Played Homefront? At all interested in the game? Well now you might be interested in the second game as Crytek UK will be responsible for developing it according to Euro Gamer. The game is a first person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic USA where an EMP has devastated the country with there being resistance fighters against a ”Greater Korean Republic” occupation. The game will be made with CryEngine 3. Hopefully a tiny flavour of the old Free Radical magic will make its way through.

Selecting Crytek to take Homefront forward underscores our strategy of working with the industry’s best talent. Homefront’s unique setting and storyline captivated gamers the world over. With Crytek’s industry leading technology and legendary experience in the FPS genre, we’re supremely confident that the next Homefront will deliver that AAA-quality experience that players demand.

Danny Bilson, EVP Core Games, THQ.

We see Homefront as a really strong universe that has a lot of potential and that has been expertly created and marketed by THQ. We believe that bringing our level of quality, creativity and production values to the next Homefront title, creates an opportunity for both THQ and Crytek to deliver a truly blockbuster game.  It’s really important to us that THQ has the faith in giving us a lot of creative freedom over one of its most important properties to allow us to bring the Homefront world to life in a new and innovative way.

Cevat Yerli, Crytek CEO

I have registered the IRC channel ##timesplitters on freenode. Feel free to come in and chat about TimeSplitters and Crytek UK’s other games.

You can enter the chat by clicking on here.

IRC chat room ##timesplitters.

As according to the Official Playstation Magazine UK, the official development of TimeSplitters 4 should be announced shortly. Hopefully this means Crytek UK have been working on it for some time already and we should start receiving more and more news.

TimeSplitters Platinum, the fan game, has been abandoned because I am focusing on other projects. However if anyone wants to take it over or look at it, the source code is available:

Click here to download the source code.

It was written in Python with Objective-C and C++ extensions. It is advised the code is converted into one fast language and not python. I gave up on the idea that I would convert it to Objective-C and I worked on my iPhone apps instead, including 3D Monkey Curling.

3D Monkey Curling for iPhone and iPod touch has been released. In this version:

Significant performance improvements.

Improved monkey textures for more aesthetically pleasing graphics.

Support for iOS 3 or more.

You can download this update here – 3D Monkey Curling for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad

I have received information from two sources, which suggest TimeSplitters 4 has been put on hold. Not only this but all of the projects from Free Radical Design have been stalled. According to one of the sources, Crytek has bought Free Radical Design specifically to help them move to console development with their own games. This can be backed by what Cevat Yerli said in an interview, referring to Free Radical Design,

I was really impressed with their development talent, and it was effectively a 100 per cent console studio, whereas Crytek in Frankfurt is clearly the exact opposite.

When I went up there the first time it was just console, console, console, and no PC. There were more consoles than I’ve ever seen. So with us developing the CryEngine 3, we saw it as a perfect fit for our future plans.

What I expect is that the team will kick ass on consoles.

It is likely Crytek UK will be supporting the console development of Crysis 2. However, this doesn’t mean TimeSplitters 4 has vanished from existence. We should hopefully see it sometime in the future. Referring to the excitement around TimeSplitters 4 Cevat Yerli had said,

I am very happy about that excitement.

It would be very odd to suddenly discover TimeSplitters 4 has been canceled.

It is also known Crytek UK will help support CryEngine 3 for consoles. Once again by Cevat Yerli,

We are going to channel our engine business there. We are going to export our engine business sales there. We are going to build tremendous value in that area in the UK.

For us Crytek UK is not just a development studio, it will support and licence our engine business. We have future announcements ahead as well, and you will see how much value we are adding to the UK studio.