A new dawn has come on Steam, with four Half-life 2 mods being given access to the Steamworks SDK. The scoop comes from Steam Review who quote the Synergy Mod’s site (a co-op mod for HL2) as saying that they:
will be releasing Synergy and future updates through Steam! Valve Software has allowed us to do so by giving us access to the Steamworks SDK.
We are honored to be one of the four first selected mods to be given this opportunity. We will certainly put this to good use!
For you players, this means that you will see Achievements and Stats coming to Synergy in later updates. (Not to mention the automatic updates, provided by Steam.)
This really is great news for Steam users. While initially we are only getting 4 of the numerous mod’s out there, there are a number of benefits to this system. There is now much more incentive for modders, since they will be able to distribute their mods far more quickly, easily and to a greater number of people. On top of this, it means that us players will get more mods and that means more gameplay time, for free!
Just to add a little dampener, this doesn’t necessarily mean that these mods will be appearning in the Steam store, however I think it isn’t an unreasonable jump. Still, automatic updates of mods, achievements and stats from these differing types of game is a definite bonus! I for one look forward to seeing many more mods coming to light over the next few months! 
Valve have been busy.
Portal and Half-Life 2: Episode 2
- Added
a new advanced video option that allows the user to easily change the
field of view to any value they wish between 75 degrees and 90 degrees
- Updated
the particle rendering code and particle data files to make them
compatible with the particle editor included in the Source SDK
Team Fortress 2
- Changed video options initialization to fix some HUD resolution problems in mods
- Fixed crash issuing the last disguise command when not connected to a server
- Fixed rare crash on exit
- Fixed a couple of issues with gamestats reporting incorrect values
- Fixed an exploit that allowed clients to crash servers
Steam Client
- Fixed input coordinates being off for the overlay in full screen OpenGL games on the secondary monitor
- Fixed possible game overlay crash
- Fixed incorrect reporting of app metadata
Huge news coming out of Valve in the wake of a press event held on Thursday. A feature many of us dreamed about but never thought would happen is coming, Steam Cloud will allow saved progress, game settings and other user data to be stored “in the cloud” so that game progress can be resumed on any PC.
I have multiple PCs at multiple locations and have always found it hard to continue playing through the same game on all systems because save game management is a nightmare. This addition to Steamworks completely solves it by uploading user data to Valve and then downloading that same data when you connect on another system.
The added benefit of this is of course that you won’t need to worry about backing up save data either. I’m sure many of us have been in the situation where upon formatting a PC’s hard drive and reinstalling Windows the realisation sets in that those saves were not backed up.
The feature will be rolled out to existing Valve titles such as Half-Life and Half-Life 2 soon. Titles such as Counter-Strike will have the feature added at a later date and the upcoming Left 4 Dead will ship with it from day one.
[via Next-Gen]
There are a couple of new releases on Steam today for those who haven’t yet got around to playing halflife in its other incarnations:
If you havent played Half-life you really don’t know what you’re missing, so now is a great time to jump on the bandwagon, with these sets saving you up to $25 (~£13) on the price to buy them separately.
Following on form John’s post yesterday, I thought it was worth a mention of Crossover Games by Codeweavers. If you’re a Mac user and have a burning desire to play your favorite Steam games on your alternative platform, there is now a way!
Bit-tech have a great review of the software which is a customised Wine build designed to play Windows games on your Mac. It ‘officially’ supports both Half-life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and will also play a vast array of other games.
While it’s not quite perfect, and it’s not the official solution that we all hope Valve will produce at some point in the future, this is definately your best best so far if you’re looking to get these games up and running on your Mac right now.
