Interview with Valve's Doug Lombardi

Apos

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Gamespy has posted a revealing interview with Doug Lombardi; Valve's marketing director. The discussion involved things such as AI, the materials system, and... moving clouds? It's a worthwhile interview, and even features a few new tidbits of information about the game (including a bit more insight into the storyline).

Among other things, Lombardi confirms that the game will have Dolby 5.1 sound, saying that they will migrate to Creative's 6.1 standard as it becomes widely available.

Multiplayer was also briefly discussed, resulting in some exciting new information:

"GameSpy: Finally, can you share any details on what we might expect in the multiplayer arena from Half-Life 2?

Doug Lombardi: Only that at this point we're not releasing too many details about the gameplay modes. Valve is very committed to online gaming. Our Source engine was built to support a number of online gameplay modes, and Half-Life 2 will ship with full multiplayer gameplay for at least 32 players."


Go check out the full interview here.
 
The question is, how gracious the HL2 netcode against the dial-up users.

For an example the RotCW: Enemy Terrority completly unplayable with my 64k ISDN connection (around up to 4 players are playable, in 8pl are laggy, 8+ player are goddamn lag...)
 
RotCW was really that bad on ISDN (what sort of connection is that anyway- i don't really remember)?

Of course, when battles between several marines v aliens start in Natural Selection, I'm pretty much in for a prediction-laden lagshow too. There's only so much you can do with that little bandwidth, especially with voice channels going. Gabe did say that they completely rewrote the netcode to be much more efficient, but seeing as how there are so many new objects to track (physics) I can't see how there could be any sort of net gain. We'll have to wait and see what they annouce I guess. Why are they holding back so long?
 
Thank the entire news team: you never know who posted or contributed to what, and there's often some shuffling around of updates.
 
Originally posted by Apos
Hey, but now we know what the conspiracy is all about: http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2622&perpage=15&pagenumber=4#post52357

Also note that for the last two Valve comments we've seen, they've said that the min requirements are 800mHz, not 700mHz. Which is too bad, cus that's 100mHz too much for my old computer :) I'm building a Dell! (Only it wont have anything to do with Dell)

Well if they can get the AA issues fixed then they can pimp ATI all day long, for all I care. :)

As far the the processor, I have a 1ghz PIII so that should be OK. I don't know how processor-intensive the physics are though.
 
Originally posted by Apos
RotCW was really that bad on ISDN (what sort of connection is that anyway- i don't really remember)?

The ISDN are an Dial-up connection, 64k in normal or 128k in dual-mode. But the dual-mode means double price too (i pay around 100-110$/month for the 64k connection - thanks for the local telefon-multi's...) :(

And yes, the RotCW - Enemy Terrority are REALY that bad with Dial-up connection....

(But the original RotCW are not that bad, i play often the first multi-demo, and it's has a great netcode, that's why i wandering the ET's bad experience...)
 
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