The fate of most mods... news

Hi,
after a long period of silence I am back again. But with some bad news: Combine Combat is dead.
Actually it stopped breathing long before I released something called "beta". Why? Back in the beginning of this project, we where 3 people that found ourselves in a german mapping-forum. I was a moderator of this Forum and one day I got a message of two people that had some problems with their maps. Over some time we developed a friendship and started to think about a project we could do together. The idea of playing a Combine always fascinated us, and because it would not require a total conversion (like the great guys from Raindrop are doing) we decided to start. And this is meant literally. We just started making some maps without having some kind of plan for the project. The quality of the maps wasn't very good because we just started doing a new map directly in Hammer (the Half-Life 2 Map-Editor) without a even a rough scetch of it. The final product was a couple of unlinked maps with totaly different settings that where only playable by writing "map" plus the filename in the Half-Life 2 Console.
After I realised that this could never lead into something playable I wanted to do a restart from the beginning. This was propably the point where the other two members lost interest in the mod because (I think) their main goal wasn't to produce something playable but just to have fun playing around with the Hammer-Editor. But I had different ideas, so I started doing maps with a well thought Setting and Layout. I put my nose into programming and it was fun, I put my nose into Modeling and it was fun, I put my nose into Animating and it was fun but after a year or so of work I was tired of doing just...everything and paused developing.
But leaving all the work on my harddisk, unseen by the public, was a pain to me so I decided to (again) put some effort into producing something playable, connected the levels that where usable, polished the mod a bit and released it as a beta (this connecting and polishing was unfortunately more work than I thought).
The feedback was great and people wanted to play the "final" product (which I never planned), but after 4 Years of HL2 Modding and Mapping I simply wanted to do something different.

I think there are enough tips online how to not fail doing a mod, so I wont give you any. All I want to say is thanks to all people that played (and hopefully enjoyed) the mod.

So long,
RedPuma

PS: Sorry for my english, as you might have noticed I am german ;)