Petar on the other hand has been busy working on a very robust mod utility for GRID and Dirt 2. If you’d like to know more about that, please comment on this post.

An official pre-compiled 0AD build has been released: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/LatestRelease If you don’t know what 0AD is, it’s a strategy game being developed voluntarily and for no profit – in other words – free to you. It’s a project that’s been worked on for more years than I can remember; certainly pre-dates LFS’s launch, and possibly Age of Mythology’s release. If I remember correctly, it was started by former senior designers of Tsunami Studios or SCNPunk. Those two teams were the best back in the Age of Kings days and were huge inspirations for Liquid Fire Studios.

Another indie game that was started during the same era and by people with similar backgrounds is Dawn of Fantasy http://dawnoffantasy.com/, and it’s just gone into closed beta. This game is much further along than 0AD due to the promise of paid work once the game is released. To be honest, I’m not sure if the game will ever see a commercial release. From what I know, the manager has been pitching the game to publishers for years without much success. I do hope the best for the project of course. I myself worked there for a month in 2006, but quickly realised the great probability of no end game.

Starcraft 2 is soon to be released next week. I’m gonna wait till I have more free time before buying it, because I will no doubt get completely hooked!

Last thing I want to say – if you’re interested in site/graphic design or 2D/3D animation, check out my site: http://sebcastilho.com/ I am currently studying Animation in university.

Legends of Middle Earth is being playtested. The guys want the release to be perfecto

I have to say there’s not much else going on here. We won’t be starting any projects for Age of Mythology or Age of Empires 3, and that means we won’t be recruiting. Nodgene does happen to be making an AOE3 multiplayer scenario though, so I’ll keep you updated about that.

I am doing an animation degree (ba) course at the moment, which keeps me 100% busy. Who knows though, I may get a band of people together to do projects for Starcraft 2 or some Unreal Engine 3 game. Actually if you didn’t know, the engine is being offered for free to non-commercial developers, and at a small cost if you go commercial.

The forums will remain indefinitely closed until the studio becomes active again. Oh and the studio will always be around. We’ve been around too long and achieved too much to simply drop out completely. I kind of miss the old days when we were competing with Ambition Designs to get the best projects out Shout out to Shrink and Archaeopteryx.

Last thing – A couple of people have been asking about troubles with getting some of our projects to work (eg. Incident 39, Age of Star Wars, Legends of the Third Age). I’m just going to put it straight – I personally can’t help you with that. There’s too many different factors, but I will say that if it doesn’t work then it’s usually because you have other mods installed.

As always, we appreciate that you appreciate our work and we’ll appreciate any appreciation shown through star ratings or comments

Till next time –

And we’ll travel there by the official LFS taxi!

Merry Christmas everybody

(Yes I saw this street and taxi coincidentally and quickly took my phone out to take a shot)

“Lars and I have finally had some free time, so we want to launch The Two Towers – and I am still planning to do ROTK and the Hobbit.
What we need now is some Beta game testers.

To test the game you will need to have the latest version of Legends of Middle Earth, which is available HERE, username = lomefiles, password = guardian. The release is about 120MB, with updates a lot smaller (and hopefully the 3.10 patch is the last!

By this weekend, the beta release of the scenarios will be available, and we want a bunch of people to playtest it.

If you are interested please email me at stephencaines@impulse.net.au and I will send you the additional login details for the scenario folder.

What we want from you is constructive feedback on bugs and playability. The campaign comprises 15 scenarios, and you will probably need to commit 30-40 hours to the task.

Look forward to hearing from volunteers!

Stephen and Lars”

So grab the files and make sure to give us feedback! This is a serious request. Email stephencaines@impulse.net.au and give him feedback.

But this isn’t the only one of our projects that has garnered massive public attention.

Birthright and Heroes Chronicles by Guardian_112 are in the top 20 most downloaded singleplayer scenarios. Project “Extremely Happy” and Tactical by Nodgene are in the top 100 most downloaded multiplayer scenarios. Petar Tasev’s Tasev Mod Manager is closing in to the top 100 most downloaded utility. Finally, let’s not forget Legends of the Third Age: Fellowship of the Ring coming in at 3rd most downloaded ever file on AoMH.

Overall our projects have been downloaded by an estimated 30 – 40 thousand people across the world.

And the best thing about all this? We all genuinely had a lot of fun making and playtesting these projects together as a team. I think each of our members involved in the projects will have lasting memories of the good times

Thanks to Petar for making this list.

As of 14th November 2009:

AoSW – 68th in Mod Catagory
LTA: FoTR – 3rd out of all AoMH files
Project: “Clear Fountain” – 281st in MPScen Catagory
Project: “Extremely Happy” – 76th in MPScen Catagory
Heroes Chronicles v1.1 – 20th in SPScen Catagory
Tactical – 92nd in MPScen Catagory
Birthright The Adventure v1.2 – 16th in SPScen Catagory
TMM – 103rd in Utility Catagory

Here are my entries to the last tournament.

Theme: Determination

Theme: Elementalist

Theme: Druid

I was knocked out in the semi finals by Nightfever

Since then, I’ve been working on content, and now it’s finally done! Please take a look around the site. I’ve even added some nice javascript effects, including sliding content on the project and team pages, and also fading feature images on the home page. The about us page now has a text on the history of our team; it is a wall of text but may be of interest to some.

On the forum front, I produced a custom theme which makes that particular page stretch to 94% of your browser’s width. I still need to style it properly and replace the icons, but I would like some more feedback on how to go about this before I begin.

As I said, this site uses WordPress, which means I can assign users to be able to make news posts and edit site content. Guests can also comment on news and pages just by filling their name and email address once. Any bot spam will be filtered by a plugin, which has already caught 28 spam posts (100%).

For anyone interested, here’s a list of all the plugins we use (as of writing this post):

• Askimet
• Breadcrumb Titles For Pages
• Header and Footer
• Head Meta
• Highslide4WP
• Peter’s Post Notes
• Simple:Press Forum
• WordPress Download Monitor
• Yoast Breadcrumbs

To make the site I used:

• Photoshop
• Notepad++
• SmartFTP
• Firefox addons: Firebug, YSlow, Web Developer Toolbar

I’ve tested the site with Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 6, 8 (plus its compatibility mode), Opera 9.5 and 10, Windows Safari 4 and Google Chrome 3. The site is coded to be XHTML 1.0 Strict, although I can’t guarantee that all pages will validate.

Thanks to Papaya, Urgwaine, Petar and Mephiles for feedback on the site.

The project will be officially released very soon. You can find some more information about it here: http://liquidfirestudios.com/projects/legends-of-middle-earth/

Update: Possible release by December

For more information, visit the project page.

Download it here: http://aom.heavengames.com/downloads/showfile.php?fileid=8986