In addition to the important news: Project Beta team is happy to announce a new releases of Mega Build and Mega Patch 5 for you with the latest fixes and addons.

New releases are already waiting for you in our Downloads section:

Mega Build 2024

Megapatch 5.0

Today is a good day! Valve released the Half-Life 2 20th Anniversary update. Many bugs that appeared during the past updates has been fixed. Episodes are now merged with the main game.
But that's not the main thing.

Among other things, on the special update page you can find those very videos from the closed presentations of HL2 2000 and 2002!

Well, we waited, we hoped, and now we see!

GET YOUR FREE TVs!

E3 2002 demo:

And of course a two-hour documentary with numerous developer interviews and much more, not shown before, including concept art of the Episode Three:

Town mod for the retail engine recently received an update. It adds Russian and English subtitles and brings visual and gameplay improvements. Some traps, gameplay segments and visuals of the mod have been finalized. Maps have been recompiled for both HDR and LDR versions. It is worth mentioning that the ported version is made as an addon for Coterminus and has a lot of improvements in addition to general stability.

Download

Earlier today, Marc Laidlaw posted a photo of a whiteboard sent to him by a fellow Half-Life 2 developer, Randy Lundeen.



In it, a whole bunch of info can be seen. Most importantly, the proposed chapter order for late 2002; seeing what chapters were still considered for the story; and various developer assignments, such as what prefab maps to work on.

The chapters listed are:

• Train ride : City 17
• Station
• Terminal Square
• Arcade (or other)
• Kleiner's Lab
• Back alleys/Factory
• Breen Plaza
• Sewers
• Canals
• Quarry
• Ravenholm
• Eli's base
• Junkyard or Wasteland
• Sub - Lighthouse
• Depot / (Train Ride?) / (Alyx + Train?)
• Air Exchange
• Borealis
• Kleiner's Lab - Redux
• Factory
• Breen Plaza
• City Streets & Museum
• Gate to Inner City
• Inner City
• Citadel
• Interior

Among other curiousities, it shows that the Airex and Borealis stayed relevant enough to be included up until late 2002; the WC Mappack's most recent Airex map is from February of 2002, and it is usually believed it was dropped in early part of that year.

There's also nothing between Borealis and returning to Kleiner's lab.

As noted by Marc, it also contains Viktor Antonov's 'trademark slogan', "This is bullshit". It is said to have been applied to everything "liberally and hilariously". 

A new mod for the beta version of Half-Life 2 has been released.



The main goal of this mod is to gather the most interesting ideas from the development of the Ravenholm chapter and bring them to a quality state.

After spending many hours studying map sources and sketches from 2002-2003, I found that the old town had a well-designed infrastructure with a railroad, power plant,
a mining cave system with digging machine, material transportation system, warehouse, a residential part with a large church and more. The player's path was much more interesting, more traps were planned.

Much of this has been radically simplified or removed in the release. These ideas were separate fragments among the many unfinished prototypes and test maps.

I put these disparate ideas together, refined and polished them to make a complete chapter with its own unique gameplay and mechanics.

Details in the forum thread