SDK Information Included in Latest Steam Update

[Bling]

ive been waiting a good 2 years for this.

Hammer is my new girlfriend

thanks for the info!

 

[Blad3]

yay, now all I have to do is learn C++...then how to use the actual Editor.... : **( * Prepares for years of studying. *

 

[changeforme]

SDK THIS WEEK (Bill Van Buren)

I went to XSI Montreal meeting yesterday, where Bill Van Buren (Producer/Designer at Valve Software) played some parts of Half-Life 2 on a giant screen. The game looked amazing.

Warning, spoilers!

Spoiler

He played the beginning, as we were told in PC Gamer, with the G-Man waking us up, speaking reaaaally weird. He speaks of past errors, of being in the bad place at the bad time, with pictures of HL1's incident... Then Gordon walks to the guards as in one of the Bink Videos, but this time he gets the guards a little pissed... First time you bump into a guard, he says "Back off"... Second time, he lights his Electric stick... Third time he starts hitting you (and it seems to hurt a lot... even if you dont have HP yet). Where the video ended, at the sight of a torture chair, Bill played a little more, letting us see the torture combine preparing something with tools.....Bill played a part I had never heard of, where Alyx hands us the G-Gun in a scrapyard, then asks us to test its abilities. Bill tried pushing and tossing and attracting stuff, and it just looked really fun. He also showed us the first time Gordon meets Eli. He played this part 3 times to show how the characters act depending on the player's behavior. After a bit of chat, Eli says "Feel free to look around", and so Bill started looking at stuff. For example, he saw a framed picture of Eli's family and Eli started talkign about his family. Oh and there was an alien working for Eli...

Anyway, he spoke about the SDK, that it would come out THIS WEEK. It was also written on his Powerpoint presentation.

The remaining of the presentation was 3D developping stuff I didn't really understand, not being in the 3D business.



And by the way, did anybody notice the HL2 fonts in Counterstrike Beta directories? In the font file are pictures for all the weapons!!!

 

[DarkGhost86]

AH! Finally! Is It free? or what?

 

[OCybrManO]

the thing is, is alyx seems to be in scripted sequences. if everyone starts making all their models 7500 polies, they will get them animated, ingame, then realize that they will have to go back and reoptimize and rebind EVERYTHING. remember to keep your models about 1500 - 2000, unless you have complete controll over where the models are going to be. mp modders, keep this number tight, don't assume you can have 20 7500 poly models running around in hl2, you can even look at the combine and tell its not 7500. valve put that out, and it misled alot of people.

They said that was the number for important story characters (like Kleiner, Eli Vance, Alyx Vance, the G-Man, etc). They never said every person in the game would be made up of 7500 polygons. Also, don't forget that HL2 models can have many LODs... so, if you wanted to do extra modeling and UVW work, you could have even the most insignificant characters look hi-poly up close but cut them down to lower detail models at appropriate distances.