In the past weeks we have seen a growing interest for custom maps in our community, which has lead to more and more community members installing hammer and giving a shot at map making themselves. Vilepickle has fine-tuned his "canalzone" map in coorporation with out community and in just a week community members SLiD3 and Lastig will release the first beta of their latest map, cp_amsterdam.

Alot of community members have good ideas for maps, but lack the skills or knowledge to make the map. We would love to help these people, so if anyone has any hammer guides they have written themselves, feel free to send them to send them to Spikespiegel, and we will publish the guides on our website.

Fellow Specialattack regular, DoubleJ went to the GC in Leipzig and has done us the honour to write a small article about what he saw there. The article can now be read here on specialattack.net.

Thanks for sharing your experience with us, DoubleJ!

It's with great joy that we can announce that Steel will (finally) make it into the map cycle of servers 1, 2, 3 and 6. The map has previously enjoyed a great popularity as a map available for Spapoints. To replace steel as a custom map, we will make cp_redstone available for spapoints. The update has also brought a few other maps as well as a new mapmode. Badwater Basin has been added to the mapcycle on servers 1, 2, 3 and 6. (click "read more")

Saint K. has paid our Dutch datacenter a visit to replace/upgrade some hardware on mrwhite which is the server that hosts our website, server 3 as well as the warserver.

The players will notice the new hardware especially when browsing the forums, which now has the response times we wanted all along. Also, server 3 should no longer have any lagspikes.

Please do thank Saint K. for providing most of the new hardware from his own pocket!

Our ever-working TechTeam has worked doubletime this week to bring you the following updates (Click Read More)

Following our detailed plan for world domination, Specialattack has launched a new TF2 server in London, UK. The server runs the same config as servers 1 through 3, meaning all official maps.

Please show your appreciation, by donating for our cause :)

After a few days of intense work on the website on lacop's side, he has finally finished working on the user login to the website today. You can now use your forum details to login on the front page.

Logging in will currently only give you access to commenting on news items with your nick shown but in the very near future we expect to have content added to the website that will require you to log-in as well. These features include:

Spashop,
Banlist (Both of them will be moved to the main page),
Sign-up for Spacups and much much more.

Today, July 30th '08 it's official: Specialattack is the main sponsor for a new Gamemod using the sourcemod.

The mod, Mariokart:Source let's you play the popular Nintendo game on your PC, using the Sourceengine. This will not only give specialattack good publicity, but might also give our community the chance of testing the mod before it's released.

We are open for entering more sponsorships with dedicated mod- and mapmakers. To read more about entering sponsorship deals with SpA, please check the development page.

We are proud to announce the launch of yet another TF2 server.

Due to the huge success our Custom Map weekend was, we have decided to make it a 24/7 custom map server, but with a much better focus on high quality and popular maps than during the weekend.

The server, SpecialAttack #5 [TF2 - Custom maps] http://www.SpecialAttack.net (85.17.239.149:27025) will run the following map cycle:
cp_steel_b4
ctf_mach4
cp_freight_b3
cp_labor
cp_science2
ctf_chaos
cp_junction_v2
cp_redstone_b2
cp_aqua
ctf_geothermal_b2
cp_harbor
cp_egypt_v2
cp_corporation_b3

We will, however, add and remove maps in the future, to keep the server popular. Any suggestions and feedback on the map cycle can be posted in the Custom map server forum.

Download:
Mappack.exe (~166 MB) @ 9mmNL's place
Mappack.rar (~214 MB) @ 9mmNL's place

Update:
cp_harbor has been removed for technical reasons, cp_egypt_v2 included again for re-testing. Mappacks have been updated with comments, correct maps and custom maps for servers #1-3. Read more for the complete changelog.

Our SpecialAttack Custom Map Weekend has come to an end. We'd like to thank all people who participated and left their feedback by rating or posting on the forums.
Reactions to the event as a whole, as far as we can tell, were very positive even though not all maps lived up to our high standards which was expected and could only become apparent in large-scale tests like these.

You can check the ratings of all maps here but we'd still very much like you to post more detailed observations of certain maps' pros and cons in our forums.

We hope you're looking forward to future SpecialAttack exclusive events as much as we do!