Gorgon
Newbie
- Joined
- Aug 20, 2003
- Messages
- 6,684
- Reaction score
- 0
The Half-Life 2 developer takes time out from its latest masterwork to tell us its favourite moments of 2003
10:00 Valve Software put itself in the map in 1998 with the release of its brilliant first-person shooter Half-Life. Breaking new ground in the genre made a star of the developer almost overnight, and scoring great swathes of respect the studio suddenly found itself sitting alongside such greats as id Software. Yep, praise rained like cats and dogs with a bit of extra miaow and woof.
Skip on five years to 2003 - bouncing briefly over Team Fortress 2, the full sequel to Valve's HL mod Team Fortress Classic that it announced shortly after Half-Life appeared and we still have yet to see - and Valve Software finally, finally unveiled Half-Life 2. Everyone gawped, gawped again when source code got nicked, got naffed off when it was announced that HL2 would miss the expected September 30 date and slip to 2004 and then gawped some more.
Half-Life 2 is expected by many to be the hottest, most glorious first-person shooter of all time, those that have seen the game first-hand and played it confident that it will blow what's gone before in the genre completely out the water.
Keeping this and Valve Software's deserved respect in mind while considering whose brains to pick about future developments for the FPS genre, the general videogame scene and the highs of 2003, the studio behind the Half-Life series seemed an obvious candidate for interrogation.
Has 2003 been a good year for videogames, in your opinion? What have been some of your own personal highlights of the year?
Jess Cliffe, co-creator of Counter-Strike: It's been a pretty good year for games. I am primarily a PC gamer and I've had a lot of fun this year with Call of Duty and Max Payne 2. You have to hand it to Infinity Ward - it tends to pull you in without letting go and the next thing you know a few hours have passed.
My hat goes off to Remedy for old-fashioned simple fun in Max Payne 2, not to mention some extremely impressive looking levels. In the console realm, a few guys on my team and I have been hooked on Top Spin for Xbox. After all these years I assumed no one could top Virtua Tennis, but with Top Spin I have to crown a new tennis king.
We're now seeing first-person shooter developers such as yourself beginning to reap the benefit of the latest graphical technology and new advances in DirectX. Where do you see such technology taking us, in terms changes/advancements it will allow developers bring to the FPS genre?
Brian Jacobson, senior software engineer at Valve: The continued movement toward increased general programmability of the GPUs is going to result in more developers making more varied and interesting special effects ever more quickly.
A bunch of algorithms that currently must be done on the CPU, such as facial animation, will be able to be accelerated by hardware soon. We're going to see continued evolution and improvement of shadowing solutions, and far superior lighting solutions like high-dynamic range rendering (HDR).
HDR is already possible, but we'll see better implementations made possible by new hardware available within a year. Screen space effects, allowing us to do things like motion blur, depth-of-field, colour correction (as done in movie film processing) and tone mapping, will become commonplace.
Some developers are also interested in taking advantage of algorithms made possible by dramatic increases in fillrate we see coming down the pipe, such as deferred rendering, which allows us to do things like decals on normalmaps.
How do you see broadband affecting the first-person shooter genre in the future?
Erik Johnson, project manager at Valve: I don't expect broadband penetration around the world to have many genre-specific effects on the games themselves. The significant direct impact will be that software developers will have more choices as to how to distribute what they build.
In the same way that physical media went through it's growing period, from floppy disks to CD-ROM to DVD, broadband distribution over the Internet is beginning to go through the same cycle right now. Over time, the line between the hard drive in your PC and the filesystem that exists on the Internet starts to look pretty blurry.
How difficult is it as a developer to remain unique (in terms of games) or come up with unique ideas for games?
Jess Cliffe: We're in a bit of a post-modern era in the gaming world where a lot of the unique games are mixtures of old classic genres. While some designers may be listless with an "it's all been done" attitude, there are still a lot of opportunities with taking the ingredients and mixing them up.
Being unique and innovative is great. Yet, I like to remind myself that they don't necessarily translate to pure fun in the same way that working with bleeding edge technology doesn't guarantee a great game.
I got it in my email from: Computers and video game.com
is this old? :dozey:
10:00 Valve Software put itself in the map in 1998 with the release of its brilliant first-person shooter Half-Life. Breaking new ground in the genre made a star of the developer almost overnight, and scoring great swathes of respect the studio suddenly found itself sitting alongside such greats as id Software. Yep, praise rained like cats and dogs with a bit of extra miaow and woof.
Skip on five years to 2003 - bouncing briefly over Team Fortress 2, the full sequel to Valve's HL mod Team Fortress Classic that it announced shortly after Half-Life appeared and we still have yet to see - and Valve Software finally, finally unveiled Half-Life 2. Everyone gawped, gawped again when source code got nicked, got naffed off when it was announced that HL2 would miss the expected September 30 date and slip to 2004 and then gawped some more.
Half-Life 2 is expected by many to be the hottest, most glorious first-person shooter of all time, those that have seen the game first-hand and played it confident that it will blow what's gone before in the genre completely out the water.
Keeping this and Valve Software's deserved respect in mind while considering whose brains to pick about future developments for the FPS genre, the general videogame scene and the highs of 2003, the studio behind the Half-Life series seemed an obvious candidate for interrogation.
Has 2003 been a good year for videogames, in your opinion? What have been some of your own personal highlights of the year?
Jess Cliffe, co-creator of Counter-Strike: It's been a pretty good year for games. I am primarily a PC gamer and I've had a lot of fun this year with Call of Duty and Max Payne 2. You have to hand it to Infinity Ward - it tends to pull you in without letting go and the next thing you know a few hours have passed.
My hat goes off to Remedy for old-fashioned simple fun in Max Payne 2, not to mention some extremely impressive looking levels. In the console realm, a few guys on my team and I have been hooked on Top Spin for Xbox. After all these years I assumed no one could top Virtua Tennis, but with Top Spin I have to crown a new tennis king.
We're now seeing first-person shooter developers such as yourself beginning to reap the benefit of the latest graphical technology and new advances in DirectX. Where do you see such technology taking us, in terms changes/advancements it will allow developers bring to the FPS genre?
Brian Jacobson, senior software engineer at Valve: The continued movement toward increased general programmability of the GPUs is going to result in more developers making more varied and interesting special effects ever more quickly.
A bunch of algorithms that currently must be done on the CPU, such as facial animation, will be able to be accelerated by hardware soon. We're going to see continued evolution and improvement of shadowing solutions, and far superior lighting solutions like high-dynamic range rendering (HDR).
HDR is already possible, but we'll see better implementations made possible by new hardware available within a year. Screen space effects, allowing us to do things like motion blur, depth-of-field, colour correction (as done in movie film processing) and tone mapping, will become commonplace.
Some developers are also interested in taking advantage of algorithms made possible by dramatic increases in fillrate we see coming down the pipe, such as deferred rendering, which allows us to do things like decals on normalmaps.
How do you see broadband affecting the first-person shooter genre in the future?
Erik Johnson, project manager at Valve: I don't expect broadband penetration around the world to have many genre-specific effects on the games themselves. The significant direct impact will be that software developers will have more choices as to how to distribute what they build.
In the same way that physical media went through it's growing period, from floppy disks to CD-ROM to DVD, broadband distribution over the Internet is beginning to go through the same cycle right now. Over time, the line between the hard drive in your PC and the filesystem that exists on the Internet starts to look pretty blurry.
How difficult is it as a developer to remain unique (in terms of games) or come up with unique ideas for games?
Jess Cliffe: We're in a bit of a post-modern era in the gaming world where a lot of the unique games are mixtures of old classic genres. While some designers may be listless with an "it's all been done" attitude, there are still a lot of opportunities with taking the ingredients and mixing them up.
Being unique and innovative is great. Yet, I like to remind myself that they don't necessarily translate to pure fun in the same way that working with bleeding edge technology doesn't guarantee a great game.
I got it in my email from: Computers and video game.com
is this old? :dozey:
;o) 
