As everyone knows Juggz, Sarge and Hendy went to the Valve Headquarters in Seattle. The meeting started with Gabe Newell ushering us into a meeting room with a large screen. He showed us some of the E3 videos and a new video showing some new spectacular mapping and bump-mapping of an alien that players will confront in HL2. We then discussed RnL and the status of the mod, Juggz and I explained the polishing of our current work and when we get our hands on the SDK, we will then start on coding and mapping.

We then were passed on to a guy named Marc Laidlaw who is the Writer/Game Designer of HL2. He automatically showed a great interest in RnL, asking many questions about our progress and what our site was, promising to check it out later when he had more time. He told us a bit of what is involved in Half-Life 2 and how the new sequel will have a more graceful end for more possible sequels or entrances for mods wanting to elaborate more on the HL2 storyline.

We then made our way to Doug Wood, he is the guy to talk about XSI. His job was working on voice syncing and animations and he showed us the basic operations of the facial animations in XSI. If anyone has seen the XSI videos, he showed us pretty much what was in those.

We then were passed on to one of the mappers of HL2, John Guthrie. He showed us some amazing stuff with the new version of Hammer. He demonstrated how easy it is to create terrain and texture it. He also showed us how well the blending tool works when creating transitions between two textures, like rock and grass. It was very impressive how quick everything can be created. The new version of Hammer is far more user-friendly than the previous versions.

We then went with Gabe to see the DoD team. We met Matt Boone and Kelly Thornton and Jakob Jungels and discussed fellow ups and downs in modding, joked around a bit and then we even got to suggest some ideas for DoD: Source. Some of the ideas were basically wider areas/bigger maps, more enterable buildings in order to avoid fire fights (to avoid being trapped in predictable choke points like most HL1 maps).

With that we said good bye to the DoD team, and Gabe showed us back upstairs. There we thanked Gabe for his time, but before he left he told us that although they work on HL2, it’s the mods that they really look forward to and that he really wants to see how RnL turns out.

For those of you wondering about the HL2 release, we were impressed by the attitudes at Valve and believe the push to have HL2 completed in August will become a reality.