Afraid the mentioned announcement will be delayed slightly... everything usually begins to go wrong just before a release (in RL as well), and this release is no different. Just for one thing, my virus checker went mad and deleted a lot of my mail, which is causing some confusion. It's leaving us with very little time for news posts and such... hopefully it won't be more than another couple of days, though (The announcement, not the release).

Mostly making this news post because a lot of people have got the idea that 3.0 won't work with older, non-Steam versions of Half-Life. Don't worry... although 3.0 has been optimized for Steam, the installer version will work with non-Steam Half-Life versions. The only problem you'll get is "Out of sfx_t" crashes on certain maps, as used to occur in v2.0B. This is because Valve increased the sound limit for us in Steam, but the limit is still the same in non-Steam versions of Half-Life.

Sorry about the lack of news updates, but we thought you'd probably all prefer an earlier release to a stream of news saying "It's not ready yet".

In any case: We're about finished with v3.0! Everything is pretty-much complete, there're just a few last things we need to see to before we can release. I hope you all enjoy it once it's out... there are a ton of tiny surprises we haven't really talked about. Currently there are just under two hundred items on the changelog, not including new and updated maps, models, etc.

Hopefully we'll have an interesting announcement for you within the next two days (not the release itself, but don't worry, it shouldn't be long now).

If you've been thinking about donating, this is pretty-much your last chance if you want your bonus features in v3.0. If you have donated in the past, but have not sent me your Steam ID (different from WON ID) and received a "Steam ID added"-type confirmation E-mail back from me, please do so ASAP, or we won't be able to give you the bonuses in Steam/newer versions of Half-Life. Information HERE.

Everyone, thanks for your patience! We hope you'll find that it's been worth the wait.

Update: A couple of people have just E-mailed me asking if the Steam compatibility issues we mentioned a while back have been solved. Don't worry, the problems have been found and corrected.