Hi all,

Sorry for the huge delays, I’ve been extremely busy recently (as has the entire team) with IRL matters. But here’s a brief overview of what the team has been up to:

HUD Font support

In retail, many HUD icons use font characters as they are vectorized and don’t look “blocky” at high resolutions. After spending a couple of days playing around with the HUD code, we got it to work. This means the weapon selection HUD looks a lot better, and paves the way for a cleaner CS:S HUD, too.

Multiplayer AI

Ben has been busy getting AI to work in multiplayer, hopefully I’ll have some screenshots for this soon!

Client logos

In the leak engine, there are several exploits related to file uploads, which can result in filling up a server’s hard-drive or even uploading viruses to Windows servers (not good!). Files which clients can upload are now a lot more strict in size, type and location.

Initializing screen

If you’ve used Anon leak, you will have realised the loading screen (before the main menu) is ugly and bland, with a simple “Loading…” on a gray background. This is all performed with GDI, and with GDI it is also possible to draw bitmaps on screen, too. So we read the image data out of the VTF, convert it to a GDI bitmap, stretch it to the window size and paint. Magic!

Congratulations Pat!

Congratulations to our project leader, Pat, who is now the proud father of a baby girl, born on 4th February. During all this, Pat has had the time to build a game distribution network, which will soon be integrated into the engine (hopefully today). More information from the man himself when he has time.

Conclusion

Once again sorry for the late update, I probably won’t be able to make these as regular as I hoped– bi-monthly at the least. Stay tuned for Soda info soon. Peace out!