In last week's Steam News Update, Valve announced that they are planning on going back to some of the older Counter-Strike: Source maps and giving them an HDR pass. Soon you'll get to play maps like de_dust with full High Dynamic Range lighting.

News Source: Weekly Steam News

Next Generation PC Title Coming to Steam

Irvine, CA – March 16, 2006 – Turtle Rock Studios, the independent studio that has co-developed recent Counter-Strike games with Valve, today announces a new Source-based title in development for the PC, to be released via Valve’s Steam online platform for digital distribution.

Turtle Rock Studios was founded by Michael Booth in 2002, and has grown to include industry veterans who have contributed to such titles as Nox, Red Alert II: Yuri's Revenge, and Command & Conquer: Generals.

“Working with Source and Steam allows us unprecedented flexibility in our development process, provides instantaneous world-wide distribution, and affords us the creative freedom to focus on building a game universe of our very own.” said Booth. “We’re excited to be working with this technology and to reveal more about the project over the coming year.”

For more information, please visit www.turtlerockstudios.com

News Source: Steam News

Updates to the Steam Client have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Fixed problem with launching Steam when running Windows 98
  
• Steam will automatically validate Red Orchestra's cache the first time it is launched to ensure it isn't corrupted

News Source: Steam News

Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, Tripwire Interactive's first-person action game set on the Russian Front of WWII, is now available via Steam for just $24.95. For more information, please visit www.steampowered.com.

News Source: Steam News

Updates to the Steam Client have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• You can now join the Friends Beta via the Friends button inside of Steam.
  
• The Steam hardware survey has been updated, with improved detection of graphics card hardware and sound card detection. Results are available here
  
• Added System information help menu option which shows the hardware information detected for the survey
  
• Fixed offline mode not working for users who account names that are all digits with leading zeros
  
• Fixed actively preloading games showing as paused in the mini-games list
  
• Fixed case where store page could become stuck displaying 'loading...' and never show a page

Source & Half-Life 1 Engine

• Enabled Friends beta
  
• Fixed several cases where the server browser would not correctly handle filtering of mods

Source Engine

• Improved filesystem throughput - this fixes a bunch of stutter reports in Half-Life 2

Counter-Strike

• Fixed menuselect 10 exploit allowing players to spawn into game in spectator mode

News Source: Steam News