News Update 3 - Half Life 2 Tag mod for Half-Life 2

It’s been 2 weeks already since I had the time to sit down and write something, time really does move fast when your doing something you like doing. And with that I will start this news update off.

As you may have seen we added a link to our homepage, however it ain’t hl2tag.com or something like that, its Jailbreaksource.com. The reason for this is because we joined the jailbreak developer group, this is a group that allows the members to use the jailbreak art resources with the single request that we credit them for their art and that we go under the jailbreak developer flag. We decided to push it a bit further though, we will be doing the same thing and make our materials and models and even .vmf’s open source for people to look at/learn off and use for their own mods. This is under the sole request that you credit us for our work and also go under the jailbreak developer flag to help this initiative grow.

The development team
Although we haven’t had any new designers join, we did get a few beta testers to tag along and help us test the new updates. The new testers i will introduce this time around are all players
Damatman, Nipzor^ and one of the jailbreak developers, Wills

Coding
As i mentioned in the news post 2 weeks ago we started work on adding new game-modes to the game. The first i will introduce is a small but quite evil spin-off of the regular tag, which also fixes a griefing problem the “it” could impose on the server
In this, as of yet, unnamed mode the “it” will carry a bomb which detonates after 1 minute. When it detonates the “it” loses points and a random “runner” will be picked to replace him.

The other mode will be “Last Man Standing”
In this mode the “it” never becomes a “runner” and the last “runner” alive wins the round.

Power-ups:
We got 2 power-ups working at the moment, both of which are pretty straight forward.
Speed bonus, this one gives you a pretty big speed boost for a limited time
Trail removal, this one well removes the trail from the person that picks it up, making him or her harder to track

Mapping
As anyone can expect I haven’t been doing nothing and well progress really is showing that. And with that I will introduce our newest map: HLT_Space. This map is situated in a spaceship somewhere out there, this is also our first map that is pretty much completly in custom textures and the first that is using jailbreak textures and models. It also the most complicated map for hl2tag out there so far layout-wise, giving people a real chance to hide. Its split up in 3 area’s of which i will only showcase one for this update: the bridge/command area

I also made some pretty nice improvements to field as shown here:

(the before shots can be found in the gallery)

Recruitment
Even though progress has been nice the last month we are looking to welcome a few new people into our midst, this mostly has to do with 0.3. If everything goes to plan 0.3 will mean a complete change in artwork from realistic hl2/jailbreak textures to a more drawn style which tf2 and pvk2 are known for. We are planning to do this because we feel this will fit more into the whole tag feel were trying to accomplish

To successfully accomplish this we are recruiting the following artists, if you can show previous work or you are able to do a small request to show your abilities that would be great
- Mapper
- Texture artist or two
- Modeller, it would be great if you have any experience with player models too, as we will be replacing them as soon as we can.
- Animator

There is a small note though, all work you will do will become open source as described by the 2nd paragraph in the news post. I hope this wont create any real problems if you are considering to apply
another thing to remember, we do this for fun and to learn new stuff and as such we wont be going after a proffesional style mod, but more of a fun good looking mod

Future
In the next newspost I should hopefully be able to disclose details on FreshyFresh’s map and get a changelog for 0.2 up

till than

Happy tagging
BurninWater, PsychaosX and FreshyFresh