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First Person Shooters (Games) PC Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Gabe Newell Talks Half-Life 2 24

Posted by simoniker from the hurrah-for-city-destroying-tripods dept.
Thanks to Voodoo Extreme for pointing to GamingNext's new interview with Gabe Newell of Valve Software - he's the managing director and co-founder of the company currently working on Half-Life 2. Topics include the scalability of the Source graphics engine: "A lot of the tricky work in Source is getting it to work across a wide variety of scenes (indoor, urban, outdoor) and across a wide variety of hardware. Not only do you have to run acceptably fast on a TNT or an Intel 810 based PC, but you have to fully exploit the capabilities of the current and next generation high-end cards." On a related note, the 500+MB Half-Life 2 gameplay/engine demo (BitTorrent link) from E3 is a must-download if you haven't seen it yet.
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Gabe Newell Talks Half-Life 2 More

Gabe Newell Talks Half-Life 2

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  • Scalability (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Wuukie ( 47391 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @05:46AM (#6046185)
    Wow, Gabe said HL2 should run on a P-III 800MHz and a DX6 class graphics card. That's amazing. I wonder does it sacrifice physics calculations, ie. do objects begin to act weird when low on computing power. At least I'd think the physics seen in the demonstrations need a lot of cpu. Maybe it penalizes graphics more.

    With a bit of luck, I'll get to play it with my Duron 1.2GHz. If not, then I'll have to re-prioritize savings in favor of HL2.
    • The engine apparently makes heavy use of dynamic LOD on just about everything in the game. Not only are far away objects given a gradually scaling lower LOD, but it also scales down the more characters are in a scene. Basically, it targets a particular stready framerate, and scales down features to acheive it. Same thing in multiplayer: far away enemies don't send out all their animation frames, saving bandwidth (though I wonder how that'll work for a sniper zoom?)
      • Some games just move your eyeball down an imaginary line running out of the end of your gun. gives the impression of zoom because the center of the turning circle is still your body. All distance calculations are handled normally for your camera eye position.
    • Just try to get a system capable of running Doom III. Even if you fall short you'll certainly been able to play Half-Life 2.
    • i think the point was to use the hardware to its limit, that takes more work than just building a game to run on the latest and greatest
  • 'Nuff said.

  • One observation, and one desire (Score:3, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) * on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @06:47AM (#6046391) Homepage Journal
    The observation:
    Has anybody else noticed how cadaverous the new G-Man looks? Especially his eyes - he looks like a dead man walking. Hmmmm.

    The hope:
    Either that HL2 runs under Wine, or that Valve releases a native version.
    • Yeah, he is looking a little deader. In the original game I always thought he was supposed to look like one of those old style "men in black" from the 50s. The ones who would show up at your house and tell you that you DIDN'T see that flying saucer and whatnot. He has that sorta G-Man crossed with an insurance salesman look...and nothing can be scarier than that.

  • HL2 and CS2! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Ese L0C0 ( 674429 ) on Tuesday May 27, 2003 @09:14AM (#6047472) Journal
    As long as I don't have to spend 500$ to be able to play it and it look badass...then i will be happy...... But if i have to spend 499$...well you gotta do what you gotta do.... I can't wait to see what they are gonna do with Counter Strike 2...
  • ...on a DX6 machine?

    I work on a game engine for a living. When people ask for these features I say "sure, but you will need some serious horsepower to make it work." The people at Valve are making me look bad. ;)
  • A friend played it on his laptop, at school. I fell on my knees and cried. This makes Doom3 look like pong (in graphics, physics, gameplay, and others).
  • He makes it sound like there is NO multiplay option at all.. surely they can't be that silly?!?!?!
  • From what I've seen in the demo videos about, the most impressive things about HL2 are not the graphics as such, but things like the physics and AI. The graphics are no slouch, but the real innovation is in stuff like being able to throw things around realistically and be killed by really smart enemies (much like the first Half Life). All this makes me think that having a fast CPU would be more important than the latest video card, which is great as CPUs are a lot cheaper.

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