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Get jobs!

Portal 2 was delayed, yes.

Sorry guys, I don't agree with your "I can't afford it, therefore I'll pirate it" excuses. Gaming is a hobby, it's not a necessity. If you can't afford it, tough shit. You'll live.

Very few games I've actually pre-ordered. Most of them offered some kind of pre-release discount. I pre-ordered the retail version of Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 via Steam.

Dead Space 2. Not a terrible game, I guess.

This is getting stupid.

Huntey: Link to your image please.

X-Men 1.

This is getting stupid now. Well done.

No Strings Attached.

And Wall-E is absolutely adorable.

Jos? Gonz?lez - All You Deliver

Server costs are no issue to us.

Mmm, chilled. I like it.

Jos? Gonz?lez - Sensing Owls

ZombieLoffe, you win.

I agree, and it's harder to remember.

Well, if we were only to support Goldsource and Source ONLY, we'd have to excel in our tutorial content. Which we don't. Tutorials don't get submitted often enough for either engine.

Any member that frequents this site is allowed a say.

Broader. Whatever anyone can bring, we'll put up. So rather than just say "we're concentrating on these new engines", it'll generally be most engines that offer a proper level editor.

So I've been told. Can't say I was overly impressed with Mass Effect 1.

David Schwartz - Stupid Chair

Sure am! To be honest, it's a lot of games that have some kind of pedigree behind them (i.e. highly-rated in their time) that I never got a chance to play. Since Steam seems to love offering stuff at ridiculous prices, I'm stocking up.

I'll either go for Crysis Warhead after Red Faction 2 or Bad Company 2. Still going through Mass Effect 1 in preparation for the sequel too, not to mention Gran Turismo 5.

Clocked Crysis last night, onto Red Faction 2.

Dunno about you guys, but I'm not exactly going to call South Africa from Australia.

Don Punch: We have already been in contact with atom, as PB mentioned earlier in this thread. He has, for the last few months, not returned any of our emails. We did the exact same thing you did to get this information.

Links are easy to rebuild.

This thread was not to primarily come up with new names. It was to communicate future plans and for others to contribute to them.

Also, with a current active population of 30-50, I wouldnt worry about that too much, I would work on building a new community using your current members are promoters.

That's the general idea, but it seems that a lot here are against an influx of newcomers.

PB and I would be paying.

We can move it without changing it. Thing is though, it's a great chance for us to redesign it properly and rebuild it: I know PB is itching to do it. We can certainly move it to a new server in the interim and have a basic redirect setup.

There is another reason why we're proposing a such a bold move. As mentioned in my first post, the Admin team have full-time jobs and various other commitments. Rebuilding a website takes a lot of time. If we decide to keep things the same when we do the rebuild, we'd be putting in all this time and effort for the 40 people that visit the site.

As for the issue raised concerning the confusion surrounding 'what engine a map is for', the design would obviously make it clear. This version of TWHL was designed to not branch away from the previous version, so there's a lot of problems with the interface. I've done enough web design to know how to properly separate content (part of my real job is web designing), so there's no need to worry about that. Frankly, it's not exactly a reason not to pursue more engines.

I'm not entirely sure why you're all against newcomers. New people bring fresh ideas, more creativity and more friends. Yes, we will get out fair share of spam like any site does, but there's nothing that can be done about that.

Think of it this way: if you arrived at what looked like a fantastic site with great learning resources, a stock pile of excellent maps and a friendly community and was then shunned by that same community, how would you feel?

There's literally about 30-40 people who actively visit the site at the moment. That's visit, not contribute. That number will keep on declining, as it has been for a good while now.

Shitstorms are built by the community. It's your job, as the regulars and lovers of this site, to ensure that if the community grows, it grows in a friendly, helpful and entertaining manner. Acting hostile to new blood is what causes shitstorms in the first place. When I originally joined, the people here treated me incredibly well (even with my lack of knowledge of proper forum protocol). I was never publicly spoken down to or ignored. Everyone joined in and contributed possible solutions to problems and new ideas sprang forward often. Believe you me, I'm far more rosy-eyed about TWHL than most of you.

TWHL won't ever be gone unless you all start thinking that way. Have some optimism,remember what brought you all together and then embrace the fact that you're shaping a bigger, potentially greater community.

As we've said countless times already, keeping the name Half-Life related and then branching into other makes no sense. We're trying to build the community, not keep everything small-scale and sentimental.

As well as this (not that this has a massive bearing), in a purely legal matter, we do not own the name TWHL. This is atom's brand and IP and it's not ours to simply do as we wish with it.

As I mentioned, it's not really an option to call it TWHL because there's no domain names we can use.

I'm with PB: we need something memorable and relatively short. Something that's catchy and easy to remember, particularly with regards to the domain. Again, look at Rust as a good example: easy to remember without shoehorning it into something specific.

That's the idea, Luke. I think it'd be nice if we kept open the possibility of branching into any engine that people can contribute content for. A while back, Andy was part of a new level design community called Rust. It specialised in a variety of engines, not just Goldsource/Source. The name of the site itself doesn't need to explicitly say what it supports.

By the way, there's absolutely no animosity between atom and the Admin team here. Atom slipped away from the site a long time ago, leaving it in the hands of the previous Admin team (Andy, Seventh-Monkey, RabidMonkey and myself). He's simply a difficult person to get in touch with.

All the data would be preserved. As for the domain names mentioned earlier, they're not exactly catchy: I'd rather we went for an entirely new name, particularly if we're going to branch into different engines.

We do have some control of the current site, so we can put up a page explaining it all.

First up: this isn't a doom and gloom post. We have some (hopefully) exciting news concerning the future of the site. So please, read through all this carefully and feel free to contribute in a mature and helpful way.

Your three awesome admin pals (that is, Penguinboy, Strider and myself) have long been discussing the future of TWHL. A bit of background: the three of us have been here for quite a while (myself since 2003). We developed the version of TWHL you see before you essentially from scratch in our spare time. The three of us all have full-time jobs and various other commitments, which I hope will explain the lack of updates sometimes.

However, the three of us have a vested interest in the site. I'm not alone in saying that, despite the occasional slip, we've got a great little community here.

Now, onto the nuts and bolts. As some of you are aware, we do not own the site. We do not own the domain, nor do we own the hosting. The original creator, atom, does. He created the site, as it says in our about page, as an 'experiment in PHP'. Given that we don't own the site (or even have full access to it for that matter), we are a bit limited in what we can do with it. We have attempted to get in touch with atom (who's curiously still paying for it all) but haven't had much luck.

As a result, we've come up with a bit of an idea. We are proposing that we move TWHL to a brand new site under a new name. I understand that there's a lot of sentimentality with the TWHL name, but we don't have much of a choice. We've explored options of purchasing a more prolific domain name for TWHL, but all the options are pretty much taken (twhl.com is being domain squatted for a ridiculous amount of money). We can't redirect the current domain to a new server either because, as mentioned earlier, we don't own it or have access to it.

So this is where we stand. We're essentially looking at making a completely fresh start, but with the same content and community. This will enable us to do far more with the site, including the possibility of branching into more engines, video tutorials and more.

This won't happen in the next week or anything, so don't panic. We're happy to read some suggestions on the next step (or even potential names for a new site), so feel free to contribute. I'm begging you though, please please PLEASE keep it civil. We're doing this for you for no tangible reward, so please respect this.

Still haven't changed mine: Scott Pilgrim ftw.

Not sure about achievements. I like them, but I reckon that when you're playing a game for the first time, they shouldn't pop up. Nothing takes you out of the story than some obnoxious pop-up reminding you that you're playing a game. Multiplayer wouldn't be as big an issue though.

Just clocked Grand Theft Auto 4 (meh), Red Faction (meh) and Call of Duty: United Offensive (ergh). Currently reinstalling Mass Effect (omg wut) and downloading Crysis (through Steam).

Contact Steam, 2muchvideogames. Do you have the box for it at all? A receipt?

I wasn't addressing to those who suck at mapping. Those members should not participate at competitions.

Erm, no. Competitions are for anyone to enter. They allow mappers to foster their skills by focusing their imagination and abilities to a clear task. Competitions are, in no way, limited to the skills of the mapper.

To be honest, I'll get excited about Episode 3 when it's a few days from release. Until then, I don't particularly care any more.

If you're looking for realism in Counter-Strike, then you're an idiot.

Condition Zero was at least an attempt to shake up the dated gameplay, so I'll commend it for that. It's a shame Deleted Scenes isn't polished, it's interesting.

Earth? Fire? Wind? All you need is Water and Heart and you've got Earth's greatest champion of all time.

If any of you mapped entries for half of these ideas, they could've easily worked for "Map Something Historical".

I wish I had more time to map... by the time I get home from work, I'm buggered but then I stay up late to map making me buggered the next day for work.

Using the rule of logic that I mentioned earlier in this thread, let's take a look at this screenshot.

First up, what are we looking at here? I'm sensing that this is some kind of high energy beam: if so, why is it completely in the open like that? Should there not be safety rails and protection for anyone that needs to get near it?

You've got four connecting bridges to reach this rather plain looking object. Give the object a reason for needing four bridges: perhaps it's such a large and unstable structure that it can only be approached by staff wearing appropriate exo-suits, which limits their movement. Perhaps there's some kind of function on the object that requires four people to use at the same time.

Trust me, logic works even when you're dealing with fantasy settings/objects. Nearly everything in Half-Life 2 and the Episodes, be it the biggest set piece or the tiniest detail, made logical sense. If you look at the reactor in Episode 1, it had a grand feel but because Valve looked at it logically too, you got the sense that the Combine built it with safety measures in mind as well.

Did you seriously just use a joke from Billy Madison? If so...

"Donkey Kong sucks!"

That's BS Urby. Worst logic ever.

I don't like the iPad myself, but that's the stupidest reasoning I've ever read.

Worked? On AT&T? I think not.

Being able to access my mail from any machine is pretty important to me.

That's kinda the whole point of IMAP.

Queens of the Stone Age ? Feel Good Hit of the Summer

Always great fun to jump on the Apple Hate Wagon, eh?

No company in the world has gotten rich simply by charging huge amounts for their products. There's always something beyond the high price that accounts for its popularity and I think everyone conveniently chooses to forget about that bit and instead concentrates on "OMG SO EXPENSIVE".

Well, most people would go straight to the last page of the thread to post, rather than checking the first. A dedicated page could hold all the rules and regulations and also keep tab of who's involved, their progress, etc.