- Quick 5.27 Progress Update - 18 February 2025
Here's an early look at some upcoming features in 5.27! Brush entities, players, NPCs, and other in-game objects can now receive dynamic lighting based on their location in a more realistic manner. This system uses light probes placed throughout the world, offering a performant solution that vastly improves upon Half-Life's original floor-based lighting method. Plus, a surprise at the end. Stay tuned for more interesting updates coming soon. Have questions? Drop a comment or join the Official Sven Co-op Discord community at https://discord.gg/svencoop
- Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 16648734 / Release 5.26] - 7 December 2024
We're excited to announce a brand-new update packed with bug fixes, improvements, and exciting new features, including a fresh map for you to explore. We've been hard at work enhancing this long-running project since 1999, and we hope the (3 year) wait has been worth it. So what's new? Let's dive in! Introducing "The Mustard Factory" - a challenging new map where you and your team must operate a series of machines to produce mustard, all while fending off sabotage attempts by rival gangsters and closing rifts that allow inter-dimensional creatures to invade our world. This complex map requires strong coordination, so it's highly recommended to start on beginner mode to master the game mechanics and familiarise yourself with the layout. A public beta was previously released, but this new version contains significant improvements. In addition, the classic SC map, Polar Rescue, has receive…
- Sven Co-op May Be Removed From Steam! (April Fools) - 1 April 2024
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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Update! 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? - 17 December 2023
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. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/5227530/249189ad8c131092e0e3...
- AI moving Sven Co-op forward (April fools) - 1 April 2023
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. W…
- Ragemap has put its foot down - 4 December 2022
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. {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/5…
- Sven Co-op beaten in 33:12 with 100% completion (April fools) - 1 April 2022
Hello Sven Co-op fans! 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…
- Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 7342106 / Release 5.25] - 11 September 2021
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 pub…
- Sven Co-op 5.25: Collector's Edition - 1 April 2021
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 fin…
- Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 6130701 / Release 5.24] - 24 January 2021
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. You can find 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: Game hub discussions Discord Version details 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…
- Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 6008644 / Release 5.23] - 24 December 2020
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***"…
- Steam Award 2020 Nomination Request - 27 November 2020
Ladies, gentlemen, eels, seagulls, amorphous eldritch horrors, 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. L…
- Rent-A-Map™ with Time-Share® CANCELLED!!! - 2 April 2020
Yesterday we announced our new Rent-A-Map™ feature and the initial reactions were great! Paying a small fee to support development for something you could have used for free otherwise seemed to really inspire our playerbase. However, it also inspired a bunch of lawyers to send us an email about the legal obligations once you call something 'rent'. Apparently once we rent out our maps we are also legally obligated to maintain and support said maps for the foreseeable future. This would not be a problem for our official maps, but since we were planning to apply the Rent-A-Map™ system to all custom maps out there (more than 1500!), we'd be maintaining maps for the rest of our foreseeable lives! We were trying to make the maps make money for us, not the other way around. So, Rent-A-Map™ will be put on hold for now and we're going back to the drawing board to think up another way to make qui…
- Sven Co-op is excited to announce: Rent-A-Map™! - 1 April 2020
We here at Sven Co-op work hard on new engine and gameplay features to bring you the best possible co-operative experience. However, we have been having a hard time delivering new official maps with our releases. We only want to give you the AAA+ material you good people all deserve but it takes a lot of time to create such maps. Many of our mappers only work on the MOD in their limited free time and need their day jobs to be financially secure. But now, we came up with a solution for both of these problems: Of course you want to play Sven Co-op 24/7 but you also have to eat at some point, visit relatives or walk your dog. Plus, you can only play one map at a time, so for 99% of the time, all the maps in your library are unused! So, why pay a lot of money for a map you're only playing every now and then? Why own a thing you hardly use, when you can also RENT it for the time you are usin…
- Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 4566677 / Release 5.22] - 16 January 2020
An update for Sven Co-op has been released. If you are running a dedicated server please use SteamCmd to update your servers. Changes Notable changes are as follows: Fix for Windows 10 users using different DPI scales per-monitor Increased maximum weapons to 256 You can find the full change log on our news. 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: Game hub discussions Official message board Discord Version details Steam build ID numbers: Game 4566677, dedicated server tool 4566690, SDK tool 4566691. 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…
- Sven Co-op Update Released [Build 4534884 / Release 5.21] - 1 January 2020
Changes Notable changes are as follows: Black Mesa: Special Tactics Sector, level by Trempler, now has a serious balance fix. (No more red team permanently winning!) Suspension, level by Hezus, now features night mode! Level designers can now change the sky with new entity "trigger_changesky". Map Compile Tools: Default subdivide value has been increased to 528. This improves world polygon subdivision on all maps, which increases frame rates, and opens the possibility for utilization of 512x512 textures without excessive subdivision. Important: Dedicated server operators running on Windows must install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2019 (x86) re-distributable package. This is available for free here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/2977003/the-latest-supported-visual-c-downloads You can find the full change log on our news. Version details Steam build ID numbers: Game 4534884, dedic…
- New Team Members & Forum Updates - 6 November 2019
New Team Members We're starting to ramp up for the Sven Co-op 5.21 release, and so, we've added a few more people to our team to help us get there. Please join me in welcoming Omega (Programming), KernCore (Art and Scripting), DNIO071 (Art), The303 (Art), and MrOats (Testing)! Omega: As a retired Valve Software employee, it would be an understatement to say Omega brings a great deal of knowledge and experience. While we're not completely sure what projects he was working on at Valve (Half-Life 3, of course), we do know he helped bring many improvements to the Half-Life engine. During the early days of Half-Life's modding community, he was a programmer for Frontline Force. Frontline Force was a popular Half-Life modification created by Adrian Finol (Valve) alongside notable community figures like Alfred Reynolds (Valve, Retired). You can still check out the mod over at ModDB. More recent…
- Coming up in 5.21: Entity "trigger_changesky" - 25 September 2019
We have completed a new entity (and engine interface) for mappers: "trigger_changesky", allows you to change the sky map at runtime. Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEgMs_RHXK4
- Coming up in 5.21: Support for BSP subdividing of 512 up from 240 - 24 August 2019
Coming up in 5.21: Support for BSP subdividing of 512 up from 240, resulting in significantly less WPOLY requirements for big surfaces. Less WPOLY = more FPS + bigger maps! Compile comparison: https://pastebin.com/cY3wgwBy Wireframe comparison: https://twitter.com/sven_co_op/status/1165194741723684864
- Modder Superior: Sven Co-op - 22 July 2019
Every other Monday, Dominic gives you a reason to dust off one of your old games and dive into its mods with Modder Superior. We’ve seen how much damage one theoretical physicist can do. Sven Co-op lets you unleash the vortex of chaos of a dozen Free Men (and women) upon Half-Life. Once just a mod enabling you to play the classic FPS with pals, it received Valve’s blessings to go free and standalone on Steam in 2016, bundled with a free copy of the original Half-Life re-tooled for multiplayer. Still actively updated and with its own modding scene and map hosting hub , Sven Co-op is now a portal to thousands of weird Half-Life worlds. They’re waiting for you, Gordons, in the test chambers. (more…)
