Relicnews: the definitive source for all things Relic

Looks like it’s a bit of a sad day (and several days after the fact). Relic’s first community manager, Allie “Buggo” Henze is no longer at Relic. Allie was Relic’s first “version” of a community manager. I think I can speak for all the fans when I say that we appreciate everything Allie did for the community and for us fans.

To the members of the Relic community, we have to tell you that Buggo is currently pursuing other opportunities. This has led to some speculation that Relic will no longer be supporting our loyal fans - nothing could be further from the truth. Soon we will be introducing you to new members of Relic who will carry forth the commitment we have to our fans. We are expanding our community support greatly over the coming months; better support for our modders, frequent updates about what’s going on in the studio, expanding our numbers, contests, content, and more.

And for those wondering, we are still hosting our upcoming community open house - you don’t want to miss it because you’ll be treated to some sneak previews of our work.

Thank you for your continued support!

Relic Entertainment

Official post here.

Buggo does still have an account on the forums, and hopefully will be able to pop in and say hi (I’d not expect her to be able to comment on Relic and all the cool stuff she worked on). The forum staff helped Relic out by modifying her account to be named “Relic” and then created a new account for Buggo. Any posts on the “Relic” account before April 24th were made by Allie, and anything after were from another Relic rep. I expect to hear more soon from Relic about their intentions, but it’s been made very clear to me that they’re not going to go without a community manager type position again. Also, as far as I know, the Relic Open House is still on, and judging on the biggest fan contest starts today at noon pacific.

Allie, you set the bar pretty high for any future community folks at Relic. I hope whoever gets the position next can meet the community’s expectations. Good luck in the future and we’ll see you around!

Relic’s biggest fan contest 2008 is accepting submissions until Friday.

Last year, Goldo_0 won with this entry (100 MB download). Not only did he get a free trip to Vancouver, he got a job at Relic!

Get your submissions in, and good luck to whoever wins!

A new video has showed up on Youtube last evening. I’ll say that it’s pretty darn impressive watching big angry giant robots slug it out against the horde of orcs.

Rickrolled

There’s a thread running on the forums about people’s recollections of the Relic Open House. If you haven’t already, pop in and have a read. If you visited Relic for the open house, and haven’t posted your impressions yet, go for it!

Relic didn’t announce any new games, expansions or anything like that, but we did get to find out they have several teams working on various projects. Watch here for an article (once approved - NDA issues), about my recollections for the weekend.

I just got word from Cyanide that Impossible Creature Enclave (ICE), has launched, and to kick off things they’re hosting the “ICE Survivor” challenge tournament. If you’ve been keeping an eye on the IC community, you’ll be happy to know that ICE is ran by some of the most devoted and best known IC fans around, so be sure to check them out!

A patch is now available for Insect Invasion, bringing Relic’s free IC mod up to version 1.4. Here’s a list of some of the more significant bug fixes:

Size 1 ant / rat problem fixed, they don’t smurf now.

Coal/Electricity Conversion bug fixed

You can no longer spawn henchmen at enemy workshops.

The patch also includes several balance fixes, for a full list of these check the readme file found in the IC root folder after installation. Please note that as the II mod, this patch is unsupported by Microsoft Support, and they will not be able to help you if you experience problems with the game.

You can grab the patch here. Thanks to ICP for the news.

John Johnson sends word that Relic’s released a map pack for Impossible Creatures.

The 14 MB file is available at Impossible Creatures Planet, and RN’s FTP Server, and Worth Playing (and hopefully at Microsoft as well).

Summary stolen shamelessly from ICP.

Maps included:
Ring - 2 Player - Small size map
2Fort4 - 4 Player - Medium size map - Good for 2 vs. 2 team games.
Rival Islands - 4 Player - Medium size map - Good for 2 vs. 2 team games.
Double Twisted Bill - 4 Player - Medium size map - Good for death-match and team games.
Shinwa - 6 Player - Medium size map - Good for all out death-match or team games.

The game requires the 1.1 patch to be installed to use these maps. A congrats is in order to Bill Brooks, one of ICP’s staffers, who had one of his maps included in the map pack.

Looks like Gamespy’s going a 25th most overrated games of all time. Impossible Creatures comes in at number 20 on the list.

For the record, I enjoyed IC, even though I couldn’t get my animals to bite each other’s heads off.

The New IC Tools and SDK are now available for download.

The IC Tools package has been updated with new tools, including a new PatchEditor, a new archive command line tool and a ModPackager Tool and is now significantly smaller (40MB vs. 150). You might want to take note that unlike previous IC Tool releases, this version of the tools requires IC to be installed.

The SDK on the other hand will allow modders to create code mods for IC, and weights in at only 10MB.

You can grab both packages from the RDN site.

The long awaited IC patch has finally been released, bringing the game up to version 1.0.1 (err.. or 1.1 if you actually take a look at the in-game version). The patch adds a new mod selector screen, sound engine updates, better mod support, several gameplay balance changes and much more.

To get the patch, simply logon to IC Online and it should download automatically.

[Update]
If you are having trouble downloading the patch from the IC Online automated patch system, you can try the following alternate links in order to download the patch:

English
French
German

[Update2]:
For a list of patch changes, see this article.