July 2012 Newsletter
Hello again! It's been a long time, how have you been? The staff decided that the news posts should make a return, so here we are. With the news, for July(ish)! The last time we had one of these, Nine was saying that we'd be wearing the mappers medallion soon. Since we have that now, I think we can release the next post.
News:
Late June and July have been busy months in the TF2 Community. First off we've seen the release of
Meet the Pyro and the
Source Filmmaker. The Source Filmmaker is what Valve has been using to create all the great short films that they use in their games. The intro to Left 4 Dead (1 and 2), and the Meet the ___ shorts. But some of our community members have gone above doing just simple shorts, and have done flythroughs of their maps!
You might want to check out a few examples of this:
YM Incoming! (pl_haste Flythrough)
Ravidge cp_evergreen_b3 Flythrough
Micnax ctf_micnax_72 Flythrough
TF2Maps.net showcase: 72hr Contest #3
Those last two lead us perfectly into our next news tidbit, the
72hr Contest Results! Starting on June 29th, mappers had 72 hours to make the best, most fun, awesome map they could. 35 people entered and only three won,
koth_idolon,
koth_ravidge and
koth_hanz. Congratulations to them! You can see the rest of the results and offer your congratulations to them on the
results thread.
The other contest we have going on is
TF2Maps.net Mapping Contest #8: KoTH, Sponsored by STAR_. This contest was announced in May, a quick reminder to create your entry thread in the "Contest Entires" subforum asap. You need to have a thread to be able to compete, read
the thread if you're STILL unclear about the rules!
Community member yyler has been organizing
Highlander testing when time and circumstances allows for it, keep an eye out for future tests and cross some fingers hoping we see more or them.
A minor update to the site that happened late last month was the addition of a
IRC webchat page, it's open for everyone to join, and you can even spy on the activity on the gameserver if you so like!
Recently we opened a new section to the forum, the "
Orphaned Maps Repository". A place where mappers may share their abandoned maps and pass the baton over to someone else who is willing to take over the project.
It's already filling up and people seem eager to help. Sometimes good maps die because the author simply doesn't have the time or willpower to continue and here we are giving these projects a chance to survive.
Read the introduction post in the forum section if you want a more in depth explanation.
Finally, for the news section, we have a warning to all mappers. There is now an SDK bug where all your entities can get wiped from the .vmf! (ooooh nooo!) This is apparently caused by trying to load an invalid solid. For more information on this, check out
the thread Ravidge posted in Featured news, and make sure to check for invalid solids with alt+p before ever major save!
Maps and Asset highlight
Map highlight is a section where we put the spotlight on maps that have recently finished and been moved to our
Showcase forum.
For this month we've seen the completion of:
Asset highlight is where we list a few of the more interesting additions or updates to our
textures and models section.
We would have liked to highlight some tutorials or articles as well, but nothing in particularly inspiring or helpful has been posted in this past month, maybe next time?
Discussions and misc content
Let's talk Doomsday. A discussion thread where the community share their thoughts on the new gamemode "special delivery" and the map "Doomsday".
What do YOU do to start a new map? A discussion thread where mappers reveal their secrets/process on how to start a new map.
A leaked screenshot of the next VALVe map koth_soho?
This thread on SPUF briefly mentions a the addition of a TF2 Map Workshop. Not really news worthy, but interesting to hear that VALVe are actually thinking about it.
This is the first in a series of monthly news posts. If it is well received and you would like to see us continue it, please leave a comment. The purpose of a monthly news post is for members (or non-members) to easily keep up to date with what we're discussing and doing in the mapping community a little easier.
If you have suggestions for how to make it better, don't hesitate to give us some feedback.
The Hammer Times: July 2012 Newsletter
