The guys over at 1Up has posted up an interesting article covering all of the Orange Box's aspects from how the developers felt about it and where it's all headed. Take a look:
GFW: A year ago, you argued that you'll evolve Source indefinitely. Has your attitude changed at all? Will Valve ever build another engine?
Gabe Newell: What we've seen confirms our thinking quite a bit, that shipping incremental improvements to an engine is a far better strategy than throwing everything away and starting over from scratch with each new game. The engineering answer is clear: We're improving A.I., rendering, physics, and authoring a lot faster than when we were first developing Source. And it runs fast, right? Much of the mail I get is like, "I can't believe how good this looks and how fast it runs. I downloaded blahblah- blah beta and it runs at a quarter of Source's framerate, and Source still looks better. I thought these were supposed to be fabulous, all-singing, all-dancing engines. They're just slow and not that good-looking." I think that's a consequence of building on a polished engine and picking your problems carefully, so that you're not spending 90 percent of your budget just to get your first pixel up on the screen again. Instead, you're spending your time making the thing better.
In theory, I suppose we could encounter a problem where we have to start over from scratch. For example, there isn't a specific problem today that we look at and say, "Oh, my god -- we need to rethink everything. The most likely case where that would occur is with this transition from heterogeneous to homogeneous computing, since Source was designed to work in an environment where you have a CPU and a GPU. Other than that, there aren't many things that we look at that lead us to say, "Let's start over."
Be sure to read the full article here.
GFW: A year ago, you argued that you'll evolve Source indefinitely. Has your attitude changed at all? Will Valve ever build another engine?
Gabe Newell: What we've seen confirms our thinking quite a bit, that shipping incremental improvements to an engine is a far better strategy than throwing everything away and starting over from scratch with each new game. The engineering answer is clear: We're improving A.I., rendering, physics, and authoring a lot faster than when we were first developing Source. And it runs fast, right? Much of the mail I get is like, "I can't believe how good this looks and how fast it runs. I downloaded blahblah- blah beta and it runs at a quarter of Source's framerate, and Source still looks better. I thought these were supposed to be fabulous, all-singing, all-dancing engines. They're just slow and not that good-looking." I think that's a consequence of building on a polished engine and picking your problems carefully, so that you're not spending 90 percent of your budget just to get your first pixel up on the screen again. Instead, you're spending your time making the thing better.
In theory, I suppose we could encounter a problem where we have to start over from scratch. For example, there isn't a specific problem today that we look at and say, "Oh, my god -- we need to rethink everything. The most likely case where that would occur is with this transition from heterogeneous to homogeneous computing, since Source was designed to work in an environment where you have a CPU and a GPU. Other than that, there aren't many things that we look at that lead us to say, "Let's start over."
Be sure to read the full article here.