News posts

Happy holidays to all! To celebrate the end of the year I've finally prepared the next version of the website up for public beta testing.

The new website drags us kicking and screaming into the modern era with better mobile layout support and other goodies. Please try it out and let me know what you think!

Go to twhl-beta.info now!

Oh snap! Yes they're finally here performing for you.

Sorry we took so long! At first we had trouble agreeing on the winners, and then we had trouble with constantly blowing each other up in Synergy, you know how it is. This time Ant even came on board to write up a review or two! You know Ant? That guy with the thing?

Congratulations to all the winners! Believe me when I say it was very hard deciding on the top 3, we had a blast testing every map. We'll try to get something else up and running before too long.

Competition 34 - Half-Life Re-imagined is now live! We have some moderator souls Steam games to give away, so get mapping! The competition deadline is 3 months away. Feel free to post progress pics or ask questions in the official competition thread!

Best of luck!

EDIT: As is tradition, the competition deadline has been extended 1 extra month. That's the only extension you're getting though!

It's now February 29th in most of the world, which can only mean one thing! It's Ant's birthday! Normally birthdays are not worthy of a news post, but Ant only gets one every four years, so we've enabled Ant mode on the site for the rest of the day.

Happy birthday Ant! See you in 4 years!

Following in the footsteps of Satchmo and probably someone else at some point, our dear Urby is now a proud father! Well, I assume he's proud, so feel free to say otherwise if that's not the case. Looks like we'll need to baby-proof the website...

Anyway, congratulations from everyone here at TWHL!

Thanks to the very generous rufee, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament for TWHL has been organised! The tournament will take place on Saturday 21 March 2015, officially kicking off at 20:00 GMT.

The tournament will be open to anyone, but TWHL members have a chance to score some prizes. Have a look at the tournament thread for more information.

Howdy folks, long time no post!

I'm pleased to announce that the results for the Floating Island competition have (finally) been released. Congratulations to our winners and to all those who entered! We'll be contacting the winners with details of their prize, and we'll see if we can't scrounge up something for all those who entered.

Edit: To the runners up: please check the competition thread for prize details.

You thought it was dead, never to be seen again...but now it has returned! And it's ready for revenge! Yes, competition 33, Floating Island, is back from the grave, bringing with it a wave of zombified minions. Due to a series of unfortunate timing and communications mishaps, the judging process of the competition...well, it never happened. Once we got to grips with the fact that it wasn't going to happen, we realised that many of the entries that were uploaded to temporary hosting websites were no longer available.

Instead of chasing people up to get the entries re-uploaded, we're opening the compo up again so people can get their entries in. Because of the rather long time it took us to do this, we're giving everyone a month to polish and upload their entries - and yes, you can enter now even if you didn't before! We've swapped out the judging team, and I can assure you that none of them plan on getting 100-hour-per-week jobs any time soon, so judging will actually happen this time!

Some quick notes:

• If you already entered the competition the first time, we will judge your entry if it is still downloadable. If you used a temporary host or are unsure, please resubmit your entry.
• A number of people submitted late entries to Grim via private message, we do not have access to these entries. Please resubmit them!
• If you need a place to upload files, please contact me and I will organise a more permanent place for your entry to be uploaded.
• No extensions this time! If you miss the 1 month entry window, too bad! We plan to judge the entries immediately after the competition ends.

The treatment of this competition so far has just not been fair to you guys, and for that I want to apologise. As a small way to make it up to everyone, I've also decided to add some prizes in the form of Steam games (or from any digital service that supports Paypal payments) for the three place winners (prize values to be decided).

You can submit your entry to the competition by clicking here.

Well well, it has been a while since we had one of these. I'll take the initiative to make the first news post of 2013.

Things are happening on the TWHL forums.

If you haven't noticed already, Penguinboy has released his first public alpha build of Sledge, an Open Source alternative to Hammer. If you still regularly map for Half-Life (it currently only support GoldSource), give Sledge a try, and report any bugs and anomalies in the process. Penguinboy is open to suggestions to make Sledge stand out in the mapping community.

We've also seen the public beta release of Compilator 3, a project created by myself to provide a front-end for compiling your maps using the latest set of map compilation tools, including Vluzcan's excellent VHLT.
I do have to admit that the code isn't that great and needs significant optimization here there, but I'll get to that sooner or later. Feel free to try it out yourself and report any bugs you encounter. This will help me make it better.

And finally, if you still regularly play Minecraft, I hereby invite you to join my Minecraft server and have some fun.

One more thing. The compo results, they're coming. Patience

Competition 33 has started!

Go take a look at the competition page, or discuss in the official thread.

I look forward to your submissions!

Edit: Belated Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

Congrats to hlife_hotdog, winning his second Map of the Month with Apartment X2! Coincidentally, this map was inspired by a previous MotM winner. Fun stuff!
Also for those who haven't noticed, the latest MotM winner is now proudly displayed in the right sidebar. Hopefully this will provide some extra traffic to the best maps we have to offer.

In other news, we've published two brand new tutorials for your mapping pleasure. JeffMOD expands our Source tutorial library with Creating blend textures for Displacements, and Stojke lends a hand for those lost in their complex entity setups with multi_manager Looping Made Easy. Thanks a bunch guys!

Enjoy and be sure to leave feedback.

Re-Invent a CS Classic results are up! A huge thank you to all the entrants, the overall quality of the submissions was staggeringly high, which made it really hard to choose the top 3.

Congrats to Zeeba-G, RabidMonkey and Skals! Enjoy the CS:GO beta!

Also, our testing server for CS:S is going to be up for a few more weeks with all the Source entries in the rotation. Check out the competition thread for more details.

Congratulations to two-time MotM winner doggybag71, the author of December's winning entry. Check out the reviews, be sure to leave a comment, and don't forget to vote for this month!

In related news, let's welcome back Taylor (a.k.a Masta Killa)!
Best known from his previous legendary reviews, he will be joining Archie, Rimrook & Urby on the MotM team to provide you with regular content once again.

Another month, another map!.. of the month.

Congratulations to noSICK, our first member ever to win two Map of the Month awards back-to-back!

Check out the reviews on Surfacerun, his little gem of pure vanilla Half-Life-single-player-ness. Also, be sure to leave some comments for both the reviewers and the winner - both sides would definitely appreciate the feedback!

Howdy folks! To avoid huge news syndrome, your extended MOTM surprise continues in a new news post. This news post, even!

But before we get to that, I must point out that unfortunately, we forgot to acknowledge a recent tutorial by our good friend (and distinguished gentleman), Moaby. He wrote a most excellent tutorial on the subject of creating caves using displacements. Sorry about that, Moaby! To make up for it, you get a...tutorial award! Congrats!

And with that, back to our scheduled programming: