The spring update 2011 mappack! 40 maps filled with crazy space adventures! All playtypes! A selection of the best , DIRECT from YOUR map-making community.Bring out the love !


---) TORRENT STAGE : Full distribution/release (---

There are a lot of people seeding the file right now, and this is very nice for the downloaders. Keep it up swarm fans!

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There is also an installer by IBEMAD. We're hoping to use it to keep the mappack project updated in the future, but it's not gonna be available at this stage.


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Please see the forum post for more information
---)http://swarmarmory.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=989&p=6261#p6261(---

Original article here:

http://swarmarmory.com/maps?action=view&id=398-Spring+2011+map+pack

November 1, 2010 - Dota Team

From now until the release of the game next year, this will be a place where you can get information on our progress as we build the game.

But first some of you might be thinking, “What is Dota 2?” Dota began as a user-made modification for Warcraft 3 and has grown into one of the most played online games in the world. Following in the tradition of Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress, Portal, and Alien Swarm, Dota 2 is the result of Valve hiring the community developers who built the mod and giving them the chance to finally build a full product out of their idea with the help of a professional team of developers and artists at Valve.

As for the gameplay, it’s a little hard to describe. The camera is set in the traditional RTS perspective, but it wouldn’t be fair to call Dota an RTS. And while each hero starts at level 1, and many times hits the level cap of 25, it wouldn’t be fair to call it an RPG.

Lots of people have tried to assign various genre names to Dota, but we think Action RTS is probably the most descriptive. And while we don’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what genre the game is inventing, we can’t stop playing it internally and we’re pretty excited to show everyone how we’re doing.

This site is where you can come to follow us along as we build the game. The first four images we shipped with the initial announcement are just the start of us showing you our work as we build it. We’re all looking forward to getting more of the game in front of you all.

The DOTA 2 Blog here:

http://www.dota2.com/

Join our Philippine DOTA 2 Steam group here:

http://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/defenseoftheancientsphilippines

By Tom Francis.

I was at Valve last month to interview pretty much everyone I could find, and play one of the most exciting PC games on the horizon: Portal 2. The preview I wrote, and the profile on Valve themselves, is in the new issue of PC Gamer in the UK. But we’re also putting up the interviews here on the site, one a day for a week. Today’s is my conversation with the creator of Alien Swarm, about how the game turned from mod to polished Valve product, and why it’s free.

PC Gamer: So when you came on to Valve, what were you doing?

Jonathan Sutton: Well, the first thing we did was get Alien Swarm up and running on the latest version of the Source Engine. We’d been receiving source code from Valve and working on it privately, so we updated it and then started applying Valve’s play testing process to it. So we would get people in every week to play the game and see, was it working? What were the problems?

PC Gamer: Did you find they found it hard?

Jonathan Sutton: Yes! A lot of people said it was too hard, although interestingly, the version that’s out now, the most popular difficulty level is the hardest one by a factor of four times.

PC Gamer: Really? Wow. I was going to ask that. It seemed like the original mod was intentionally hard.

Jonathan Sutton: Absolutely, the game is set out like a puzzle where you have to figure out, “What do I use where to get through this mission?” And you’re meant to replay it and try different things. You’re meant to change your load-out, you’re meant to change the position of your guys in each of the rooms, until you find this solution that you then have to execute perfectly. It’s that last run when you just make it through and you’ve done all the right things, and all of you work together as a team, is the highest high in Alien Swarm.

PC Gamer: So obviously you decided to make it easier, what was the thinking there?

Jonathan Sutton: Yeah, it wasn’t intentional, it was more that happened from the play testing. I suppose the original mod, when we tested it, was with a lot of hardcore gamers. With Valve there’s a bigger spread of people, and we were able to make the game work for more people by having lower difficulty levels. They were still hard for them, like it’s easy for us, but it’s still hard for them. And the game will actually recommend a difficulty level that has you retrying a few times, because if you just blast through every mission in one go, you’re not really doing the puzzle. So it’ll monitor your performance and if you’re blasting through it’ll say, “Why not turn the difficulty up?”

Read more of the article here:

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/09/12/interview-valve-on-why-alien-swarm-is-free/

Press Releases - Valve
14:08
Since release, we've received a ton of feedback and feature requests from the Alien Swarm community. The most requested additions are more variety and greater difficulty.

With that in mind, we've added "Onslaught" mode, which introduces an AI Director that dynamically generates swarms of aliens based on several factors, such as the squad's stress level. Onslaught works with any difficulty setting and ensures no mission plays the same way twice.

Speaking of difficulty, we've also added a "Brutal" difficulty level for those of you who told us "Insane" wasn't insane enough. How brutal is Brutal? Nobody on the Alien Swarm team has managed to complete a mission on it.

If for some crazy reason Brutal is still too easy for you, there's now a "Hardcore Friendly Fire" toggle. When enabled, friendly fire deals full damage immediately, flamethrowers set teammates on fire much faster, and turrets will hurt you if get caught in their crossfire. HCFF truly tests your team’s ability to work as a elite squad. Coordinating movement and firing lines become an even more integral part of the game.

Finally, to reward the most dedicated players, we've added 3 new IAF Promotion Ranks: Platinum Star, Osmium Star, and the coveted Iridium Medallion.

Alien Swarm is now available via Steam.

Available free of charge, the game thrusts players into an epic bug hunt featuring a unique blend of co-op play and squad-level tactics. Along with the game get the complete code base for Alien Swarm that features updates to the Source engine as well as the SDK.

Alien Swarm is a game and Source SDK release from a group of talented designers at Valve who were hired from the Mod community.