Valve’s Doug Lombardi talks Portal 2, Left 4 Dead and future plans

At the recent EA games showcase in london, CVG sat down with Valve’s Dough Lombardi to discuss Valve’s upcoming game Left 4 Dead. Lombardi also talked about Portal 2, Source engine and Valve’s expansion into new genres. Here’s a snip:

How much has the Source engine been updated for L4D since Half-Life 2?

Lombardi: I would say that almost half the code has been developed since Half-Life 2 was released. We introduced new lighting effects, we did a lot of character animation work for HL2: Episode 2, added support for multi-core PCs, we worked on the physics for Portal and new AI added for L4D.

We look at Source as a set of tools, not necessarily as an engine that we’ve built that we’ll use until it expires and throw away. We see it as this organic thing that we’re constantly tweaking and building. It’s more of a toolkit than a set engine.

Source SDK Update Released

Updates to Source SDK have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Enhancements

• Added a drop-down list in the SDK Launcher that allows the user to switch between The Orange Box engine and the Half-Life 2: Episode One engine
• Two new lighting preview modes are available in Hammer
• Models are automatically centered when loaded in Faceposer

Bug Fixes

• Fixed crash and corrupt configurations for users that don’t own any Orange Box games
• Resolved issues with building models for any games that that use the Half-Life 2:Episode 1 engine
• Fixed crashes in Hammer and Faceposer when HL2 is set to the active game

Known Issues

• Cannot create shortcuts to Hammer, Faceposer, and Model Viewer
• Linux makefiles for the Orange Box source code are incomplete and will be updated in the next release
• The Particle Editor is not presently included in the Source SDK
• SDK shader code only included with mods built to use Half-Life 2:Episode 1