Was just reading PlanetHalf-Life a second ago and got very excited!
"They Hunger' Makes History Again
If you were suspicious about the recent lack of news regarding "They Hunger: Lost Souls"... your instincts were correct. Although Black Widow Games previously agreed to provide us exclusive coverage about this project to be published back in January, they actually became completely silent last year, and only very recently did we found out the why. Now we're breaking the silence.
Since 2006, Black Widow Games has been working on porting a simplified version of their classic "They Hunger" mod trilogy to Nintendo DS. This upcoming title is based on a licensed version of VALVe Software's Goldsource engine for handheld devices. As far as we know, this is the first (and only) title under development for portable devices using this technology.
We obtained this information a few days ago, but per BWG's request, we were holding up on this information until the complete in-depth coverage "BWG: The Second Encounter" to be published next week. However, some internal footage of their prototype has been just leaked out to the general Internet, which forced us to hurry up and reveal the videos today in advance while we still have exclusivity. "Showing our hand", as it were.
Although the footage presents a considerably simplified version of the original "They Hunger" due to hardware limitations, the results so far are really amazing.
An official Press Release is expected for next Monday following this pre-feature announcement, according to Neil Manke. In the meantime, we got the chance to talk briefly with Nathan Fearon, one of the developers from BWG working on this title, and confirmed that their highly anticipated PC title "They Hunger: Lost Souls" is currently on hold. "It seems someone at Valve started working on porting the Goldsource engine to handheld devices but they didn't know what exactly to do with it, so we took the chance to continue their work", he said. "Lost Souls was a great project and we intend to reactivate its development eventually, but it's just that this new opportunity is so much better. Creating a new game is a big risk, in comparison to porting an already successful game to Nintendo DS and making it available to a much wider audience. Depending on the sales, we may continue to develop versions for other similar portable devices or get straight back to Lost Souls. It's too early to tell."
A much more detailed coverage about this title will be published in our special "BWG: The Second Encounter" to be presented late next week. Here's a little excerpt from the full interview:
Einar Saukas: "We initially tried a straightforward port based on the licensed Goldsource code, but Nintendo DS simply could not handle so much. As a matter of fact, our main challenge was not to add content for this version, but to take it out. Architecture detail and model polycount were reduced a lot, which is fortunately hard to notice in a lower resolution display. Instead of real lip-sync, there's just a random mouth movement we turn on and off. We have also simplified AI, decreased sound quality, and basically applied every possible optimization to obtain an acceptable framerate. For instance, we found out that disabling the lower display during 3D rendering helped a lot to increase performance. There's still a lot left to do, but so far a couple sections of the game are already fully playable."
Neil Manke: "The worst part for me was to break down each original They Hunger level into smaller pieces so they could fit in memory. It means some of the larger open areas had to be removed from this version, but even so most of the original mod content could be ported over successfully."
As always, our sister site, FilePlanet has got the goods!
UPDATE: PHL has tried all day to squeeze more information out of VALVe regarding other Half-Life based titles planned for the DS platform, but finding someone available (and willing) to comment (unsurprising for a Saturday) was not in the cards. So far, our only reply came from Minh "Gooseman" Le, well-known creator of Counter-Strike. When asked about plans for releasing Counter-Strike or possibly Condition Zero for Nintendo DS, he enigmatically replied, "Valve hasn't officially announced anything regarding a Goldsource engine port to Nintendo DS, therefore I can't really reveal anything about that". Yeah, that's what we thought, too. "
SAMPLE 1SAMPLE 2 (both require, fileplanet atm)
"They Hunger' Makes History Again
If you were suspicious about the recent lack of news regarding "They Hunger: Lost Souls"... your instincts were correct. Although Black Widow Games previously agreed to provide us exclusive coverage about this project to be published back in January, they actually became completely silent last year, and only very recently did we found out the why. Now we're breaking the silence.
Since 2006, Black Widow Games has been working on porting a simplified version of their classic "They Hunger" mod trilogy to Nintendo DS. This upcoming title is based on a licensed version of VALVe Software's Goldsource engine for handheld devices. As far as we know, this is the first (and only) title under development for portable devices using this technology.
We obtained this information a few days ago, but per BWG's request, we were holding up on this information until the complete in-depth coverage "BWG: The Second Encounter" to be published next week. However, some internal footage of their prototype has been just leaked out to the general Internet, which forced us to hurry up and reveal the videos today in advance while we still have exclusivity. "Showing our hand", as it were.
Although the footage presents a considerably simplified version of the original "They Hunger" due to hardware limitations, the results so far are really amazing.
An official Press Release is expected for next Monday following this pre-feature announcement, according to Neil Manke. In the meantime, we got the chance to talk briefly with Nathan Fearon, one of the developers from BWG working on this title, and confirmed that their highly anticipated PC title "They Hunger: Lost Souls" is currently on hold. "It seems someone at Valve started working on porting the Goldsource engine to handheld devices but they didn't know what exactly to do with it, so we took the chance to continue their work", he said. "Lost Souls was a great project and we intend to reactivate its development eventually, but it's just that this new opportunity is so much better. Creating a new game is a big risk, in comparison to porting an already successful game to Nintendo DS and making it available to a much wider audience. Depending on the sales, we may continue to develop versions for other similar portable devices or get straight back to Lost Souls. It's too early to tell."
A much more detailed coverage about this title will be published in our special "BWG: The Second Encounter" to be presented late next week. Here's a little excerpt from the full interview:
Einar Saukas: "We initially tried a straightforward port based on the licensed Goldsource code, but Nintendo DS simply could not handle so much. As a matter of fact, our main challenge was not to add content for this version, but to take it out. Architecture detail and model polycount were reduced a lot, which is fortunately hard to notice in a lower resolution display. Instead of real lip-sync, there's just a random mouth movement we turn on and off. We have also simplified AI, decreased sound quality, and basically applied every possible optimization to obtain an acceptable framerate. For instance, we found out that disabling the lower display during 3D rendering helped a lot to increase performance. There's still a lot left to do, but so far a couple sections of the game are already fully playable."
Neil Manke: "The worst part for me was to break down each original They Hunger level into smaller pieces so they could fit in memory. It means some of the larger open areas had to be removed from this version, but even so most of the original mod content could be ported over successfully."
As always, our sister site, FilePlanet has got the goods!
UPDATE: PHL has tried all day to squeeze more information out of VALVe regarding other Half-Life based titles planned for the DS platform, but finding someone available (and willing) to comment (unsurprising for a Saturday) was not in the cards. So far, our only reply came from Minh "Gooseman" Le, well-known creator of Counter-Strike. When asked about plans for releasing Counter-Strike or possibly Condition Zero for Nintendo DS, he enigmatically replied, "Valve hasn't officially announced anything regarding a Goldsource engine port to Nintendo DS, therefore I can't really reveal anything about that". Yeah, that's what we thought, too. "
SAMPLE 1SAMPLE 2 (both require, fileplanet atm)
