It has been five months since we announced our comeback, and the response was impressive: not only have the people continued to remember us, but also flocked en masse to our Discord and Steam group to thank us for our efforts. Even PC Gamer has dedicated some words to us. That was incredible!!
So you are probably thinking “Ok, what has been going on after all these months?”:
To start with, we got a new team member, Troop as our animator. He did the animations of the new Sniper Rifle and the Ion cannon, and reanimated the OICW. But he went further than that, as he also made a whole new model for the Alyxgun, as well as some light fixes for other viewmodels.
News of our resurrection reached the ears of an ex team member, who has since then rejoined us: KittopiaCreator. He’s responsible for programming the Ion cannon as well as assisting us on internal fixups and improvements. He’s also an expert with particles, as one can appreciate them on the Ion cannon.
Then came the contributions from the community. From mere fixes on certain models, to new textures, to even fixing and remastering maps! All of them have been greatly appreciated as it helped us to focus on other tasks. We can never be too thankful of your contributions. Here comes some examples of such dedication:
Zelda, remastered by Spartykins
Courier, remastered by AsG_Alligator
Harvest, fixed by Sherlock
During this time we have re-established contact with other mod teams in order to strengthen our capacity of solving problems with Source, which among other things it lead to solve some long time bugs of Source SDK Base 2013, like the playermodels and NPCs no longer being able to blink, or even the dreaded playermodel twitch and invisible bug that plagues all Source multiplayer mods and games on pre-L4D branches.
As if all of the above weren’t enough, almost a month ago, it came to our knowledge that some legendary GoldSrc modders like Besli, RavenGT or Ambient.Impact were still active, so we contacted them in order to know their opinions as former members of H.I.T. about our old accord of using their content for our mod.
Not only were they honoring our prior agreement, but also to our surprise, they gave us a pack with HD models that have originally been done for HL1 - some of which were either a rare sight on the Internet or outright unseen by the common user!
We have ported and adapted them for our HL:S campaign and they have certainly helped to raise the quality, while not looking out of place by maintaining visual themes.
Even as just a mere anecdote, we were present at the GSH LAN party in Hannover this month. The preparation for this event has pushed our limits to the point where we had to work against the clock, but ultimately an ( almost ) bug free “demo” was shown at the event. We learned important lessons due this and enriched our experience.
We know that at this point you are all waiting to watch our third Devblog video. While most of our work can’t be truly appreciated through this, we have some new stuff to show, so here it is:
( Don’t forget to turn on captions )
We would like to remind our fans that we are still looking for programmers and mappers, so if you think you can give us a hand, come to our Discord and talk to us.
And finally, we are sorry to say that unless a miracle happens, the chances of releasing on Steam before the year ends are very, very slim. But, as most of you might know, game or mod development is rarely easy under a crunch - especially when dealing with Source!
Thank you again for your support, and see you soon!
