Howdy folks! It's been a couple of months since we last had an official update on the progress of the new version of the Half-Life 2: Wars beta, and we have a couple of goodies to share with you fine people. Development has been moving ahead at a steady pace since the beginning of the year, and we draw ever closer to the next public beta. In case you forgot, that will take the form of a multiplayer demo where the only playable race is the Antlions. Today we have two major items on the agenda:
a development progress video (below) and
the release of the HLW Beta v0.5 source code.
The team has been hard at work since you last heard from us in early January; 2010 has been a very productive year for HLW thus far. Sander has continued to tweak the code to improve performance, and some of the more recent features implemented in the mod include a new shader for the fog of war effect, some new HUD icons, team colors, the Antlion "burrow" ability, and improved unit AI and navigation code. You can see all this in action in the dev video above. Note that the "spit turrets" in the video aren't part of the game, they're more of a dev toy.
We also have a surprise for all of you fellow Half-Life 2 mod developers out there:
the source code for our last public beta (v0.5), released almost two years ago back in July 2008. The code is free to all of you out there for non-commercial use, and you are welcome to modify and use it so long as you credit
Half-Life 2: Wars and link back to this website.
That's it for this time. Progress is steady and you will hear from us in the near future. Expect more videos and screenshots. Meanwhile, you can follow our development a bit more closely by reading our forums.
We're also still recruiting talented developers, so if you're an experienced Source engine developer with a bit of free time and an interest in helping us fully realize Half-Life 2 in RTS form, drop us a line.
