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iocator
Joined: 01 Sep 2007
Posts: 709
Location: Australia
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 Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2008 9:17 am Post subject: interview on half-life.lt |
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| Can anyone provide a decent translation of this interview? I tried Google Translate but a few bits didn't make sense and a few words didn't get translated at all. |
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Hoaxer
Site Admin
Joined: 22 Apr 2007
Posts: 567
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
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| Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2008 12:20 pm Post subject: |
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I'll talk with that see if he can upload English version, since I've answered everything in English  |
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iocator
Joined: 01 Sep 2007
Posts: 709
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Sun Nov 30, 2008 10:32 pm Post subject: |
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| Thanks. |
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Hoaxer
Site Admin
Joined: 22 Apr 2007
Posts: 567
Location: Kyiv, Ukraine
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| Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2008 5:08 pm Post subject: |
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Here is it
1. So, can you introduce yourself a bit?
My name is Vyacheslav Dzhura (nick Hoaxer) , I am 21 and current living in Kyiv (Ukraine), currently working as a freelance web developer. I enjoy travelling, games and a lot of other things, but these two are main) I don't have any university degrees, after school I tried being a student but that didn't work out well (or I was just too impatient to sit and listen again those things already learned at school) so I went working for a local game development company for the position of level-designer and afterwards tools programmer.
2. When and why you decided to go for such an ambitious project to port
PS2 exclusive Decay for PC?
At some point my level-design hobby grew into something more big, a fun desire (looks fun for me now) to make own version of Half-Life's continue (imho as a lot of other amateur Half-Life level-designers had at that time). But I personally didn’t want a "continue", I wanted to make something more serious (I wasn't a fan of mods as Redemption where you see Gman walking out of taxi ) so I thought on making own parallel story like Blue-Shift or Opposing-Force (I really love those games, Gearbox did great job recreating atmosphere and gameplay overall is brilliant). Then there was a team of people who shared my vision on that and we tried making a mod, but unfortunately (or fortunately?) as most of mod teams we separated and project was abandoned. And at that time Half-Life for PS2 comes to the scene for me (being out half year ago in 2001) with it's unique official add-on which was available only to PS2 owners and i n next several months I worked hardly to get Ps2 just to play that thing, and when I first played it (it happened to be New-Year's eve of 2003 and I had this crazy idea - 'hey, what if I'll try to bring that for PC?" Back then I didn't know about amount of work which has to be done, neither I have thought about why I'm gonna do that (I had some tiny thoughts that at least that Valve might invite me [or the team] for a payed excursion to their office  note: don't get me wrong, that didn't happen )
3. How many members your team has? How did you managed to get all together?
Three team members. Denis Zhatov (nick Rabano) who awesomly recreated most of levels - we met in high school, and Hayri Yurdakul (nick Barnz or Barney_in_Blue) met him on Gearbox software forums and then on our project's forum, he did great job recreating bonus mission (played by Vortigaunt)
4. Porting Decay took about three years. Some of game fans were very
impatient. Why it took so long?
Count that - a lot of time spent on converter to get decompilable versions of .bs2 (maps), .dol (models), .spz (sprites), a lot of time spent recreating each mission (not less then 3 month per mission), plus a lot of time for programming game logic - entities, game rules, etc., plus testing, plus making website and running a forum and all that for free in spare of work time (because real work on project started after I got full-time eployed). And we all are people, I don't like spending 8 working hours in front of PC + other who-knows-how-many hours at home staring at monitor, there are so many nice things around, except that flat panel 
5. What was Valve’s or Gearbox’ s reaction to your intentions to recreate
Decay for PC?
I read "great job guys!" by Botman at Gearbox's forum and some "wows" from other guys in here, they were amazed that we actually did that, and unfortunately absolutely not a word from Valve, though we send them notifications, propositions to run mod as part of Steam's mods but no reply at all.
6. Finally, Decay for PC is done. How accurate it is to PS2 analog?
98% precise. We did minor improvements such as "uhm… this hallway is waaaaaay waaaaaay waaaaay to empty, you agree we should place pipe in here? Yes, totally agree with you"
7. We are really interested in your future plans. Can we expect Decay:
Source?
I don't think so since there is no version of HL1:Source SDK, and making it absolutely new project on the base of HL2 SDK is a massive amount of work, maybe even more massive then we already did. There is a possibility, but only if anyone will sponsor us, because as a hobby project (taking into account all today graphical standarts and complexicity of Source engine, it's models) it would take too long
8. Thank you for your time, hoaxer. Greetings from Lithuania.
Thank you for your interest! Greetings from Ukraine! |
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Sandler
Joined: 24 Apr 2007
Posts: 247
Location: Israel
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| Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2008 5:18 pm Post subject: |
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| Thanks for posting this, was interesting reading |
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iocator
Joined: 01 Sep 2007
Posts: 709
Location: Australia
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| Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2008 10:48 pm Post subject: |
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| Thanks again, Hoaxer. |
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Half-Life_Maniac
Joined: 06 May 2007
Posts: 94
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 8:09 am Post subject: |
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Interesting read.
"Then there was a team of people who shared my vision on that and we tried making a mod..."
I was there!
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Barnz
Site Admin
Joined: 31 May 2007
Posts: 585
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Distinct Reality, amirite? |
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Half-Life_Maniac
Joined: 06 May 2007
Posts: 94
Location: New Zealand
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2008 2:57 pm Post subject: |
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Correct - and even something before that, which I really can't remember too much. Or that could have even been scrapped DR material.. back in my n00b mapping days!
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xombie
Joined: 18 Mar 2008
Posts: 18
Location: Spain
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| Posted: Fri Dec 05, 2008 7:54 pm Post subject: |
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| Hey, thanks for the translation! |
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hellraizer
Joined: 17 Mar 2008
Posts: 2
Location: Pa
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| Posted: Tue Jan 13, 2009 9:23 pm Post subject: Awesome |
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Thanks for the read, i'm working on finding a friend who'll play this with me. i'm kinda having a hard time getting it to work. thanks for the PCport too.
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