Gabe Newell Talks Half-Life 2

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.

Comments

Scalability

[Wuukie]

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.

Re:Scalability

[wolrahnaes]

you'd be surprised what you can make work. i can run any game that doesn't blatantly reject my hardware on my P2-350 w/ a Rage 128.

They actually play semi-decent most of the time. Age of Mythology causes my neighbors Duron 800@833 w/ Ti4200 to creep occasionally, and even that holds a playable ~12 FPS on my machine

One observation, and one desire

[wowbagger]

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.