Other than the huge Team Fortress 2 Update, this week has only seen one other update, and that is to the independent game Planet Busters. The update does the following:
Fixed crash after completing Indi 3/Indi 4
Fixed difficulty on Daggers in Men’s Smiles mission
Addressed bug with UTF-8 characters in user names
Anti-aliased graphics
While this was the only Update, there have been a slew of new trailers and videos for upcoming games, and most of them are definitely worth a watch. These are as follows:
It’s probably escaped nobody’s attention that this week has finally seen the release of the Heavy Update for Team Fortress 2. With so many people at Valve working on Steam and related projects, it’s no wonder that the Steam community has got such a cracker of an update for one of it’s most popular games!
The full list of updates can be seen below the break (the initial update has also seen two additional additional patches, also listed), but the key points are described in more depth at the Heavy Update portal site.
To summarise these key points, the update includes:
An update has been released for Unreal Tournament 3. The update makes the following changes:
Fixed overlay mesh showing up on hidden sniper rifle when un-zoomed
Added motion blur menu option for PC (defaults to off)
Fixed zero extent collision bug in octree code (finding nodes in Z axis)
LOD Hysteresis / LOD Decision making bug fix
Fixed default mesh not having proper LOD settings
Fixed rare darkwalker physics crash
Added player name list to server browser
If you’re still playing this, and not Team Fortress 2 then these could be interesting*. If however you’re a Team Fortress 2 player, there is some more news for you!
Following on from yesterday’s update, the Heavy portal site has released information on the first new weapon and all of the achievements that will be available for the class.
The weapon is the K.G.B (or Killing Gloves of Boxing) which will give the Heavy “five seconds of guaranteed critical hits”. This can be used to “to punch and kill further enemies, extending the boost time” or to “switch to another weapon and use the boost to take out an enemy at range”. Either way, sounds like a lot of fun to me!
As for the achievements, no news has been released on what to do to get them, however you can see them all, as well as download the icon pack at the official portal site.
* Please note, I am aware that Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament are significantly different games, however I wanted some way to link the two items and this was the best way I could think of. Sue me
A really nice little update has been released for Audiosurf, which makes the following changes:
Audiosurf friend lists are now automatically populated with friends from Steam
Forced match collections can no longer reset the chain multiplier
Soundtrack CDs now use correct artist names instead of “various artists”
Especially pleasing about this update for me is the addition of Steam friends list importing. This is a feature that I felt was severely lacking in the first instance and am very glad it has finally been implemented!
Updates news has also been posted on the Official Team Fortress 2 Blog regarding new environments. This is quite exciting - moving away from the old ‘wild west’ look and into new places is a really interesting development, and it will be good to see how the manage to make the characters fit into a new world…
Thehighlycontroversial Eternity’s Child has been updated! Those debates I have linked to are utter nonsense when you consider the game is only $4.49 right now.
Improved controller compatibility
Allowed configuring which controller axis can be used for moving or aiming
Xbox360 controller bumpers can be used as buttons now
Birds are twice as fast, and have 35% as much health
Fixed crash when switching anti-aliasing
Fixed possible achievements issue
Changed the title page to fade out sooner for each level
Fairly substantial updates for these games are available now, the changes are as follows.
Audiosurf
Players can now easily experiment with custom game modes by combining special tags in song names. More info is available on the forums
[as-4lane] Play with 4 lanes
[as-monoonly] Mono characters required
[as-everybodymono] All characters have only 2 block colors
[as-lessgrey] Mono characters have less grey blocks
[as-allgrey] Mono characters have all grey blocks
[as-nogrey] Mono characters have no grey blocks
[as-monoptX] Base points for Mono characters (default 3)
[as-nostlth] Remove Stealth and cumulative hit bonuses
[as-swind] Sidewinder camera mode
[as-bankcam] Banking camera mode
[as-first] First-person camera mode
[as-caterp] Block caterpillars
[as-mszX] Minimimum match size (number for X)
[as-wbX] Percentage of white/black blocks
[as-mtX] Match collection ticks (default 10-25)
[as-prowsX] Puzzle row count (0-8)
[as-hidepuz] Play with an invisible puzzle grid
Fixed bug finding CD tracks in drives beyond the first
Children of the Nile
Lots of fixes for French, German, Italian, and Spanish where strings would be missing or have extra nonsense at the end of them. Cheats work again in French, German, and Italian. Some messages appearing with a “” marker in them have been taught to speak proper German
When running the game on Vista, you can now open scenario info screens without crashing, regardless of your user privileges. This will let you start a campaign or load a scenario without any of the fiddly rigamarole with properties and options you had to go through before
Fonts are now installed in-game if needed, fixing a problem where you’d lose most text and could crash if the game was updated without your machine being restarted
Steam achievements now work properly. IMPORTANT: On some machines, this will prevent you from running the game directly from the “steamapps/common/children of the nile” folder. You’ll need to start the game from the Steam client, or use the client to create a shortcut (right-click on the game in “My Games”, select “Create desktop shortcut”, and move that shortcut wherever you like)
The latest version of DirectX is automatically installed if you need it when you first run the game
Over at Steam Review they spotted an update for the Steam Player statistics. This update, which took the stats down for a brief outage last week, now allows you to see the current players, and the peak number of players for all of the games that are available of Steam.
Currently, out in the lead is a (slightly) surprising Counter-strike: Source (with over 77,000 players at it’s peak today), followed closely by the original Counter-strike (with 64,000). I was personally expecting Team Fortress 2 to be out in the lead, however that comes in 3rd place at a measly (by comparison to the other two) 15,000 players at it’s peak.
The stats are quite interesting, and definitely worth checking out if you’re interested in what’s going on behind the scenes. One thing that they certainly prove is that with a peak today of over 1.1million players, there is definitely a massive audience of people that consistently use Steam, and that support the digital download model. Looks like we’re in the right place!
