HL2 - EP3 - CE blog - ChromeAngel

Two months ago I release a major revision to Exterminatus, Beta 6.0. To my Joy we had hundreds of downloads and a full house on all the servers... for about 2 days. I've been scheduling regular games every Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday ever since, but i'm back down to one regular player/tester ( hello OolonColluphid ). I've been working on making the mod more n00b friendly since the beta 6.0 release, putting out an alpha patch every weekend to keep it fresh. I think that bit is about done, which kind of ties up what I want to do with EX, so my eye has been roving for another project to take up.

HL2 Wars caught my eye for a while, I made a few static models for the rebel and combine buildings, played a few development games. I don't get the feeling there is much more for me to do there. Sandern the lead coder is in a league ahead of me and he's still having problems with the AI path finding. There are some gameplay problems with HL2 wars, the resources don't seam to have much value and there is limited strategies you can play with just infantry, such that the build sequence of the tech tree becomes the single most important thing, the player that learns the optimum build sequence to make a bait ball of infantry the fastest wins. With a couple of dozen tweaks i'm sure those issues could be fixed. So my eye was roving again...

I typed "Source mod Podcast" into Google and it popped up with Podcast17.com , a weekly podcast about all things valve and steam related. When, more astonishingly, Exterminatus was listed in the agenda for that weeks 'cast. I *HAD* to listen to this. It soon become apparent this was enthusiastic, if tired, amateurs, pulling together all the gossip, leaks, releases and mod news into an hour plus of chat. They did mention Exterminatus (albeit referring to space marines as "shouty robots") and veering off into a discussion of Warhamemr Fantasty Battle and how Games Workshops prices are a complete rip. Anyway, Pdocast17 has made it into my weekly schedule, even if they clearly biased toward their own favorites. Last weeks episode (#179) mentions a group putting together a giant mosaic of HL2 images to remind Valve that "hey, we love you're flagship franchise... why the f**k don't you stop messing about with hats, portals and elves and get the next installment shipped". This kind of inspired me. Not to take screenshots for the mosaic, not to nag Valve, but to make something...

Half-Life 2 - Episode 3 - Community Edition

The basic idea is to find enough enthusiastic modders to put together our own version of Episode 3. I talked the idea through with the guys on the podcast17 group chat. There were a few naysayers, but a couple of interested modders, not nearly enough level designers though. So, while my blood was up, I wrote out a lengthy outline of my idea and posted it on Interlopers.net , the most active Source modding forum I know. Man, they were really not down with my idea. It was like I had suggested we should write "the Bible part III", because God hadn't put out another book for 2000 years. That's the kind of reverence they have for HL2 (even the sh*ty episodes). I don't think i'll be getting any help from there. I could post the idea on the Steampowered.com forums or here at Moddb.com, but I suspect the reaction would be much the same. So here's me with a good idea, that i'm fired up about and i'm shelving it.

Maybe now would be a good time to learn LUA, Python or the UDK...

...it would all be much easier if I had a project to aim for.