Part 2
Warming up the bone saw
Mapmakers make the game! So who do you have making maps, and drop some hints and tell us a little about one map or campaign each of them is doing.
I roped in Ian to answer this one, since he's the map team co-ordinator.
[Ian]
[/Ian]
Thanks Ian!
Get ready for my personal favorite (and remember, you heard it here first!):
There was mention a while back that you were trying to get Ramirez (author of CanalZone) to make some maps for you.
David 'Ramirez' Sawyer has been hired, and he's working with a partner, Matt Armstrong, on a large command point map that is quite a few notches beyond Canal Zone. This has been officially announced right here ;) Feel free to send him balloons.
WOOHOO! Congratulations to you both, and I'm sure we will all be blown away with this entire mapmaking team, some of the biggest names I have seen grouped together in a long time.
Will you have a map with, for instance, a bridge, and on either side of the bridge would be a fort, and then you'd have to go up stairs via, say, a ramp room, through some open area that can also lead to the balcony, and down a spiral staircase / ladder / ramp to get to a basement area where can be found a flag which must be returned to your home sniper balcony? Or, to put it a different way, 95% of all TF maps are variations on the same map. Will TF2 contain yet another variation on this theme?
Not if there's a god!
*Collective sigh of relief*
Multiplayer -- what are going to be the multiplayer benefits of using Half Life over other game engines? Any innovative concepts or ones based on QuakeWorld? (More of a Half Life question, but it fits)
HL's multiplayer base is built off QuakeWorld-style client-side prediction, so you'll get all of QW's fantastic net play, as well as a few refinements that Yahn Bernier's been working hard on providing. Also, additions such as the Client-Side DLLs allow us to cut down even further on net traffic. For TF2's perspective, we're very happy with Valve's decision to build HL's networking this way. As you can understand, when we were engine searching for TF2, the multiplayer capability was something we were very concerned about. Quake/QuakeWorld is the only "engine" that's really stood the test of time in terms of its networking.
Other than networking, what are the advantages of going with Half-Life over Quake2? In a nutshell.
The modelling system is a big bonus. The memory it saves allows us to have unique models for each class, which wouldn't have been possible in Q2 without raising the memory requirement to 32 meg. The extra graphics goodies (decals, beams, shockwaves, tracers, etc) combined with the enhanced sound engine will make the battle environment more immersive. The client side DLL makes the client HUD more powerful, more customisable, and less network-intensive. The multiplayer launcher, while not being part of the actual engine, is another bonus HL provides us. The ease at which it allows players to get into multiplayer gaming means there should be more people on the servers than ever before.
Would you have been able to work with the same interface system and HUD that you have been doing in Half Life?
The HUD in the Q2 was similar in design, but a lot uglier in execution. The server only ever "ticks" at 0.1 second, so updates to the client's HUD would only ever happen at that speed. Smooth scrolling client menus aren't possible in Q2, for example.
Did you have to shake the people tailing you to the airport from TFCon so they wouldn't find out you were flying to Seattle instead of Melbourne? Or did you explain Seattle as being a stopover? (TFS went from the TF Con in Oklahoma to Seattle to hole up with Valve, but had to keep it under wraps)
*grin*
I can't remember exactly how that went... it didn't really
come up. I remember we told a few people there that we were going to
Seattle, but I don't remember anyone actually asking us why.
What sort of player skins? Multiple, showing damage or armament?
We're probably going to be providing "damaged" skins. Armament's taken care of by the model itself, not the skin.
With the skeletal animation system, are model animations going to be more intricate and lifelike?
I think that's more dependant on the modeller than the system ;) But one of the benefits of skeletal animation is that it takes less memory to store the frames of animation. So we can provide many more frames of animation is less memory, allowing us to do more intricate and smoother animation.
Lately we've seen a lot of people crop up that think they can do a better job than what TFS has been doing with TF -- what sort of things have you guys as a team gotten better at as far as creating entertainment in general? How is the Valve team fitting in with this?
There's no doubt we learnt a lot during the TF1 development. Some of the people who're now creating their own class based mods feel that its easy to create a bunch of classes and weapons. And they're right. The hard part is making them fun to play for any extended period of time. A variety of playing styles is one of the keys to this. In the early days of TF the 5 classes (scout, sniper, soldier, demoman, and medic) still had their grounds heavily in combat. We began to work towards providing styles of play that were completely unlike any other FPS out at the time, believing that there were a large number of players who liked Quake not because they had the opportunity to kill a lot of people, but because they liked the social interaction of working with a team of people. The engineer and spy classes were aimed at these sort of people. They don't need to have a great ping, or good aim, or fast reflexes to be a valued member of their team. In many of the TF-mods I see coming out, they've de-emphasised this variety, and pushed back towards the combat.
Building classes itself was something we got better at. A common mistake some people seem to make is in their class creation method. We learnt fairly early on that the way to create a class wasn't to create a bunch of weapons in a common theme. We created classes based upon roles in a team. The Pyro class, for instance, was created as a light skirmish class, useful as someone to position in no-mans-land or as a first line of defence. Once we'd decided this, his weaponry was built accordingly. We wanted him to find it easy to damage an enemy, but hard to kill. His weaponry is a nice mix of long and short range, all low-damage but with large-radius/rapid-refire. But we never thought that this was the only role the Pyro would be good at, or that all players should play him like that... it was just the guiding design we used. And on a side note, that was why he was "removed" in TF2. It wasn't that we disliked him, it was simply that his role in the team was not needed... it's now being filled by other classes.
It's interesting to see that changes between TF and TF2 were made, not on the basis of weapons or other such details, but on what role each part plays in the whole experience. Seeing as this game is being built from the ground up for the multiplayer, team-oriented experience, I can't help but believe that this product is going to take us beyond our wildest expectations ...
We also learnt to listen to our players. And this is harder than it sounds, because sometimes listening to your players means not doing what they ask. Especially in a class based game. There were times when I'd get 5 emails in a row saying the soldier was too tough, followed by another 5 saying he was too weak. Everyone thinks their class could be just a little bit tougher ;) These days we still read everything we get sent, and while we don't reply to it all, it all affects TF2. Simply the act of reading it makes us think about it.
Valve has helped us a fair bit in learning to be self-critical. We made a lot of mistakes in TF1, and some of them are visible and some aren't. The only real thing you can do wrong isn't to make mistakes, its to not learn from them.
And as a final comment, which I can't resist ;) Many people might be claiming they can do a better job than TFS at TF, and maybe they can... but ultimately, they're just making TF with different weapons and classes. I still haven't seen any real gameplay changes.
The TF community has heard from a reliable source (who will remain unnamed) that John Cook is, in fact, a big wet nok. Is this true?
Uh... why, sure.
(What's a nok?)
Holed up in that tiny cubicle, coding away since God knows when ... no social contact for months ... doesn't even have time to read the message boards ... or the Knews ...