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More LagMatch Goodness

by: Chuck -
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Valve has delivered a nice little present for those of you with Half-Life 2 via Steam today. It's a new Half-Life 2 DeathMatch map and two new weapons. The stun stick that the combine soldiers smacked you around with in the first game and the SLAM which is a nice plantable trip mine. You can throw them into areas and trigger them with a trigger or attach them to walls and use them as tripwires. Tweaks were also made to the SDK and some other pieces of the game.

The net code hasn't been touched so playing HL2DM online is still laggy as it ever was but the game is hella-fun for LAN parties.
Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Source SDK, and Source Engine updates are available and will be applied automatically when Steam is restarted. The changes include:

Half-Life 2: Deathmatch

* Added SLAM, Stunstick and Crowbar
* Added dm_steamlab
* Fixed game_score entity not awarding points
* Added team specific spawn points ( info_player_combine, info_player_rebel)
* Optimized weapon firing effects bandwidth usage


Source SDK

* Added source code for Half-Life 2 multiplayer (Run the 'Create a Mod' link)
* Added ability to create new shaders. See Authoring Shaders In Source for documentation
* Added new tool and source code of DemoTool.exe -- which shows the high-level structure of .dem files
* Added source code for Source Model Viewer included (src\utils\hlmviewer)
* Added source for Half-Life 2's Airboat model
* Fixed issues with Steam account names with ".."
* Fixed FacePoser flex sliders
* Hammer limits framerate in 3D views to 300fps -- eliminates overheating problems


Source Engine

* Fixed screenshots/save games being saved in the wrong place
* Fixed hang in rcon server
* Fixed server crash where banned players could retry/cancel quickly during connection
* Fixed crash when a user specifies a heapsize that is too large
* Fixed "play" command crashing on dedicated servers
* Fixed bspzip'd assets in maps not loading properly
* Added FCVAR_CHEAT to r_shadowids
* HLTV port/server can be completely disabled by command line parameter "-nohltv"