After slaving away for over a year, the fine folks at Polycount have unveiled their new community site for video game artwork. Given that a year is roughly the time it takes for us to post a blog update, you can imagine our immediate and deeply-held suspicion that they probably used magic. Possibly black magic. I won’t bore you with the details, but long story short, we immediately raced to their office, armed with holy water and fire, to confront them. Several police officers informed us that we were mistaken, and then made us apologize to the wizards, and then made us stop calling them wizards.
At any rate, to help celebrate, we’ve teamed up with them to run The Polycount Pack contest. Whether you’re a modeler who’s submitted work to the Contribute page already, or a beginner looking for a great community to give you useful feedback, this contest is the thing you’re looking for.
And guess what: If you’re not a modeler, you’re even luckier. Why? You don’t have to do anything at all, and you’ll still be getting free content from suckers your fellow players.
Remember, if you see someone carrying one of these “self-made” items, make sure you thank them for their work! (But then, of course, shoot them.)
Updates to AI Wars have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The major changes include:
Major new Border Aggression behavior for the AI.
Four new Heavy Beam Cannons (Mark I
IV).
Performance improvements for the largest battles, game loading, and more.
Focus fire control node options added, along with other various new control nodes.
Many various improvements to ship autofire targeting in general.
Many significantly rebalanced units, including MLRS, Anti
Armor, Transports, Sentinel Frigates, Scout Starships, all melee ships, mines, all Golems. Many of these units are like all
new (and much more useful) ships.
ClearType text is now used, resulting in vastly more attractive fonts.
New AI modifiers for optional less
Tower
Defense
inspired gameplay for advanced players: No Wave Warnings, Cross Planet Waves
New AI Plots feature for more exciting endgames: the first one, Avenger, is now available and more will come in the coming months.
New lobby options for starting with a largely invisible galaxy which is only revealed as exploration is undertaken (normally you can see all the planets and their connections, just not any details whatsoever about the planets).
Other balance tweaks, interface tweaks, and bugfixes.
Since we launched Steam for the Mac a little over a week ago, one of the biggest complaints we have gotten is that we put game content into a “Steam Content” subfolder in the Documents folder. This interferes with how many of our users backup their files, who want to be able to back up their entire Documents folder with Time Machine, Dropbox, or some other software, but who do not want to back up all of their game content. Additionally, many users simply don’t like seeing files they don’t directly interact with in such a visible location.
So we thought we’d take a moment to tell you why we decided on the Documents folder in the first place, and what we plan to do about it.
Our original inclination was to put game content under “~/Library/Application Support/Steam”, along with the other support files Steam uses. The problem is that uninstalling an application is meant to be as simple as dragging it from the Applications folder into the Trash. However, uninstalling Steam this way will leave all of your game content on the drive, which could easily be quite a few gigabytes of wasted space. Our solution was to put the content in a very visible and often used location so users could easily find and delete the game data if they didn’t want it anymore. That’s right, we chose the Documents folder specifically because it was visible and often used — the very reasons users don’t want it there.
We’ve taken your emails and forum posts to heart, and we’ve come up with a different solution for users who uninstall Steam. We are working adding a feature to Steam to detect when you drag it to the Trash, and ask you if you want to delete your game content files as well. This will allow us to put your game content in an non-intrusive location. In an ideal world we would let you choose where the game content files are located, and in the long term that is a goal of ours, but due to architectural issues with our engine this is not as trivial as it may sound.
APB All Points Bulletin is now available on Steam for Pre-Purchase. Will you choose to play as a criminal or an enforcer? Join this living, breathing Pacific Rim city with streets full of vehicles and thousands of civilians. Your mission: gain fame and fortune, fast.
Pre-Purchase now to receive the following special items:
Key to the City: June 10-19: Includes 5 Hours of district gameplay and unlimited social gameplay
3 Days Early Game Access: Includes 10 Hours of district gameplay and unlimited social gameplay.
Week 5 of the in game blog: Return of the Gnome and Realism Versus and Pick Your Favorite Infected.
Encore Week
Last Gnome On Earth
Protect the gnome at all cost.
Do you crave attention? Want all the Infected to swarm you and the gnome you are carrying? Then we have the game mode for you. The team needs to carry the garden gnome from start to finish in any campaign. The Infected hate the gnome and will swarm whoever is carrying him. Watch out putting him on the ground, a boomer explosion will send him flying!
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP PUTTING HIM DOWN HE IS THE LAST GNOME ON EARTH!!!
This Mutation is available in Campaign Mode.
Return of the Gnome
Last week was the first of a regular poll we will be running. After every four Mutations, we will have a vote to bring one back for an encore week. Last week The Last Gnome on Earth won handily, followed by Bleed Out and Follow the Liter.
Thanks to voting on a previous poll, Realism Versus has graduated from a Mutation to a permanent Game Mode. On the Xbox 360, owners of “The Passing” just need to connect to the Internet for this update, no Live update is needed.
Favorite Infected
This week’s poll question is simple. Which Special Infected is your favorite?
We will continue the Play with Devs games this weekend. Look for us all this weekend using these Steam names – L4D2_DEV_1, L4D2_DEV_2, L4D2_DEV_3, L4D2_DEV_4, L4D2_DEV_5. And on the Xbox 360 these gamer tags – L4D2 DEV 1, L4D2 DEV 2, L4D2 DEV 3, L4D2 DEV 4, L4D2 DEV 5. Let’s get some games of Realism Versus going! Next Week’s Mutation: Last Man On Earth
You can now enjoy the complete medieval experience in The Stronghold Collection, featuring five real-time strategy games. This fantastic package comes to Steam from 2K Games and FireFly Studios and includes Stronghold, Stronghold 2, Stronghold Crusader, Stronghold Crusader Extreme and Stronghold Legends. SourceContinue reading New Release – The Stronghold Collection→
Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands™, the next chapter in the fan-favorite Sands of Time universe, is now available for pre-purchase via Steam. 
