Hago un paste de la entrevista que le han hecho al programador principal:
Unless you live under a rock, you've undoubtably heard of Gabe Newell, the man behind one of the most ground breaking games ever made, Half Life. He and his team are on the eve of releasing would could quite easily be the best damn game we've laid our eyes on - bar none. We had the chance to catch up with this incredibly busy and talented man for a few questions. Thank you Gabe for taking the time to chat with us.
GD: Why DirectX9 over OpenGL 2.0?
Gabe: OpenGL 2.0 isn't as mature as DX9.
GD: It's obvious that the Source Engine takes advantage of certain DX9 features, can you explain what those features are?
Gabe: High-dynamic range rendering (HDR), bump-mapped characters, soft shadows, improved full-scene anti-aliasing are the most interesting. In the future our enhancements to Source will all be DX9 specific (we won't be creating DX8 equivalents).
GD: Are there any DX8.1-class shaders as well?
Yes.
Gabe: For example water rendering is better on 8.1 than on 8.0.
GD: It's been announced that HL2 will make its way onto consoles - how much graphical detail will have to be stripped out to accommodate that move?
Gabe: Depends upon the console, of course. For an X-Box version, you can expect to see the DX8 level of functionality, modulo what we have to do to the art to get it to fit.
GD: Talk to us a bit about your team's excitement level regarding HL2. Certainly developing what could easily be considered the biggest follow-up game in history has its amount of stress?
Gabe: I'm not really able to reflect on this until after we ship. Right now we have pretty violent mood swings between euphoria and despair, and that's just waiting in line at the espresso stand.
GD: ATI has been blatantly obvious about its relationship with Valve. Can you tell us a bit about how that came to be?
Gabe: We've had a lot of relationships over the years, with companies like Intel and AMD, with NVIDIA and ATI, and so on. What we look for are relationships that help us build better products or are in the best interests of our customers. Once we started to understand the performance of the various chipsets running DX9, it became pretty clear to us who we should work with to deliver the best hardware/software combination to our customers.
GD: What's your relationship with NVIDIA been like in light of all the recent ATI press over HL2?
Gabe: Valve and NVIDIA both know that we have a lot of shared customers, and we've invested a lot more time optimizing that rendering path to ensure the best experience for the most customers.
GD: Do you think it's safe to assume that the majority of the next 2-5 years worth of First Person Shooters will be built either on the Source or Doom3 Engine's?
Gabe: I have no idea how to predict something like that. We certainly have tried to make sure Source will be a good platform for the next generation of MODs and games, and we hope that more than just first person action games can be built on top of that technology.
GD: Where do you see PC graphic's technology 2-3 years from now?
Gabe: The next generation will basically bring the pixel and vertex shader flexibility to geometry, we'll have many more passes per scene, and each pass will be doing more interesting stuff. We'll be doing lots of image post-processing, we probably will do deferred rendering to some degree, and we'll be doing tone mapping. Motion blur and depth of field will be used by lots of applications. Real-time radiosity may or may not be happening in this time frame. If we're right about this, then Source should be a very good engine for taking advantage of these functions.
GD: What will that technology mean to Valve and what it's capable of?
Gabe: We're still trying to understand how this allows us to build better games.
GD: Now that you're getting ready to embark on the release of HL2, what's next for you and the team? Any vacation-time in sight?
Gabe: TF-2 is kinda an open issue for us. We have lots to do.
GD: What drives you?
Gabe: The people I work with. I love working as part of this team.
GD: What game(s) are you currently playing outside of your own?
Gabe: Warcraft: The Frozen Throne.
GD: Any upcoming games outside of HL2 that you're really looking forward to?
Gabe: Doom 3. Pikmin 2.
GD: What are the kinds of things we, as gamers, can look forward to seeing from Valve in its future endeavors?
Gabe: Let's just get Half-Life 2 out ...