The Axel Project

Hey all,

It’s August! With that said, I’d like to give everyone an update on the state of R2.

One of our goals in R2 was to learn from our mistakes in R1. We dropped the ball there and we apologize :^).  That’s why we dedicated large blocks of time to playtesting and code reviews. Our focus in this release was to make the tech base as stable as we could, while carefully adding additional features and not introducing new regressions (though some may slip through testing).

With this in mind, we are probably going to end up pushing the final release date into September. We’d rather sacrifice time over quality .

We wishfully hope that with R2′s release, we can spark some more interest into the HL2 beta.

Here are some highlights of the technical goodies we’ve included into this release:

• 16-bit Floating Point bloom.
• Various fixes to the rendering system.
• Major stability enhancements.
• Performance boosts.
• Console variables to fine tune multiple aspects of rendering.

Content-wise, we’ve polished and fixed the following maps:

• e3_c17_01, e3_c17_02
• e3_techdemo’s 1-6
• e3_start, e3_end
• e3_lab
• e3_bugbait

Other maps in the leak should still be playable (v18 and above) but their stability is not guaranteed. Our plan is to have R3 include some of the HL2 story maps.

On a final note, I’ll just leave this here:

Looking forward to comments and questions!

/ynh