Welcome to June!

The sun is starting to appear more and more where I live and the days are so loooong, which is great. I’ll probably spend more time away from my PC this year than any other in the last 12 years, but I’ll also try to be more productive when I am there.

Please use this post to talk about about anything you want to – except maps and mods, which should be done of the specific post, assuming there is one.

From now on, I will use a poster from a classic Sci-Fi move as the background for the post image. This month it is from Forbidden Planet 1956, which features Robby the robot and the Krell. The Krell base is 20 miles square and underground. There’s a nice summary of the movie over on Sci-Fi Movie Zone, but don’t visit it if you plan to watch the movie.

Update: MapTap has been replaced by Gauge.

I am very pleased to announce the release of MapTap 2.4, which addresses the Steampipe update.

This version has been extensively tested and we do not anticipate any issues.

However, if you do encounter any problems, please let us know immediately.

Forest Train, Version 1.1 is now available. It was already a fantastic release and I am sure this update will make it even better.

If you would like to re-review it and change your recommendation image and or the Meta Review Data, that’s fine.

Please don’t post any reviews of the mod on this post as it will be deleted in a few weeks.

The changes are in this post and the release itself.

In this podcast I talk to Darren Weekes, Jim Partridge, Dan Jordan and Abraham Lee about their entries to the RavenholmVille mod, their approach to building a map in such a short time and other mapping topics.

If you have any specific questions , please post them as comments and I or the guest will respond.

There’s been some recent talk on Reddit about Gordon, specifically related to “Is anyone else annoyed by the level of undue praise in HL2?” and “The Success and Failure of Silence: Gordon Freeman in Half Life and Half Life 2”.

I mentioned the first thread on the May 2014 General Chat but I have wanted to re-start the Poll Questions for some time and this seems an interesting enough topic.

Clearly Gordon is “special”, both in terms of in-game and as a game character. Not speaking allows players to slip into his shoes more easily than if he spoke, but is that sort of wording just me regurgitating commonly held views?

How do women feel about playing as a man?

Is it really that important?

I think in the Second Unreal, the player is a woman and it didn’t make any difference at all for me.

Perhaps once we get into hardware that more completely immerses the player then it will matter, but not at the moment.

Thoughts and votes?

May! Yes, May! Can you believe it’s May already?

It’s starting to get warming and the days are definitely longer – at least where I live.

Can’t wait for Summer, can you?

Please use this post to talk about about anything you want to – except maps and mods, which should be done of the specific post, assuming there is one.

As a sort of gap-filler between RavenholmVille and the next mapping competition, I have decided to run a little Animated Gif competition.

There has been a resurgence in animated GIFs (the proper name is cinemagraphs) recently after some very artistic ones were created. Check out FastcoDesign and Hongkiat for more examples.

Viewers to my recent Twitch broadcast may have seen the one I created as the pre-stream image and I also created this one from an Episode Two background map.

Entrants must create an imaginative and subtle image that I will try and use in various places around the site, although I make no guarantee of that. I will try and create a page with all the entries, but again, I don’t guarantee it.

Please make your images as big as possible in terms of dimensions, as that gives me more possibilities for using them on the site.

They must be from any Half-Life game, i.e. Half-Life, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, Half-Life 2, Lost Coast, HL2: Episode One and HL2: Episode Two. No entries for other games, including Portal and Portal 2 will be considered.

Closing date for entries is 10:00 AM GMT Monday 19th May 2014 -that’s about 3 weeks.

Send you entries to me directly, [email protected] or host them somewhere and send me the link or post the link as a comment (remember, all comments with links are held in a queue – please do not try to subvert that process).

Winner will receive a $5 Steam game or something else if anybody wants to donate a prize.

As always, if you have any questions, just ask. Oh, and please tell as many people as possible, including tweeting, FB updates, Messages in bottles, carrier pigeons, smoke signals and graffiti.

Starting in a storage area, you enter the main part of the building via a lift.

After getting your suit, you travel to Xen and must reach the top.

Beware headcrabs, vortigaunts andn Alien grunts will try to stop you.

You play as “Franta Novák” and you work at nuclear waste storage facility.

They decided to illegally move the site into a forest and not long after strange things start to happen.

This is the day you get to work and the shit REALLY hits the fan!