> One of my dev team somehow got word that the next HL patch might include > some if not all of the engine enhancements from CS:CZ, mainly the added > model capabilities like alpha maps. I've not heard any mention of this > from the usual sources but it seems possible now that CS:CZ has been > handed over to Ritual Entertainment and had an addtional delay added to > it's release. Since Ritual aren't usually affiliated with Valve (unlike > gearbox who tend to work hand in hand with them) and the extended delay it > would seem to make sense to make the enhancements now as the work has been > done plus we wont be seeing CS:CZ for another 3 months now at the > earliest. > > Any comments from you folks at Gearbox about this or does this come under > the restrictions of your NDA so you can't speak about it with the public?
Even though I work at Gearbox, I'm not an official spokesman for them so don't take this as "a Gearbox sanctioned reply". It's just my personal opinion, so take it for what it's worth (practically nothing). I'm not sure what Ritual has or has not done with the Half-Life engine in support of CZ, but there were changes made to the engine by Gearbox in support of the CZ work that they did (99% of which was before I went to work for Gearbox). Valve always had access to the work that Gearbox was doing, and I presume Valve always had access to the work that Rogue did before Gearbox picked up the project. Any changes made to the engine to support MODs or expansions (like OpFor, for example) would be available in future releases of the engine. I've never known Valve to remove a feature from the engine, only expand it to include new features, so backing out an existing feature probably won't happen unless that conflicts with something that Valve and/or Ritual REALLY wants to put in and there's no way to support both. In some cases, this would break any MODs that used that feature and Valve doesn't want to do that. Whether or not Valve and/or Ritual preserves engine changes made by Gearbox (or Rogue) will be completely up to Valve and Ritual, Gearbox doesn't really have any control over this as far as I know. Ritual may want to rip out many of the changes made by Gearbox and replace it with their own. Ritual might also want to preserve all of the changes made by Gearbox so that they can concentrate on game content and not worry too much about engine changes. Again, only Valve or Ritual can tell you what gets done in the end. My guess is that you won't know what changes have been made until the game is released. Usually the release notes contain a list of changes that tells you what features were added and what bugs were fixed. From this list of feature changes you can sometimes determine what types of engine changes were made (for example being able to render view models transparently). One thing that I find interesting is that Ritual is using QERadiant instead of Hammer. Perhaps Ritual's level designers (all hail Levelord!) are just more familiar with QERadiant and didn't want to have to learn a different interface, but I wonder if there were any missing features from QERadiant that had to be ported from Hammer to support CZ. Jeffrey "botman" Broome _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlcoders
