Mike and Jess visits TG05
Huge interest around Counter-Strike and Half Life 2 resulted in a full auditorium today, when two of the guys behind Half Life and the popular modification Counter-Strike held a lecture here at The Gathering. Directly from USA and the game-company Valve, came the two famous developers Jess Cliffe and Mike Dussault.

Jess started out by telling his story from the "basement" and all the way up to his profiled job at Valve. Jess and his pal spent almost of their time through college creating the pupular modification Counter-Strike. Even though they had success, Jess doesn’t recomend that anyone drops out from school to create modifications. Mike also has this background. The mod-scene started when the first SDK was released for Quake.

The guys told further on how simple the release of “Steam”, as a distributor for them, has made the spreading of news, updates and patches to the users of their games. They also told a bit about how they created “Half Life 2”. Mike told that all the locations in the game are based on real locations around the world.

When Valve released “Half Life 2”, they also made an SDK available through Steam for the new Source engine. Now can everyone freely program their own modifications for Source with Valve's blessing. Among the functions in the SDK was programming of facial movement and realistic physics allowing objects to be moved just like in the real world.

Jess and Mike finished off by telling how much they appreciated good modifications. If your mod reaches over 1000 unique users you get a free trip over to Valves HQ and help to further development of your modification. So, there you have it all layed out.

We wish the best of luck to you all :-)

These words were brought to you by Andreas Adolfsen and Daniel Skovli.