The guys at Half-Life2.net have posted a Q&A with Doug Lombardi, asking him about various Valve reated things like the Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Steam and Day of Defeat: Source. There's also a new Day of Defeat: Source screenshot.

GameSpot conducted a Q&A with Valve's Robin Walker, a designer/programmer, and dug up quite a few new details on Half-Life 2: Aftermath, the first expansion for the game. All the action takes place in City 17 with a rather cataclysmic event about to occur. Plenty of the characters return (including Dog) and Aftermath will answer some questions gamers had regarding the Half-Life universe but at the same time creating many new mysteries. Walker also hammered home the point that there are certain new abilities that will be realized that'll play a big role both in the singleplayer and the multiplayer.

GS: Half-Life 2 was a universally acclaimed game, but was there anything in the game that you wished you had more time to work on that you're setting out to fix or add to in Aftermath?

RW: The biggest regret we had about Half-Life 2 was that you didn't spend enough time with the major characters. Players spent small sections of the game with allies, and interactions with them were fairly constrained. As a result, this is the first challenge we set out to tackle in Aftermath.

As for a release date, Walker said it'd be completed in a few months and out by the end of the year. Read the entire Q&A here.

GameCloud has posted the first Distribution Revolution Q&A, asking Valve's Doug Lombardi about the digital distribution of games. Lombardi answers questions about the reason for starting Steam, releasing Half-Life 2 over the systems, plans to publish third party games over the app, and freeing developers from publishers.

The latest internal Steam news update is now available, offering an update on the Lost Coast add-on. The update mentions that the new Half-Life 2 section, which will also come with High Dynamic Range lighting, is getting closer, though nothing specific is mentioned. Here's what comes after the Lost Coast release.

Once Lost Coast is released, we will include HDR in our future product releases. For instance, Day of Defeat: Source will feature HDR lighting for all of its levels the day it is released. One of the fundamental pieces of HDR rendering lies in "dynamic tonemapping." In the Source engine, by varying the exposure of a scene based on how much light is visible, we can accurately simulate a range of brightness that is beyond what a computer monitor is physically capable of displaying. A real-world example of this effect happens every time you walk from a very dark room to an outdoor area with very bright sunlight -- your eye takes a few moments to adjust to the variance in the amount of light hitting the retina. If you have a video card that supports HDR, you'll be able to see this in the engine when Lost Coast is released.

There's also a link to a video showing a side by side comparison between regular and HDR lighting.

As noted on the Steam website, a new update for the Source Engine is now available. It fixes some issues related to Valve's anti-cheating technology, which is currently being beta tested but will apparently be active for all servers very soon.

The Steam site notes that a new Source SDK has been released through Valve's content delivery system. The new release includes alternate physics code, adds hl2mp model animations, and fixes a compiling problem related to shaders and spaces in the mod path.

The Steam website has been updated, noting that a new Half-Life 2 Deathmatch update is now available. The update offers a few bug fixes, including "Fixed explosive barrels to allow burning after respawn" and "Fixed bug in player bounding boxes while crouching".

A new Steam update is now available, re-releasing the retracted Thursday update. The update also takes care of some hang/crash issues.

A new Steam update is now available, mainly dealing with SourceTV but also fixing a problem with Steam's backup feature and improving content server selection on Windows XP SP2 systems.

Black Cat Games, the team behind the unique Alien Swarm mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 have announced Alien Swarm: Infested, the followup which will be powered by the Half-Life Source Engine. A free version will still be available, but they also plan to release a "competitively priced" commercial version featuring extra content. Thanks aaarrrgh.

Through Korean publishers GNA-Soft, some new media is now available from the upcoming Half-Life 2: Lost Coast add-on which will add high-dynamic range rendering to the Source engine. We have a few screenshots here as well as a high-res movie on FileShack. Thanks Young su.

A Steam update is waiting for you after you restart Valve's content delivery system, adding a new Half-Life 2 Deathmatch map. dm_runoff is based on the original Half-Life deathmatch map Crossfire. The Steam update also changes the default multiplayer port for the Source Engine.

The Sven Co-op page has been updated, showing some early materials from the upcoming Half-Life 2 version of the mod.

Planet Half-Life has a story about Half-Life 2: Aftermath, the Lost Coast HDR level and Half-Life 2 Xbox. From Valve's Doug Lombardi

Half-Life 2: Aftermath is due in late summer. The episode continues the adventures of Gordon Freeman, and begins immediately following the conclusion of HL2. It will be available via Steam and may appear in retail boxes as well. It is not slated to appear at E3.
Lost Coast is slated to appear in the Games for Windows areas at E3, and is scheduled for release during the summer months.
Half-Life 2 Xbox, featured on this month's issue of the Official Xbox Magazine, is slated for completion in August and will be shown in Microsoft's booth at E3.

Restarting Steam will yield you the latest Steam news update, which reveals that the next Counter-Strike: Source update will include two new maps. One is de_port, which was mentioned before, while the other is a reworked de_inferno. Valve says to expect some media from these maps "in the next week or two". The news update also includes this Half-Life 2: Aftermath teaser image.

As noted on the Steam website, the three Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Contest maps are now available. The maps will download after the usual Steam restart. Also in the Steam update is a fix where incorrect player names would show up on the scoreboard in Counter-Strike: Source.

The new maps are:
* Winner: dm_underpass by Scott M Jordan, USA
* 1st Runner Up: dm_resistance* by Jonathan Linker, Germany
* 2nd Runner Up: dm_powerhouse by Michael Schulz, Germany

*Based upon "Bodies" from Blood.

Steam users were greeted with a new update message that promised upcoming goodies to be made available soon.

Next week we'll be releasing the three HL2DM map contest winners on Steam. The winners of the contest along with some images of the maps were first mentioned here. Also next week, we'll have a small sneak peak for you of the upcoming Half-Life 2 episode "Aftermath".

They also provided a link to the results of the new survey they have been running which registered over 600,000 responses.

The latest issue of PC Gamer UK has first word on a Half-Life 2 expansion pack Aftermath, and EuroGamer has a news story up with info on what's mentioned in the magazine. Tentatively scheduled for release this summer, Aftermath deals with the events you set in motion in the original game. You'll see more of Alyx, but Valve is keeping most other details to themselves. It also looks like Aftermath might be a Steam-only release.

"We really want Alyx to grow as a character," [designer Robin Walker] insists. "There was the promise of that in the first game, but we spent so much of our time introducing her as a character, we didn't really get a chance to spend time with her for an entire section. She would flit in and out. Since she's with you quite a lot, we're working on ways to make her a lot more interesting to be around, a lot more interesting to interact with." Ahem. A burgeoning romance perhaps?

The Steam website notes a new Source SDK update is now available. The update includes a new hl2mp character model sample, optimized bandwidth usage for mods based on the hl2mp code base, and some fixes related to xwad. Restart Steam to grab the SDK update.

The latest Steam news item is up, announcing the winners of the Half-Life 2 Deathmatch contest. The maps themselves aren't available yet, but will be soon (there's a screenshot of each map though). Scott Jordan's dm_underpass was the overall winner.