hey, welcome and yeah, you are playing a public alpha. thus it has a load of bugs ;-). you might get by the fact that i had to make the alpha public to get it actually playtested, that we are in some kind of trouble. the popularity of HL1 mods is on a downward spiral for years now and rival species remained a rather small mod inside the hl1 community. since some months, ive been loosing the support of our testers and well, this is the result.

if you want to help us out, try to be descriptive about the bugs you find and try to read the comments on the release news, for they contain descriptions of already found bugs. however, itll take a while till you will find someone else to test with. i think there are about 3 people testing this game from time to time, especially after the release of a new alpha patch.

ooookay, let my clarify a few things:
- i switched the server from platform to canyon in the hope to bring you a tau vs IG map.
- the curertnly released version of canyon does however bring you IW vs BT (thats the old setup).
- obviously, your clients didnt recognize the shutdown and startup and messed up.
- if such occurrs, please quit hl1 alltogether and restart the game.
- because anything that happens after a client messes up looks like a whole LOAD of bugs but it isnt.
- its really just that the client messed up at some point and what we need to do is avoid exactly that.

that depends on their authors. i still plan to write a newsletter about the public alpha. however, with the bugs we already find, i wont do that until theyre eliminated. i hope that with the newsletter, we will approach some of the old mappers and start them to convert the best of their maps. i think i will myself try and convert my own maps.

however, converting will not be automated, because it doesnt make much sense to convert the old maps as they are. that wouldnt make use of the best source features and it would play just the same as the old game. you could play the old game instead and this work would be useless.

big maps, proper player in vehicle transportation, real trees (for platform for example) and generally better environment seems like the big advantage of HL2 to me. all the fancy model stuff is just a burdon to me in a  multiplayergame. you just dont really care for this during the game. (however, RS2 will try out if using the fancy model stuff can work to an advantage. basically im not sure what is true, but RS1.5 will try the other way. as well RS2 will have quite the different feel and gameplay from what i get.)

zenarion didnt send me any yet, but i do get some lines from him about the progress on the shield :-). oh wait, yeah there was a render of an nskinned first versio  of the arm clips that hold the shield. but i aint got the link no more.

well, i was discusing its visual efect with other ppl. its asically done, what it takes is doing these effects. thats also most of the coding work, that is left on RSS in general. the interation of the metaengine will make the coding easy, but the metaengine doesnt encode the effects.

heh, thanx for the report! could you explain the melee bug a bit more? i dont remember the old demonsword bug.
pressing n or m to get loads points is just a leftover developement command. (not really a bug)
the wraiths are supposed to fly. ill see what is about their energy not draining.

oh, i do remember your name :-). youre welcome ^^. feel free to enlist on the thread for alpha tester registration for the Source alpha.