Mods

Epic Games' lengthy Unreal Tournament 3 based Make Something Unreal mod making contest is nearing its end. Today the developer announced the winners of the fourth and final phase of the contest in various catagories. The winner of the best first person shooter mod went to The Ball (winning ($10,000) with Prometheus getting the first runner up prize (winning $7,000). Both mods have been turned into small stand alone games via the Unreal Development Kit. The winner of the best non-FPS mod went to the zombie third third person shooter The Hunted which also won $10,000.

While the contest is no longer taking any more entries there's still one more part of the contest that will be awarded soon in Las Vegas (and we aren't talking about playing in a casino kingdom). That's the grand prize of the best overall mod where the winning mod team will get a $50,000 cash prize as well as access to a full commercial Unreal Engine 3 license. The winner and runner-ups will be announced at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas in February.

In 2007, Valve released The Orange Box collection for both the PC and Xbox 360. Xbox 360 owners, however, actually got a version of the original Half-Life 2 in their port of The Orange Box that is graphically better than the current PC version. That's because Valve decided to give the Xbox 360 port all of the updates they had made to the Source Engine since Half-Life 2 was released for the PC back in 2004, including support for HDR lighting and improved character models.

While Valve doesn't seem in a hurry to give PC owners those kind of updates, a group of modders have taken it on themselves to bring the original Half-Life 2 up to speed with the graphical updates that were put into Half-Life 2 Episode 2 (released in The Orange Box). They even hacked in some new Steam achievements. You can see the differences in the YouTube video above. It's currently unknown how Valve feels about this kind of modification but if you want to try it out this Steam message board thread has some download links for the mod.

[Via Rock Paper Shotgun]

Over two years ago MechWarrior franchise owners Microsoft game a mod team called Wandering Samurai permission to go ahead with their free MechWarrior-based mod project for Crysis. Now at long last the mod team has released the first beta for the mod, titled MechWarrior: Living Legends.

Yes, even before the actual official MechWarrior game revival from developer Piranha Games is released you can try out this beta mod which requires the latest version of Crysis, the 2007 shooter from developer Crytek. In the meantime you can check out a launch trailer, which has lots of gameplay footage, from the mod, after the jump.

Mod makers got an early Christmas present late on Wednesday. Valve announce on the official Left 4 Dead web site that the mod tools for the zombie shooter sequel Left 4 Dead 2 are now available. Mod makers can download the tools via the Steam client under the Tools tab.

The new authoring tools include some new features compared to the tools released for the original Left 4 Dead including support for the new Scavenge mode. It also lets mod makers support changing the layouts of maps with the new AI Director improvements. If you just want to play new custom Left 4 Dead 2 maps, you can simply download the Add-On Support tab in the Tools section. It will also allow players to download and play any map including those made for the original game.

There's no doubt that the PC game industry is moving more and more towards a digital distribution model and today another such service officially announced its presense. The ModDB.com web site, perhaps the single biggest online resource for learning about and downloading third party mods for games, has just announced its plans to enter this growing market.

The service is going under the codenam Desura and ModDB.com claims their service differs from others like Steam and Direct2Drive in that they give mod and game developers more control over how they share things like news, screenshots, movies and other things to the public. Currently the service is in a private closed beta stage and there's no word on when Desura will go live to the public.

At the same time that Infinity Ward's community manager Robert Bowling announced that there would be no support for dedicated servers for the PC version of Modern Warfare 2, he also ducked answering questions about if the first person shooter would have any kind of mod tools release from the developer. Since then Infinity Ward has been silent on the mod tools issue.

At least until this week when a "tweet" from Bowling on his Twitter page answered a fan's question on dedicated servers with this reply: "Nothing on Dedicated Servers, but there may be some Mod Tools news coming in the future, I'll pass it along once I have it." We doubt that he would mention it and then later say that they won't release any tools for the mod community so we are hopeful for some good news on this front.

Gallery: Modern Warfare 2 Screenshots

Sit down, dude and dudettes, because this will be a tad confusing. Tripwire Interactive has been busy today issuing a new update to their shooter game Killing Floor via Steam, putting their first game Red Orchestra on sale and updating two free mods, one for each game.

First, Killing Floor has been updated with four of the winning maps from their recent level making competion added to the main game. Also every owner of Killing Floor now has two Guest Passes that they can give to friends. They can play the game for free for up to three days. Finally, Killing Floor's free sci-fi based mod Defense Alliance 2 is now available to download via Steam.

Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, Tripwire's WWII shooter, is now on sale via Steam for just $4.99 until Monday. There's also a major new update to the game's free mod Mare Nostrum which adds 12 new maps, 14 new weapons, over 20 vehicles and 26 Steam achievements.

Just over a year ago, the creators of the Half-Life 2 mod Black Mesa released a spectacular trailer that showed off efforts to make a true Source Engine graphical remake of the original Half-Life. At the end of the trailer the makers indicated it would be out by 2009.

Well, 2009 is almost done and with no release in sight, the development team has now posted up an official update on their message board. The obvious news is, "Black Mesa will not make a 2009 release." However, they continue to insist that, "we have come very close." and that we can expect to see Gordon Freeman battle in the original Black Mesa complex with much better graphics "in the near future." We will believe it when we download it.

Download the Black Mesa HD gameplay trailer at Big Download (104 MB)

It's pretty rare that a game's level editor is released prior to the game itself but Unknown Worlds Entertainment is doing just that with people who pre-ordered their upcoming FPS-RTS game Natural Selection 2. Today the developer released the "pre-alpha" version of the game to those folks which basically amounts to the level editor and some environmental artwork for the game.

This release is mostly for folks who want to tinker with the level editor and start making maps for the game before its release (currently set for sometime in 2010). Unknown Worlds might even use some of the best third-party maps and put them into the final game.

You could create a DeLorean-Back to the Future car mod inside of Crysis if you really wanted to, but that's not particularly news worthy. However, creating a DeLorean-Back to the Future car mod that actually does use the flux capacitor to travel back and forth in time (in the game) . . . now that's worth looking into.

That's just what mod maker Mert Mimaroglu did with his very cool mod that can be used inside Crytek's 2007 first person shooter. The mod not only models the car, both inside and out, in great detail but as you can see in the video above you can use it to time travel in the game itself. All of the effects are spot on, from the electrical burst as the car hits 88 MPH to the frost the is created after a time jump to the fire trails it leaves behind when it moves out of the time line. Make sure Doc Brown and Marty see this.

Download the Crysis 'Back to the Future' DeLorean Mod (22 MB)

Valve has yet to release the mod tools for Left 4 Dead 2 (we assume they are coming soon-ish) but in the meantime that hasn't stopped some enterprising mod creators from shoehorning the characters, new zombie bosses and items from the just released shooter sequel into the original Left 4 Dead campaigns.

The L4DMods.com site has the full instructions on how to make this happen. The site puts up plenty of warnings that this kind of thing is not for folks who are unfamiliar with opening up and altering a PAK file but as you can see from the above screenshot it is possible to get Coach, Nick, Noelle and Ellis up north to battle the infected.

[Via Kotaku]

One of the more interesting mixes of first person shooter and real time strategy was Command and Conquer: Renegade. The title, made by Electronic Arts' now defunct Westwood Studios and released in 2002, was highly anticipated but while it got good reviews for the most part it was not a huge sales success (in fact a planned sequel was canceled due to the low sales of the original).

For some time a Unreal Tournament 3 mod team has been working on Renegade X, which brings the multiplayer design of C&C: Renegade to Epic Games' shooter. But the recent release by Epic of the Unreal Development Kit has caused many mods to be re-released as stand alone games. Now it looks like Renegade X could be moving in that direction. In a message board post announcing the release of the latest UT3 mod version the development team announced that thanks to the UDK release, " . . . there is a great chance Renegade X will become a standalone game in the future." The announcement emphasizes the fact that this stand alone game will still be free to download and play due to EA's holding of the C&C game rights. Still fans of the original could be looking at a Unreal Engine 3-based version in the months to come. You can check out a gameplay trailer from the latest UT3 mod release after the jump:

[Via Blue's News]

Nazis. Dinosaurs. Without a doubt these are two of pop culture's biggest and most used groups of bad guys. But what if these two totally different groups suddenly joined forces? That's the uber-cool premise behind Dino D-Day. The upcoming Source Engine based game has the Nazis bringing in the big lizards to help them in their quest to take over the world in World War II. The game comes from new developer Digital Ranch Interactive which has just released a free Half-Life 2 mod that serves as a demo for what they have planned for the full game. You can download that mod right now at Big Download.

Big Download got a chance to ask some questions to Digital Ranch Interactive's co-founder Abe Scheuermann to find out more about their plans for the game, his reaction to how well the mod release has been received and more.

The Torchlight Editor (TorchED) allows users to create custom content for Torchlight. Much of what users are can look forward to getting their hands on is detailed in a video, where Runic Games highlights the features of its development tools.

Download Torchlight Editor v1.0 (383 MB)
Download the Torchlight v1.12 Demo (418 MB)
Check out all Torchlight downloads

With the Dragon Age: Origins Toolset, users can create custom adventures for Dragon Age. The toolset can only be installed on a machine that has the full Dragon Age: Origins game installed. The EclipseRay Lightmapper Source Code is an optional add-on.

Download the Dragon Age: Origins Toolset (472 MB)
Download the EclipseRay Lightmapper Source Code (6 MB)
Download HD Dragon Age: Origins Toolset Trailer (80 MB)
Check out all Dragon Age: Origins downloads