News Update! - MarioKart: Source Mod for Half-Life 2

It's been a fairly long year for the mod, with inevitable slowdowns and
real life trials playing havok with the team. As a consequence, there
have a been a fair few ups and downs. Lets begin with the few downs. In
the last half of the year, we lost members Mojo and Shadowill, whose
work on the mod remains as a testament to their hard work. Likewise,
others in the team have found themselves playing a more restrained role
on the team due to real life cutting in. Coding in particular has had its progress slowed to a crawl, however most other areas continue to progress without too much interference. So despite the loss of two of our members, we continue to strive to make the mod great and work ever closer to that holy grail of a beta.

Now after such a dismal beginning, the positives. Our mappers, myself included, have been working hard to recreate more of both battle and race maps. Here we have some of the latest screenshots of Killermapper's hard work, including the most recent shots of Pipe Plaza, Skyscraper, and both race and all new battle versions of Baby Park. Also shown are some of our shots of my own Toad's Turnpike, which along with Baby Park have never been seen before. All these maps, with the exception of Pipe Plaza are still all WIP at different stages.

Additionally, a selection of our other character models have been finished to the point of needing animation. At this point they've become somewhat held back because of coding. However, as you can see a lot of time has gone into giving as large a selection of characters to play as we can. We hope
this might prevent the more regularly played characters (Yoshi fans), from becoming so tiresome and add a bit more variety than you might find from the original Mario Karts. Any fan should recognise the
majority of our Christmas selection, but only the most devoted are likely to recognise the Big Bad fellow from Super Mario Bros. 2 in 3D glory.

We've also been making good progress on our music front. We decided upon sharing some of Milkydeathgrind's Mario Kart renditions, including the current versions of the menu music and the star power themes. At present these themes are still awaiting the coding to get them in game, but even on the team we wait in anticipation to hear all the earnestly crafted music together with the maps and other resources. We also have a small treat for our third party mappers. Wind Helleven has worked to create a custom skybox, which we all agree is pretty awesome. It should help brighten up the skies of custom maps with its cheerful Mario-like panorama.

Lastly, we wanted to draw your attention to some of our resources being featured on the french Nintendo Channel on the Wii, Fnac. As you can imagine, it's very rewarding to see other team members' work displayed there. Let's hope there's more to come in the not too distant future.

Merry Chistmas from us all.

~General Guy, KillerMapper and all the MKS Team.