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One of the craziest things about Half-Life 2 is when it ships, mod makers and game programmers will have free acces to a full-blown SDK(Software Development Kit) that basically lets people make there own games based on on Valves HL2technology. In doing so, the Valve crew hope to foster a sort of independent game scene.
The one tool that excites Newell the most is Face Poser, a scarily easy-to-use character behaiver tool that does anything you could hope to do with a computer generated avatar. It even does most of the "hard stuff" automatically-record a .wav file, for example and Face Poser will lip synch your character for you. "Bill Fletcher [one of the artists] was in the feature film department at Disney," says Newell, "and he said we have better tools for building characters and animating them in Face Poser than he had at Disney."
Newell hopes the mod community does what he feels a lot of developers cannot. "It feels to me like its too risky for a lot of professional game-development teams to do innovative stuff. Budgets are so high, schedules are so tight and they're in these situations where they're not going to push crazy ideas."
Speaking of crazy ideas:"for Half-Life 2, i had this design in my head of these things that lived on surfaces of things," says Newell, "so when you were looking at things you wouldn't always be shure that one of these creatures weren't there. And you could transport them, and some of them could only live in wood and (this is an old idea) you had carry them with you. Basically they would come out of the wood and talk to you...I thought it was really cool...sometimes the rest of team has to talke me down."