Black Mesa Interview
Some of the modernisations are very subtle - small additions take nothing away from the original character.
YouGamers: How long before we will be able to play the game? Approximately how much is done? Rose: I'd love to give you an exact date. Unfortunately, I'm just going to say it's done when it's done. We've given out a couple of estimates on our boards and publically that I can't recall at the moment. We are making substantial progress in various areas, though; levels are starting to come together and become playable and we've got some nifty new pieces of code in the works, not to mention the ever-steady flow of new assets such as props and textures.
YouGamers: Are you planning an open beta test? Rose: Most likely, no. I'd expect that we'd need to bring on separate people just to go through applications for beta-testing, because we'd receive so many. It just wouldn't be practical. We'll probably invite helpful members from our community to test, as well as other qualified members and people in the industry, or people who have done professional testing and can quickly evaluate our builds and work with our bug-tracking and repository software.
YouGamers: I understand that Valve asked you to remove "Source" from the original name of the mod, to avoid confusion on whether it's an official Valve product or not. Did you receive any other kind of support from the Valve guys? Rose: We had talks at one point about working with the original sources to some Half-Life levels, but to my knowledge we didn't pull through on that one, since we're making them from scratch anyway. Other than that we've been working as a separate team, although we've been pointed out in a Steam update at one point. I expect they'd like to see what we've done with their game when we're done.
YouGamers: The development of BM has been... well... tormented. The source code was leaked, the forums hacked (three times, if memory serves me well), website also hacked (even if I read that the attack was directed to your service provider, it affected you as well). You never think these things can happen to you until they DO happen to you - were you discouraged by all this? How's the situation now? Rose: As I mentioned before, it's more of a nuisance than anything. We salvaged what we could and evaluated our options. I don't believe it's ever been an idea to stop development, although these hacking efforts did slow down production for a while. We're all clear now, with a secure, private host for our build repository, wiki, and development boards.
Nine years of graphics and hardware development means that the perennial favourites, Headcrab Zombies, can now look stunning.
YouGamers: One of the funny things about modding tools is that almost every game must have them, but only a few of them actually catch the attention of the modding community, if any attention at all. I find pretty odd, for example, that games like Serious Sam 2 or Painkiller (both with beautiful and powerful engines) are virtually absent from the mod scene. Why is that, in your opinion? What makes you prefer a game (and tools) over another? Rose: I think some of it has to do with accessibility, and some of it to do with commercial success, among other factors. Hammer is a simple and intuitive editor to get into if you've just bought the game, know nothing about asset creation, and want to start making levels, and the development wiki provided by Valve is an immense help. To my knowledge, neither Serious Sam 2 or Painkiller have such tools or support by their developers, and I think if they did, then we might see more assets or mods being created for them. Likewise, I don't believe either SS2 or Painkiller have enjoyed the type of commercial success that Half-Life, Counter-Strike, or their source counterparts have had.
Related Stuff Games: Half-Life 2
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