As I promised last week here is Snow-War 2.1 - The Final Snow-War. As this is a bug-fix only release I'm going to skip the new features list here and head over to the final version stuff. This is really the last Snow-War release we'll ever make, so here are the memos on Snow-War written by the root staff members.
Teemu Polvi/Zilppuri (team leader and coder before version 1.0):
Snow-War was definately very interesting period of my life.
SW website was released 30.12.2000 in Planethalflife.com/snowwar and 18.12.2004 we made our 2.0 release. After that we more or less "signed out". But Scott continued to do some changes on the code that never got released, and thus Eddi decided we should make this 2.1 release.
I have moved to different projects long time ago and started my studies in University. I'm planning to start new game project within year or two. All I can say about it, is that it wont be your everyday-average-shooter.
It really was blast to do Snow-War during all these years. Ofcourse it wasn't always easy, but still it was worth doing. I made many frienships while doing it that will definately last a life time.
Cya soon,
Teemu P. aka Zilppuri
Scott Miskovish/Scott51 (coder):
I am the only current member of the team that is not European (I’m in the US), and easily the oldest member of the team (almost 40 now).
I remember it was late in 2001 that I found Snow-War. I had previously worked on Rho-Bot, the old Half-Life Deathmatch bot, and had done some work with the developers of Oz Deathmatch, but I was looking for a mod that I could share with my nephews. I contacted Teemu (Zilp), since he was looking for a programmer. And that began my involvement in the project.
I enjoyed working on Snow-War, with the exception of my computer crash at the release of 2.0 beta, when I lost all of the client-side code. But it gave me and the team a chance to update the client-side, and to put in the snow-fall and some other features. The features that I am most satisfied are the snow fall and bots, with their automated waypoint mapping (although it does not completely work on all maps – never could figure that out).
Unfortunately, I have been slowly distancing myself from the development of the game, mostly due to the fact that my first daughter was born in 2003, and my second was born in late-2005. The release of Half-Life 2 was a big change, since it would not run on my home computer at that time, and I wasn’t about to buy a new one just for a game (since then, I was able to get an old work computer, and play around with HL2 on it, but I never had the time to figure out the new SDK). Also, I have been enjoying my new car, a Caterham Seven (http://www.caterham.co.uk/), and have been quite busy with my day job as an engineer.
It has been a pleasure to work with Teemu, Eddi, and MrH2O on Snow-War. I don’t get in touch with them as often as I would like (differences in timezones + kids makes it difficult), and I do miss working with them. I don’t know if I will be doing any more mods or game programming after Snow-War. Free time is harder to come by these days, and I don’t know if I can find a team like this one again. Maybe when autumn rolls around, I might be in a programming mood again.
I would like to thank the forum regulars, especially [LADT]Weasel, who was great at keeping Snow-War going on his server. Finally, I would like to thank the players. You made Snow-War a success.
Take care, all!
Scott
Jan Hartung/eddi (mapper, beta-tester):
On October 21st 2001 exactly at 10:03pm I downloaded the then-current version 0.95 beta of Snow-War. Somehow I thought this was a really cool mod and since I knew that the team could use some new members I decided to send an e-Mail to Teemu offering some map, texture and sound work. Since then I’m a member of the Snow-War team and I’m proud to be able to say that I’m part of the “root-team”. During the past four and a half years I never got tired of working on Snow-War but with the release of Half-Life 2 back in 2004 interest in Half-Life 1 modifications vanished slowly, so I decided to put an end to Snow-War and this is why you read these words from the team members here.
Snow-War never was one of the big mods everyone knew, but we managed to constantly get more players playing our mod and Snow-War was at least two times shown on a German TV-show named “Giga Games” so we can state that Snow-War is a small but successful mod. It even helped me getting an apprenticeship as a software developer along with my very own program, the ZHLT Compile GUI. Working with the Snow-War team has always been fun and we never had any problems when it came to deciding about new features – you’ll want such a team later on the job when it’s time to earn money. I still could tell you some more stories about Snow-War and the work on it and while I’m writing these lines the installer script for the final version – Snow-War 2.1 - is still opened in the editor - just another thing that reminds you that it’s never easy to put such a project to an end.
Last but not least I want to thank YOU, our players, for playing and your support (on the forums when they existed) through the past years. One never knows – maybe we’ll return with something new in the future.
Take care,
Jan (eddi)
Martin Blomkvist/MrH2o (2d-art, beta-tester):
I don’t have such sharp memory as Eddi does but I rember the first time I played Snow-War. Back then the gibs were flying and it was just one map to run around in.
This couple of years have had it’s ups’s and down’s. Down’s have for example been when one of our coder went missing, Zilp went to army and having to push the release dates. Up’s on the other side was when we got good response from the community, got Snow-War on television, Cliffe said he liked Snow-War and when Teemu showed all the new eye candy that was gonna be in the next version.
So what have Snow-War meant to me? Well first of all I’ve got some really good friends, but I’ve also got more knowledge and some really late and funny evenings infront the screen.
Snow-War never been the mod you played for hours and hours, instead it’s been a mod you played when you wanted a fun time and a change from all releastic and bloody games.
Finnally I would like to thank everyone thats made this possible, You (the players) offcourse, Valve for making the best game ever, but also guys who had supported us with servers, domain names, maps and everything else that I can’t mention here beacuse of the space limit :). I would also like to thank Teemu, Eddi and Scott for letting me be a part of this great team.
Thank you
/MrH2o
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