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« on: May 15, 2004, 04:16:41 PM »
The SDK was supposed to be released before E3...Here, we find out why it wasn't!
Half-Life Radio: We're here with Gabe Newell from Valve. Gabe, thank you, we're glad to have you.
Gabe Newell: Great to be here, thanks.
Half-Life Radio: Well Gabe, what our listening audience wants to know is, how's the game (Half-Life 2) coming?
Gabe Newell: Right now the game is basically complete end to end... and we are bringing in play tester after play tester. We watch them play, we see what sort of style play they use whether their more exploration vs. action and then we make sure the game works for them. So we just keep doing that over and over again. Each time we do a playtest we generate about 100 change items for the game, and then we go back ... until we feel the game is ready to go.
Half-Life Radio: Outstanding. Now I also know that you track the gameplay through Steam. In what way do you do that?
Gabe Newell: Well, we're going to continue to do that more and more. What we want to start doing is gathering statistics on when people play, when people who opt-in, so we can see a bunch of people who are dying or getting stuck in a specific location that we didn't intend them to. We can then look at that and figure out what's going on. But, it's the idea of extending our ability to interact with the people who are playing our games and not just through interviews of email but through statistical methods.
Half-Life Radio: That's pretty important, because you need to know exactly what's going on with them and they need to be able to let you know and this is one easy way to do it while listening to the fans.
Gabe Newell: Sure. I mean it's also great for things like weapons balancing in Counter-Strike. If you can see which weapons are for dominating and so on, you can use it to make better decisions about how you want to adjust weapon switching.
Half-Life Radio: Outstanding. Tell me what's going on with DoD and what's coming up with that.
Gabe Newell: Well, for the first time we're talking about what we're going to be doing for multiplayer for Half-Life 2, and what we've done is, we've taken all the original Half-Life 1 content.. so Half-Life 1 single player, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress Classic, DeathMatch, Day of Defeat, and we moved them over to source. We are showing that to people... so that you can see what De_Aztec looks as people are playing it. So that you can see how we take advantage of shaders and ... physics...to create a better environment for the multiplayer games which are about 90% of what's being played online.
Half-Life Radio: Any release date in mind? I know you don't want to be specific with dates but what's in mind?
Gabe Newell: This summer. We're just going to keep tuning it, the performance optimizations are done that we run on our DX6, DX7 hardware which was a big goal for us. So really, it's about tuning the game, tuning the game and tuning the game. When we feel we've got the quality level then we'll release it.
Half-Life Radio: Outstanding. I like the attention to quality. Question about the SDK. Is there any release date on that, or any idea when it's released to the MOD developers?
Gabe Newell: We're going to start releasing stuff incrementally, so the next release will give people the ability to build Half-Life 2 models and have a viewer for them and it'll show them what it looks like in the engine. A little bit of a problem with releasing the SDK is, in order to fully release the SDK we have to release the whole game and it's difficult for us to do that without people essentially doing a bunch of stuff that would probably spoil the game for people. So, the next big step will be happening shortly after E3 is to release something so that all the modelers and animators can get their work done and see what it's going to look like in a small run-type version for models & animation.
Half-Life Radio: There are alot of different mod teams looking forward to it and to see what the engine can do. That's one thing that has made Half-Life special throughout the years.. so I want to say thank you for that because that's made it special for us.
Gabe Newell: I think what we're going to see in this next generation, if you look at what's winning in the online space, it's stuff that came out of the mod community. It's because the mod community is willing to take more interesting risks and in a lot of ways is closer to the players than your traditional... you know... giant game publisher.. and so, I think what we'll start seeing is more and more.. mod makers building on top of source are going to be able to build games for a variety of reasons that aren't going to be possible coming out of their large traditional publisher. I think that's very exciting. I think with Steam giving people a way to monetize what they're successful at with the mod community, it's going to be a great pathway for a lot of mod teams to build the games that they want to play, that they think are interesting, rather than waiting or hoping that somebody else is going to make them... and also... depending on how they want to do it.. it gives them an option of going from amateur to professional at whatever pace they and those who are fans of their game want them to.
Half-Life Radio: We want to thank you for being with us on the Half-Life Radio program.. we are looking forward to what's coming up.
Gabe Newell: I can't wait to ship. I think that it's been a long haul for us, it's been a long haul for everybody in the community and at this point I really do think we're going to make the wait worth everybody's time. I can't wait for people to play and see what the mod people do. Thanks.
Half-Life Radio: Do you have any last things that you want to say to your fans?
Gabe Newell: We want to hurry up and ship the damn thing. That's all we think about.
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