It’s time to dust off your good old Quake. Meltslime has released Rubicon 2 – a Q1SP mod containing three single player levels. Author’s description:

Rubicon 2 is a new Q1SP experience with three large single-player levels, plus a custom mod featuring new enemies, sounds, textures, mapmodels, hazards, and more. It should run with any Quake engine, but for the optimal experience I recommend FitzQuake or any derivative engine such as Quakespasm or RMQ.

More information can be found in the readme file and the mod page.

Go get it here and check what’s new.

Return of The 1024^3 challenge has been started at MapCore forums. More information can be found here.

We can finally see the results of Winter 2011 Level Design/Environment Art Challenge from World of Level Design website. Check out full list of winners and runner-ups here.

Winner:
hhmoore (UDK)

Runner-ups:
Qmaster (HL2EP2)

Shrioihusky (L4D2)

Interview with Jeroen Maton, Environment Artist from DICE. Read it here at Next-Gen Hard Surface website. Also make sure you checked out Jeroen’s portfolio.

Contest results can be found here.

Another part of the interviews from Snarkpit is available:

– Andrew “OmegaSlayer” Egelhofer – Community Mapper
– Chris “2d-chris” Kay – Level Designer at Crytek
– Ryan “Armageddon” Trawick – Community Mapper
– Soenke “Warby” Seidel – One of MapCore’s Veteran
– Jefferey “Muhnay” McDowell – Community Mapper
– Jon “Orpheus” Rickenbacker – Community Mapper

Epic Games, Inc. has released the January 2011 UDK Beta! Get it here. Changelist can be found here.

Riven from Snarkpit is starting series of interviews with Level Designers and Environment Artists. First guy interviewed is Thiago “Minotaur0” Klafke, Environment Artist from Brazil. Also you might be interested in Thiago’s portfolio.

Specialisms in Level Design is a series of short articles about all parts of Level Designer’s job. Latest part contains information about scene lightning. Check out Take Initiative blog to read more, that’s a good read for aspiring Level Designers.