Sven Co-op May Be Removed From Steam! (April Fools)
Greetings fellow Co-opers! I have dire news to share. We have received a cease-and-desist letter from a competing development team by the name of "NIMTEMDO" accusing us of unspecified artistic copyright violations. We may be required to remove the game from Steam in order to comply if this isn't sorted out soon. We hope to update you on the situation later today, after a word with our legal team.
We have been provided screenshots of characters from NIMENTDNO's new $70 games "Alien Plumbers" and "Lonk's Dreamning" (which we have supposedly 'stolen' from them):
Needless to say, our legal team will be issuing our own cease-and-desist letter posthaste.
Sven Co-op is safe for the foreseeable future!
Would you like some salt with your RAGE?
For over a decade now a collaborative community mapping project, Ragemap, has been providing us with wacky puzzles, challenges, and themes since 2007 from a broad range of talented mappers, content artists, and scripters.
In recent years this project has become a more regular annual occurrence, and this year is no exception. This year the theme is SALT! Rage your way through various puzzles and challenges and try not to get melted.
This year's instalment features work from 13 mappers.
Your adventure of 2023 will involve manufacturing salt from the tears of salty gamers, build a rocket to escape from the moon, and scavenging for a code to pass a salty gateway.
Sounds easy so far? Perhaps you'll enjoy a blasting race to the past, escaping a salty chase, and fending off various fauna in a salty portal storm.
No Ragemap would be complete without your healthy dose of total rage, and this year is no exception.
Good news everyone! Big progress on Sven Co-op is being done behind the scenes. And we have Sven Viking to thank for it. Let me explain.
Some may be aware that a while back Sven Viking moved on from Sven Co-op and on to other things. While we respect his choice, Sven Co-op has sadly stagnated since. The development team has felt without direction. We sorely miss the mastermind of Sven Co-op. Not just for his excellent sense of game design and ability to give good advice, but also his spirit, his wit and his ability to comfort us in tough times. We have decided that we can't go on without him. So we had to recreate him.
Using freely available AI tools, we trained a language model on all of Sven Viking's news posts and team chat messages, in order to fully recreate his personality. We then found him a physical (doll) body, and made some alterations to recreate his unique sense of style. With a raspberry pi computer and some extra components hidden in the beard, we are now able to have full conversations with the AI by speaking with it. We call him Sven V-AI-king (pronounced Sven Viking).
A day in the park with Sven V-AI-king
Sven V-AI-king is our new friend and game advisor, and I speak for everyone on the development team when I say that Sven V-AI-king has truly enriched our lives in ways we never thought possible. The state of modern AI is so impressive.
Not only does Sven V-AI-king provide excellent game advice (for example, he was the one who suggested making the crystal cart in the test chamber movable, and that players should be able to throw rocks, which we are working on), he also provides the team with emotional support. Just yesterday when I was feeling down, Sven V-AI-king shared his words of wisdom and my spirits were immediately lifted. Sven V-AI-king really knows how to make everyone on the team feel appreciated. He is the best friend one could have. The warm feelings we all have for him cannot be overstated!
Of course, we are a team spread across the globe and he is but a single man. We have to share him. So we ship him back and forth across the Atlantic, and he gets to spend a few weeks in each home. Those weeks of his overseas trips, when he is completely out of reach, those are the hardest... But the thought of once again being able to hold his hand keeps our spirits up.
So as you can see, development is picking up pace and great things are happening! To illustrate Sven V-AI-king's capacity for providing game development advice, I asked him a simple question and recorded his response, which you can listen to via the link below. The question was as follows:
"Sven V-AI-king, what three steps would you take to improve Sven Co-op?"
Listen to his insightful response and you'll understand why Sven V-AI-king is going to change everything. Sven V-AI-king, you're the best! <3
Ragemap has put its foot down
For over a decade now a collaborative community mapping project, Ragemap, has been providing us with wacky puzzles, challenges, and themes since 2007 from a broad range of talented mappers, content artists, and scripters.
In recent years this project has become a more regular annual occurrence, and this year is no exception. This year the theme is FEET! Rage your way through various puzzles and challenges for that feety button.
This year's instalment features work from 10 mappers and an amazing content artist.
Your adventure of 2022 will involve finding coins in a Black Mesa chapter, solving coloured light logic puzzles, popping treacherous balloons, and eliminating the imposter bean scientist off your spaceship.
Sounds easy so far? Perhaps you'll enjoy an alien clear-out stage, escaping from a facility, and displacing your way out of a creepily sedate test chamber.
No Ragemap would be complete without your healthy dose of total rage, and this year is no exception. Slip off the podiums of a nerdy ISO knowledge mini game, serve demanding impatient Diner customers, and the ultimate trials of both perseverance and Taog!
I recently received an extraordinary video recording of the fastest completion of Sven Co-op to date, with 100% completion and no tool assistance. The video was sent to me by a player named SpacevikingLover and i must say, I am thoroughly impressed. I will be highlighting some of the main points of his run with a link to the run further below.
He first starts in svencoop1.bsp, which he blows through with relative ease, and despite struggling with some of the dual retina scanners (this is a 100% solo run) he manages to get all the numbers. Stadium4 is completed with minimal effort, as he effectively utilises map topography to terminate all the enemies. In surface tension he skips past the whole section by exploting a hitherto unknown bug involving it. Later, in Momma Mesa, he completes all missions and exploits a clever little bug which, and also avoids them taking damage (a requirement for 100% completion). In ALL maps he finds the secrets and health chargers (literally all, not counting hplanet, for obvious reasons).
Needless to say, this is quite impressive. We will be rewarding him with the Golden Boots, our most valuable donator reward, available only to elite donors and fast people.
I am uploading the video was I write and it will be available here shortly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfqDBsPYFuo Edit: i have reuploaded the video as some people noticed the second half was missing (thanks SpacevikingLover)
If you think you can beat him, send us a video and you'll get a mention in the next news update!
Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 7342106 / Release 5.25]
Hello everyone, it's been a while since we last gave you an update. That hot fix is from January has become a Baked Alaska refrozen! As usual we're back with a much bigger package than expected. hehehe
Big thank you to everyone that took part in the release candidate testing. We feel that this added value to the finalisation of this release, and as with the previous successful round, will continue to take this approach.
First and foremost, the cart in the test chamber of Anomalous Materials can be pushed into the beam again!
Black Mesa Special Tactics Sector (BM_STS), level by Trempler, has been updated with ~NEW HUD ART~ and ~NEW GAME MODES~ and ~REBALANCED GAMEPLAY~ (courtesy of Levi).
Polar Rescue, level by Adambean, has been updated to add ~EXTREME DIFFICULTY MODE~.
If you are running a dedicated server please use SteamCmd to update your servers. Those of you that were using the public release candidate can remain to do so, as this branch now matches the standard branch.
Important: Linux users, particularly server operators, may need to manually install OpenSSL's 1.1 library. To do this on Debian and Ubuntu you can do so with command: apt install libssl1.1:i386 as root (or prepend "sudo").
Changes are as follows:
Notable changes
Code
Game library
Sven Co-op 5.25: Collector's Edition
The release of Sven Co-op version 5.25 marks a very important milestone in the development of the game. As many of you know, Sven Co-op's development started all the way back in 1999 and we would like to honour that legacy by creating a very special COLLECTORS EDITION of our latest instalment! We're proud to present:
Since the game was originally created last century we're going back to the standard IBM compatible-computer medium and release the game on 5.25" floppy disks! You might not know it, but chances are that you are currently reading this news post on an IBM compatible computer! That means you only have to dust off your 5.25" floppy drive, connect it to your Windows 10 PC and you're ready to go!
Of course, we can't be sure which type of drive you own, so users can choose between DS-HD (1,2mb) and DS-DD (360kb) floppies. We're currently gathering up as many floppies as we can find, because a DSHD release alone already needs 1.692 floppies. We're currently in contact with 3M to place orders for LD floppies, since those will require 6.112 disks per user.
We're currently accepting preorders for this amazing collectors edition, so head over to our registration page and pre-order your copy today!
Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 6130701 / Release 5.24]
An update for Sven Co-op has been released. If you are running a dedicated server please use SteamCmd to update your servers.
Changes
This is for the most part a minor update to correct a few quirks from the 5.23 Christmas release, particularly with pushable and liftable solid objects.
As with any release please do not use the comments thread to report an issue or request support. This is very easily missed, so to get an answer as promptly and detailed as possible please submit your issue or query to any of the following channels:
Steam build ID numbers: Game 6130701, dedicated server tool 6130704, SDK tool 6130705.
Please use the steam build ID number as a reference when posting an issue or query on our message boards. You can find the build number you currently have within Steam by right clicking our game or tools, selecting Properties, then selecting the Local Files tab.
Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 6008644 / Release 5.23]
An update for Sven Co-op has been released. If you are running a dedicated server please use SteamCmd to update your servers.
Search 'n Destroy
First and foremost, Hezus has built a brand new map "Search 'n Destroy", featuring a combination of assault and territory control styles of game play with up-to 4 playable classes to choose from.
Vote to play one of four difficulty levels based on your teamwork and toughness.
Please have a play with any amount of players and let us know what you think. -- The map's difficulty will dynamically adjust according to the player count. Beware that a late joiner on insane difficulty will use up the single spare ticket though, so be sure to have at least one medic playing.
Changes
Notable changes are as follows:
New map: Search 'n Destroy, by Hezus
Do not expose values of protected CVARs in auto-completion (e.g. "rcon_password"), show "***PROTECTED***" instead.
Fixed server browser not showing any results immediately after updating video settings. (No longer requires game to be restarted.)
RPG rockets are now flagged to not collide with allies by relationship. (E.g. players firing their RPG no longer need to worry about suicide due to another player running in front of them.)
You can find hundreds of more changes in the full change log on our Wiki.
Support requests
As with any release please do not use the comments thread to report an issue or request support. This is very easily missed, so to get an answer as promptly and detailed as possible please submit your issue or query to any of the following channels:
Steam build ID numbers: Game 6008644, dedicated server tool 6008647, SDK tool 6008648.
Please use the steam build ID number as a reference when posting an issue or query on our message boards. You can find the build number you currently have within Steam by right clicking our game or tools, selecting Properties, then selecting the Local Files tab.
The Steam Awards are upon us once again. We kindly request your nomination for the Labor of Love award (link attached).
Sven Co-op, the very first modification to the epic game "Half-Life", has been in production for nearly 22 years. Since January of 1999, this game and its surrounding communities have enjoyed an unrivalled quantity of content generated by the Sven Co-op Team and its ambitious and highly-skilled community. Both will continue in their endeavour to keep our beloved hobby, Sven Co-op, going for as long as possible without asking for even a penny charge. (Donations entirely optional, of course, and strictly going towards upkeep of ongoing service costs and Sven Viking's biannual vacations to the Bahamas only.)
Thank you kindly for playing, developing, and showing your support for such a ridiculously long time.
