Well, we’re back! Thanks for sticking with us through the site downtime – a server problem that also just had bad timing right over the holiday season.

And so here’s a new General Chat for the New(ish) Year! What are you looking forward to playing in 2024?

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Another year is upon us already! Here’s a new General Chat! Best wishes from me to you for a great 2023!

This year, I’m still hoping that mods I mentioned a year ago see the light of day, like The Core, Dark Matter, Signal Lost, and THWL Tower Source.

I also plan to catch up with mods and games I’ve been wanting to play, like an Alyx replay as well as FMPONE’s Levitation which was released in November.

What are your 2023 resolutions? Or better yet, goals?

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Well I skipped a year, but given that 2022 is now upon us, here’s a new General Chat! Let’s hope 2022 has better things in store for all of us!

What are you looking forward to? For my part, more Half-Life mods, of course! I’m keeping an eye on things like The Core, Dark Matter, Signal Lost, and THWL Tower Source.

And Operation: Black Mesa just got added to Steam, so hopefully that’s not too far away. Oh, and FMPONE’s addon for Alyx, Levitation is looking really sharp!

For my part, I hope to consume a little less and create a lot more in 2022. And post some more mods! What about you?

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Well, it’s been a long time since we’ve posted a General Chat. For a while it was monthly but then it kind of fell away shortly before Phillip left.

So here’s a catchall post to chat about anything Half-Life or Valve related, or questions/issues about the site. Or gaming in general! Or just about anything!

It’s really a great time in the Half-Life world. Black Mesa just officially left Early Access with their 1.0 release. The Map Labs mapping challenges keep on rolling. And of course, Half-Life: Alyx, the first Valve Half-Life game in almost 13 years, is right around the corner!

What are you playing? What are you making? What are you looking forward to?

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Well, it’s back to work for me soon. I’ve had all of August off and reduced hours in July, so September always feel really hard. That said, it’s nice to get back into a routine and I hope to keep some sort of update schedule going, but certainly not one release per day!

I will also begin mapping again and may start livestreaming practice at the weekends.

I am actually on a holiday until 6th August, visiting the UK.

What about you, what do you have planned?

Let me tell you about some changes. I have limited by tweets. I have stopped the Half-Life Art and other series, like Half-Life Proverbs. They got me lots of retweets, likes and responses but the reality is that it’s not part of RTSL core objectives. Stuff like that is better suited to Lambda Generation.

I may begin to post more mod images etc and I would love to post more mod news, but I don’t have time to constantly check ModDB.

I’ll be publishing my objectives for 2019 in November, but essentially I am going to try to limit myself to updating the site and mapping.

Can you guess the name of the mod shown in the image above? It’s called Half-Life: Echoes I can’t link to it in a spoiler, so you will have to search the site for it.

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I just looked at the July 2018 General Chat post and it talks about it raining. Guess what? It’s raining now. I just got back from my bike ride and was absolutely soaked – I love it!

So here we are August. I’ve got some things planned for the site, updates etc and hopefully some HL1 mapping too. I’ll try to start and finish one game as well.

What about you, what do you have planned?

OH, starting this month, I will be embedding the Half-Life Art and Half-Life Proverbs tweets into the comments of this post. Mostly for those people who don’t use Twitter.

Can you guess the name of the mod shown in the image above? It’s called Capital Punishment. I can’t link to it in a spoiler, so you will have to search the site for it.

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Hello July. Why is it raining? Where is the sun?

Here we are. Over halfway through 2018. Where has the decade gone?!

I AM GOING TO FINISH WOLFENSTEIN: THE NEW ORDER THIS MONTH! yes, I know I have said that for the last 12 months but I really mean it this time.

On a serious note, I would like to apologise for the lack of updates recently. the site has essentially become the Mapping Challenges and that is not right. I promise to begin to add new maps and mods very, very soon.

How was your Steam Sale? Did you spend too much money? I did a stream, where I spent just over $25, with $15 of that donated. It was fun.

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Right, sit down, I’ve got something amazing to tell you…..I actually played some Wolfenstein: The New Order this week. SHOCK!! HORROR!!

I have been saying I would play for months and finally did. I WILL finish it this month. Maybe even this weekend. I struggled for the first 15 minutes while I tried to get used to the new (standard for you) keybindings and also trying to remember how to do the crouching slide, but eventually had a bit of fun.

So, the new Collections feature is online and working. Looks like we need to address multiple lines in the description but the rest seems to work. I hope you take a moment to have a look.

This weekend, I will be posting the PDF of the fan fiction event called Untold Stories and at the time of writing this, it looks like we have 9 or 10 submissions.

I plan to keep working on my mapping and probably stream a bit too.

What about you? What do you have planned?

BTW, can you guess the name of the mod that the featured image is taken from?

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As I was lying in bed this morning, thinking about getting up or thinking about staying, a new feature for the site popped into my head.

I’m going to call it “Reference Gallery” and it will contain reference images from HL1 mods. I’ll split it into a few sub-galleries: Ceilings, Corridors, Large Arenas, Set Pieces and Science Baby!

I’ll start building the framework pages this week and slowly add images to each section. Let me know if you feel I should have other sub-galleries. I did consider creating an account on an external social media site just for this but want to keep everything hosted on RTSL.

Anywho….

Here we are. Getting closer to summer. I still haven’t finished Wolfenstein The New Order – shame on me. Who knows, MAYBE I will this month.

Found a mod I have been meaning to play for ages, so that takes presidents (Thank Mr. Trump for that spelling), plus a bunch of other stuff related to the site.

What about you? Got any big plans for the month of possibilities?

BTW, the image is taken from Dark Interval – Canals

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No doubt, there’s a bunch of “Half-Life 3 Has Been Announced!”, “Exclusive Half-Life 3 Screenshots!”, “Valve announces Half-Life 3!” etc but we are all too wise for to fall for those.

In fact, some of you might even avoid the Internet all together in the hope of not being disappointed yet again.

Sometimes the timing of news releases can have us doubting but the reality is that not everybody pays attention to April Fool’s and therefore inadvertently add to the strange news stories released.

I might have something to announce today and unfortunately it has to be today, so no doubt you’ll question its timing.

Anyway, enough of that.

As I write this, I still have another few more days off and hope to do some behind-the-scenes work on the site, including getting the multi-tags feature working again. I’ll also trying to open J.A.C.K. and starting doing some mapping again.

That plus my monthly promise to finish Wolfenstein: The new Order!

What about you, what do you have planned?

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