I have updated the Community Spotlight with the new map Affinity by Insta. This map is both gorgeous and is a blast to play, so be sure you download it right now!

Our email problems should have come and passed by now, so if you are still having problems getting notices from the site please post here and let me know. I can't fix things if I'm not told about them!

For the Supporters out there who still have not contacted me about it, F7Lans will still honor any donations you made to this site. Ask Rellik, he is enjoying his Reserved Slot on their 8 TF2 servers! Speaking of TF2, the Heavy Update came out this week so be sure to play over at F7 for a good time with or without the Heavy spam.

Be sure to watch for some more news about the Community Project!

We are having some small issues with email outbound from the site. Providers such as Hotmail and Yahoo (I think) are not delivering mail sent from here, such as your signup emails. I have already received a few notifications from new users and thank you for that.

When f0rkz gets back from Quakecon we should have this resolved. Thank you everyone for your patience!

As yet another incentive to donate to ThinkingWithPortals, we are now offering Reserved Slots at all of the F7Lans TF2 and CS:S servers! The rate on these is different, $5 for 2 months access. Previous donors will get back-pay for their donate amount, so those of you who paid in the past will get their fair share of the Reservation fun.

If you are a previous donor, post your Steam ID here so that I can add it, and preferably the amount of money you donated (though I will be checking the Paypal log so don't try to cheat me). Steam IDs look like: STEAM_0:1:123456, you can check this by joining a game and typing "status", then finding your name and Steam ID there.

Fresh off the E3 presses (that show that no one cares about, right?): more Portal is on the way.

Information is scarce right now, but the sum total seems to be this: It'll be released for the XBox Live Arcade, instead of as a boxed game. I think it's assumed the game will also come out via Steam, but I don't think there's any super-official confirmation of that.

This second title, called "Portal: Still Alive" (Try Googling that to get some information. Is good time, yes?) will be a "continuation" of the original game, and include a "new challenge mode".

As Kotaku astutely notes, we were told in April 2008 that we "won't see a new Portal this year". Since this new game is slated for release in 2008, it seems there have been some crossed signals.

I was recently shooting the shit with Jeep Barnett, one of the Portal developers. He said some things that I want to pass on to the community.

Quote:
[. . .] I do have a general complaint for all the community sites I've seen. It seems that very few map creators are using the BMZ system that I set up ( http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Bonus_maps ). It was intended to making playing custom maps MUCH easier for non-technical people. Though it's our fault for not giving the details on how to create BMZs until long after the flood of custom maps had started, I wish that the community portals themselves would automate a system for packaging them this way.

Quote:
Thanks for the Community Spotlight link. I've passed all the Portal peoples so they can take a look. Thanks for trying to pimp the BMZ stuff. I have seen it used a few times, I'm just saying as a whole I think it's been ignored. The bugs with custom content does sound pretty bad though.

Quote:
I had hoped to do more post lauch support for the Portal community, but instead chose to work on other non-Portal projects such as Left 4 Dead almost immediately after Orange Box came out. But a lot of the original Portal team is still working on some cool new stuff for you guys and I'll be sure to point them to these bugs.

Here's hoping for a Portal update that fixes the problem with BMZ!