Valve. He’d been attached to the L4D2, Portal 2, and Dota 2 teams during his time at the company. But maybe you’ve been wondering about Valve’s losses on other fronts; such as their oldest ever team: the Half-Life 1 developers. Well, we’ve actually got the answer!