May 2007
YouTube Music Contest
The first Music Contest presented by Hyena Studios has just started. Join us! Details in our forum HERE!

January 2007
How not to be seen
A new comedy movie is released. For those of you who have the Age of Mythology - The Titans game, you can download it HERE. For those who do not have it, HERE is the link to the HS forum topic with a stand-alone wmv version. Enjoy!

December 2006
Hyena Studios Current Top1 Projects
Still - the next months the music and sound creations for "The Corruptor" movie will be Hyena Studios first place for creating new stuff. If you do not know about it, then better visit the main project website HERE. Enjoy! It has many content which you definitely will never see on any other website! Also, a new trailer for this movie was published at the end of December - (double click on the video below for full screen).


December 2005
AOE3 Section Updates
Good news for all players and designers of AOE3 random maps: New random maps for AOE3 can be downloaded HERE! If you have much time and want to create your own random maps for AOE3 you can check out the new AOE3 RMS Tutorial HERE! If you are already an advanced RM Scripter you might have interest in the AOE3 RMS Hints section HERE! Whatever you like most, enjoy! You can also use the navigation bar (Game Addons) at the top.

August 2005
Hyena Studios Opens Its New Gates
After more than two years online, Hyena Studios opened its new gates on Thursday, 4th of August 2005, to the gaming community, designer community and all fans of Hyena Studios. A lot of new contents, maps, movies, musics and flash menues are now added to most of all sites. Indeed, we can speak of a fully face-lifting now. This new webspace is friendly hosted by Pacosgames. who currently hosts great gaming and multimedia sites at www.gamingextremes.com and www.mugamo.com. Nevertheless, the Hyena Studios Team also wants to thank the Geocities Hosting Team for its long free webspace support. The old website of Hyena Studios will still stay at Geocities, but it will be slower updated in future than this new domain. The entrance to the old site can be found at www.geocities.com/hyenastudios .

August 2005
New Long Upcoming Flash Movie
Well, since Hyena Studios started as a designer community for the Age of Empires II and Age of Mythology game by Ensemble Studios, the thoughts of our designers are not far away from the upcoming Age of Empires III game. Due to this reason and to precelebrate this event, Hyena Studios decided to create a Flash Movie for it - in a yet unknown huge length for a flash movie. More than 25 minutes of comedy and parody are waiting for the spectators yet. All is set up into the background images of the screenshots of the upcoming Age of Empires III game, already published at www.ageofempires3.com. The movie is fully animated and with voices and sounds. It will soon be released at Hyena Studios Videonauts. Enjoy the trailer below ...


August 2005
Let The Music Play
Some people know the "Head" of Hyena Studios just as a map designer and utility programmer for the Age of Empires/Mythology game. In the Hyena Studios Audionauts section you can now listen to his new compositions and recordings. A lot of music genres are covered: Epic, Classic, Classic Rock, Rock, Pop Rock, Jazz, etc. The Hyena Studios Audionauts section now has a new, nice, and interactive "Jukebox" made in Flash, so, now all can get a sneak prelistening of each file in just a minute.

August 2005
The Long Way To 44 Random Maps for AOM
In October 2002 - the release of the Age of Mythology game in Europe, the head of Hyena Studios - M0nTy_PyTh0n - found out, that his recent favorite PC game mostly used his favorite C++ programming code for creating new random maps for this game. It took a few weaks to learn the code, then "Mythland" map was created. Then, he remembered some scenarios from "Age of Empires 2", called "Art of War" - a deathmatch like scenario with unlimited resources to play. However, due to the technology upgrades in AOE2, these matches would always lead into a tie game for advanced players. So, this kind of map could not be simply moved to AOM. The new implementation of towncenters in AOM, and the dependency of the maximum population for each player to it, changed the strategy of this concept to a new balanced and new gameplay for deathmatch fans ... and the AOM "Total War" maps - also known as TW maps - were born. They now reached a few thousends of downloads on the Hyena Studios website, also at aom.heavengames.com , and they are very popular at ESO - the AOM/AOM-TT online gaming server. After the main TW map creation period, Hyena Studios concentrated to the most wanted maps for AOM/AOM-TT: The Regular Gameplay Random Maps. All maps can be found in the AOM Game Addons section.

December 2006
"Edge of Empires III - Episode I" released!
The "somehow" new parody movie of Age of Empires III was released. You can watch it now at Hyena Studios Videonauts in the Cinema Maximus. Flash8 plug-in or higher is needed. Enjoy!

September 2005
New AOE3 site at Hyena Studios
The release of the trial version of the RTS game Age of Empires III on September 6th, 2005 was a great move of the developers ENSEMBLE STUDIOS - not only for the RTS fan community, but also for the designer community. Unfortunately, the scenario editor in not included yet in the trial version, but the files in the trial version already allow a deep look into the details of the modding, but even more of the artificial intelligence files (AI) and random map script (RMS) possibilities. HS is already able to present you some modified maps. Just check the the logo to the left or the menu bar above for navigation.

August 2005
A Menu Bar? - What Is It For?
Hyena Studios added a very helpful menu bar at the top of its page. The menu bar is present on ALL pages and it will help you to immediately switch to any other Hyena Studios site in a second. You even can use hotkeys to navigate the menu bar. The underscored letter in the menu is the hotkey to open the corresponding section. To go to the submenues just use the "->" cursor right key, then press the ENTER key (tested for IE6 only).
Furthermore, all files of which this newspaper is talking about, you will find as a link in the menu bar.

August 2005
AOM Designing Over Now At Hyena Studios?
Well, actually not! Although the head of Hyena Studios thinks that the potential of making maps for AOM is already filled up, there is still high potential in making great movies. Some nice movies were already published by different authors at aom.heavengames.com download section. However, Hyena Studios contacted a well known scenario designer for AOM a few months ago about a cooperation for a new AOM-TT movie. It is not a regular scenario one: The cinematics will contain more than just one scenario, made by one of the best custom cinematics designer for AOM-TT - The_Vandhaal. Furthermore, ALL music and sounds and voices will be exclusively composed and created by Hyena Studios (M_P). A release date is not set yet. If the readers would already like to see or hear something from the designers, there is something below ...


August 2005
The Beginning Of Random Map Scripting
Beside single player campains, random maps do count to the main parts of almost every real time strategy (RTS) game, like AOE and AOM. Compared to scenario design, it is much more time consuming, since these maps use some kind of code similar to a programming language and the learning curve is much more flat than that for the built-in scenario editors. But, once one gets used to it, it is possible to create new random maps just in a few hours. For those of the readers who are interested in learning random map scripting, Hyena Studios published a detailed AOM random map scripting tutorial for beginners. The tutorial covers the basics for creating a working script and will go into depth later. It can be found in the Game Addons link in the menu bar.

August 2005
Rusty But Still Useful
The great activity of scenario designers for the Age of Empires and Mythology games are not the only reason why these games will stay popular for a long time. However, every scenario designer knows that making triggers for a scenario is highly time consuming, especially in multiplayer maps. Ensenble Studios has improved their scenario editors from game to game. But, there are still some utilities needed to speed up the scenario design. Therefore, Hyena Studios decided in Spring 2003 to create a new trigger tool for AOM, called YATE (yet another trigger editor). It is based on the random map scripting code and covers all AOM triggers. It is very easy to use, and, with a bit of time you will learn how to use it. Then, you be able to create a few thousends of triggers for a scenario or random map within just a minute.


Review 2001-2005
M0nTy_PyTh0n - What A Weird Nickname ...
Exactly, this is the name of the head of this non-commericial Studio. Well, the Englishmen upon the readers will already know the spelling of this name. The "Monty Python Flying Circus" TV Show already earned worldwide cult state. Also, some of their movies - like "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "Life of Brian" - are already voted up to the TOP 250 best movies of all-time on the earth's biggest movie database at www.imdb.com . However, the head of Hyena Studios is a big fan of this "Theatre Group". So, the choice of a nickname for playing online and for web forums was found quickly - since 2001. He just changed the "o" into a ZERO="0", to make the nickname unique and not to mistake this name with this awesome company. His "MSN AOE2 Zone" name is "_M0nTy_PyTh0n_", the nickname at heavengames.com is "M0nTy PyTh0n" and all others you can see at the topic.