The Whiteboard incident

Mr-Fusion

Mr-Fusion

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Who's in the mood for some over-analyses of a possibly pointless observation? I sure am!

http://games.telenet.be/images/reviews/screenshots/174s_22.scripteditor2.jpg

TheWart said:
In screen number 20, on the whiteboard appears to be dates with goals on them. (Eli's acting, get final breen, etc).

It goes through 6/3, so the game probably owont go gold before then
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figge said:
6/3 DISK... ? =o
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ElFuhrer said:
It looks like the board says "6/3 - Start disco"
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Jackal hit said:
for that 6/3 thing... it looks more like "start disc..." to me, than "start disc."(emphasis on "...") i'm pretty sure they'd write disc as disk. so i think it's something about "start discovery" "start discography" "start disco" "start discount, discoid, discontinue or any of these following things:
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Start disc manufacturing?
Start disc replication
 
i think we're giving too much attention to this board,,, we're not even sure what they really meant...
 
MaddMexican said:
It looks like an R after disc.
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This kind of stuff is the reason I left these forums a few months back...always thinking that the smallest thing could be the biggest thing...
 
Taking things a tad seriously aren't we d8cam? It's just a friendly little over-analyses of a tiny little thing :D
 
d8cam said:
This kind of stuff is the reason I left these forums a few months back...always thinking that the smallest thing could be the biggest thing...
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How about you just leave for another few months? Whiney bitch.
 
RTFMish said:
How about you just leave for another few months? Whiney bitch.
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hey now, let's relax. there's no law against thinking overanalyzing is silly.
 
I personally think that June 3 is too early...
Can they finish the game and start shipping in just a month? Meanwhile they have to prepare for E3 stuff.
 
RTFMish said:
How about you just leave for another few months? Whiney bitch.
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Wow nice to see how much the community has grown since I have left back in November.
 
It's not "disk"

It's DISTR
 
Considering how thats the animator's part of the office, I don't think that 6/3 is the 'distribution date'. It could just be time frames in content that he is animating. Maybe it could be dates, dates that he set up to work on stuff. I doubt they'd plan out production dates and stuff like that next to the animator's workspace, just doesn't make sense.
 
i still say it's discr. that letter after the "disc" part looks kinda like an R, notice how similar it is in shape to the R in "start."

kinda like a quickly written R. and i believe the guy that wrote the little article on that belgian website (the lector or whatever that got to visit valve), where he said that they're scenes
 

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actually, it could very well be a lower case t, jackal. looks like one in fact.

start distr..ibution on steam, perhaps?

edit: definitely looks like a t, you can even see the little line at the top

"t"
 
but the rest of the writing is all caps... no reason to use that random lower case T
 
I still say 6/3 is the target date to start work on their final headcrab species. They have normal, fast, poison, and they will be working on the most exciting one: the Disco headcrab.
 
for that 6/3 thing... it looks more like "start disc..." to me, than "start disc."(emphasis on "...") i'm pretty sure they'd write disc as disk.
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Notice the rest of the writing is all in captiols. Making it very easily "DISK". Seeing as how I write in caps myself, its really easy for me to see how a few of my uppercase 'K's can be seen as uppercase 'R's.
 
They probable wrote that stuff on the board especially for the photo.
 
ORIGINAL whiteboard photo

That image was edited by Valve and censored, here's the original photo that was taken.
 

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Im curious as to who 'BF' is, theres no one at VALVe with those initials. Atleast, no one listed on the 'people' page and VALVe's website.
 
LOL, thats a pretty nifty piece of photoshop.

anyway, my opinion is that it has nothing to do with the game going gold, but that isn't to say that can't happen soon.
 
i told you guys in another thread they are just a couple of D&D (black mesa setting) notes.

EDIT-> either that or magic cards, were 6/3 is the vortigon setting (6 attack, 3 defense)
 
6/3 is definately way too early. Usually the beta stage takes a month on so at least, and they are not even there yet. The problem with this board is that Valve has all sorts of internal needs and processes we know nothing about. It could well be "start distribution" but that phrase actually then refers to some internal process that's fairly minor, like the distribution of final art textures to mappers, or distribution of a special update to steam, or.... just about anything. We're dealing with too much ambiguity here: we need more hints. :)
 
Apos said:
6/3 is definately way too early. Usually the beta stage takes a month on so at least, and they are not even there yet. The problem with this board is that Valve has all sorts of internal needs and processes we know nothing about. It could well be "start distribution" but that phrase actually then refers to some internal process that's fairly minor, like the distribution of final art textures to mappers, or distribution of a special update to steam, or.... just about anything. We're dealing with too much ambiguity here: we need more hints. :)
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they're way past beta, they're in zulu-delta!
 
While the whiteboard probably means nothing, June 3rd is not an unreasonable date for them to go Gold.

Also remember, as soon as the game goes Gold, Valve can start distributing it via Steam (although they may not allow activation until the retail date - but it would make sense for them to it prior to that to make Steam purchasing seem more attractive)
 
Apos said:
6/3 is definately way too early. Usually the beta stage takes a month on so at least, and they are not even there yet. The problem with this board is that Valve has all sorts of internal needs and processes we know nothing about. It could well be "start distribution" but that phrase actually then refers to some internal process that's fairly minor, like the distribution of final art textures to mappers, or distribution of a special update to steam, or.... just about anything. We're dealing with too much ambiguity here: we need more hints. :)
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Apos i've followed your discussion on the opinion of terminology regarding alpha/beta/pre-gold etc. and agree with what you say^ but I was just thinking: Valve don't ever seem to work like anybody else and they've had their code under construction for 6 years now. Could it not be that they're at a sort of 'pre-gold' code stage but only an 'alpha' or 'beta' stage with design? (perhaps in the same way that a modder might not need to check any code, just design his game based around the complete source engine?
 
I think it is probably a bit unreasonable. They would basically have only a month to complete the game, to be completely code final, before they start distributing it out via Steam with the trickle feature. It doesn't even sound like they've finalized the game's content just yet, or the features it'll ship with (they weren't sure about HDR, for example). And once you are done mucking about with the game, bug testing can be a very unpredictable process: can take two weeks, can take two months. You never know until you start: so a hard date would seem a bit strange at this point. For all we know, "start distribution" could mean: start distributing the game to the QA people for testing. I really, really, doubt that 6/3 will be when they start pre-loading through Steam.

Though I guess if some content is basically done, they could start pre-loading things like encrypted textures and skins long before the game is even done, just to spread the bandwidth cruch a little more evenly.
 
Could it not be that they're at a sort of 'pre-gold' code stage but only an 'alpha' or 'beta' stage with design? (perhaps in the same way that a modder might not need to check any code, just design his game based around the complete source engine?
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It's possible, and I'm sure developers would love for that to be the case, but the thing about code is that it's almost inevitably never done done, and even minor design changes can throw it all out of whack again. No matter how stable you think the code is, when you finally think you are done with the game, you play it through and experience a horrible crash bug. Where did it come from? Who knows: but it's back to the drawing board, hunting down the problem. So I doubt they are going to truly feel like ANYTHING is really just about gold until they actually have a content complete game and have tested it out extensively to make sure it all truly works.
 
It just occured to me, ive really learnt alot about the game design process thanks to Half-life 2. I could so go out and make my own game with everything ive learnt:)
 
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