Half-Life 2 Q&A

[Jun 14, 2003, 11:47 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

There's a Half-Life 2 Q&A on Sharky Extreme chatting with Valve's Ken Birdwell and Josh Weier. They go into detail about various aspects of the project, like this bit on how they planned a target for their engine and graphics development:

Actually, technology-wise it hasn't [evolved much]. Right from the beginning, one of our major goals was scalability. We wanted to make sure that our engine would scale to hardware that wasn't going to ship for several years. We knew it was going to be a three to four year development process. So when we started we said "Okay, let's project what graphics hardware will look like in three to four years." Get a rough idea of the polygon counts. Talk to NVIDIA. Talk to ATI. Get an idea as to what direction they are going. And how fast they were going. We offer all of our content at extremely high resolution.

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18.

Re: It's out...

Jun 15, 2003, 19:42

cyxxon

You know, what I found to be the most important little piece-o-information in the recent HL2 interviews was in this one: the fact that in HL2 the player will be playing the role of Gordon Freeman continually, not changing position between two levels, and not being aboard another planet / spaceship / whatever in the next "mission". This was what really set HL apart from other games at that time. Moddability and a scalable engine (sure, it looks outdated today, but not that much... I mean, c'mon, you can do some good things with it, and playing HL now again is still much fun. Playing Doom or Quake again now is basically nostalgia) only made HL great in the long run, but it was also good back then already. This continously evolving plot helped bring the game world to life, since you were really experiencing it all, and did not just get thrown some fancy tidbits here and there, and then this, and then here... Edit: Left a statement hanging in mid-sentence. Caught it. This comment was edited on Jun 15, 19:45.

17.

Re: No subject

Jun 15, 2003, 13:40

LordSteev

Here's another one:

http://www.trepid.net/interviews/2003-06-13-gabenewell.shtml

Ripped shamelessly from Shacknews, lol..




-LordSteev Supporter of the "Unleash the Fredster!!" Fan Club

16.

No subject

Jun 15, 2003, 07:21

Hump

one of the better interviews so far.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
PAH!




---------------------------------------------------------------------- "Both the “left” and the “right” pretend they have the answer, but they are mere flippers on the same thalidomide baby, and the truth is that neither side has a clue." - Jim Goad

15.

scaled back story

Jun 15, 2003, 02:19

rist3903

They probably want to save some of it for halflife3

14.

Re: No subject

Jun 15, 2003, 01:57

GandalfTheWhite

bah if ya wanna go technical be my guest




"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Albert Einstein

13.

Re: No subject

Jun 15, 2003, 01:27

DrEvil

2k = 2048 gandalf

12.

Re: No subject

Jun 15, 2003, 01:03

Zar

Bunko, I don't think he means they're scaling the story back from Half-Life 1, I think he just means there may have been some parts of the Half-Life 2 story that became too involved or took away from the focus of the game. Filmmakers and writers do this all the time. It has nothing to do with assuming the story will be simplistic, its about cutting away what detracts from the overall impact.

11.

Re: No subject

Jun 14, 2003, 22:33

CyBeRpImP

SE - You can't give us little clues as to if it will include Capture the Flag or Team Fortress? Josh - ... That's pretty much confirmation of a bundled TF2 for me.! :-D

10.

Re: No subject

Jun 14, 2003, 17:53

Scott

What is that supposed to mean? Are they making the story SIMPLER? How much simpler can a story be? Probably scaling things down for all those console kiddies How do you know how simple the story was in the first place? For all we know it could have been much too intricate and complex and they decided to trim it a little. Sheesh.

Re: what?

Jun 14, 2003, 17:37

GandalfTheWhite

textures can be 2k x 2k this means 2000 by 2000 pixels




"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Albert Einstein

Re: what?

Jun 14, 2003, 13:28

Ztrand

It's obvious that 2048 pixels was what he meant in the interview. or.. the original poster was trying for humor? sorry, lost my sense of humor years ago. This comment was edited on Jun 14, 13:29.

Re: what?

Jun 14, 2003, 13:18

vacs

what part of a 2048 by 2048 texture doesn't sound too appealing to you? maybe the part that "2 kilobyte" is the number of bytes used to store the texture and "2048 pixels" the resolution of the texture and not the size.

what?

Jun 14, 2003, 12:53

Ztrand

what part of a 2048 by 2048 texture doesn't sound too appealing to you? sounds great to me.. This comment was edited on Jun 14, 12:54.

Re: No subject

Jun 14, 2003, 12:51

JediLuke

We offer all of our content at extremely high resolution. All of our base textures are 2 [kilobytes] by 2 [kilobytes]. All of our polygon counts are very, very high. Dah, megabytes perhaps? 2x2 kb textures don't sound too appealing. ~Jedi

No subject

Jun 14, 2003, 12:42

Azraelot

Upon it's release, the sequel to the 1998 hit first-person shooter will, no doubt, shatter all record sales and instantly become a must have, a classic, and become the new standard all in one fell swoop. Geez, get excited much? http://www.matthewrorie.com http://users.ign.com/collection/Azraelot

No subject

Jun 14, 2003, 12:29

Bunko

To tell you the truth, I don't think there was anything that we had to scale back on. I think story-wise we've done things where we've bring it back a little bit just because it's better for the focus of the game, making it tighter.

What is that supposed to mean? Are they making the story SIMPLER? How much simpler can a story be? Probably scaling things down for all those console kiddies

Other than that, things seem to be going well.




There was only one catch and that was Catch-22

Re: Half-Life 2

Jun 14, 2003, 12:08

GandalfTheWhite

oh and it's a good read btw...




"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Albert Einstein

Half-Life 2

Jun 14, 2003, 12:07

GandalfTheWhite

We offer all of our content at extremely high resolution. All of our base textures are 2 [kilobytes] by 2 [kilobytes]. All of our polygon counts are very, very high. We won't actually ship that, primarily because there's currently no hardware that can possibly [run] it. However, once hardware releases that can run it, then we might release that higher rez content.

*Major Drool*




"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -Albert Einstein

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