The Crafting of Half-Life 2 - Episode Two

Monday, November 12. 2007

The Crafting of Half-Life 2 - Episode Two

Now that they have some time to stop and think, the folks behind Half-Life 2: Episode Two are making the interview rounds. Halflife2.net has up a discussion with HL2 scribe Marc Laidlaw. They discuss some of the world-shaking events in this latest chapter of the game, with plenty of spoilers. (So be forewarned.) RPS, meanwhile, has an interview with project lead David Speyrer. The developer talks John Walker through the process of playtesting at Valve, what it's like to work at such a creative company, and the decisions they made regarding DX9 vs. DX10 tradeoffs during the dev process.

"RPS: You chose to not use DX10 for the new games. Why was that? DS: For this set of products we decided to use some DX10 features, but not through the API itself. It's because we didn't want to be Vista only. We didn't feel there was an enough of an install base for the Orange Box launch. I'm sure we will use it - it's pretty much inevitable. But this time, things like the hardware face morphing is implemented via a back-door API. RPS: DX9 can do what DX10 offers then? DS: Yeah, but through driver-back doors. And I'm sure we'll rethink it at some point. For this roll out it was fine to do it as we did."

Check out the roundup of interviews at Slashdot.