Team Fortress 2 interview

Bij Strategic Gaming Online hebben ze een vrij grote interview gepost met Robin Walker van Valve Software over hun Team Fortress 2. Hier heb je 1 vraag, check het interview voor meer info!

I've seen interviews/previews that discuss the strategic map handling, but they typically have covered it as an aside from the gameplay - but I'd like to go into more detail. How is this scripted? Is the structure linear - i.e. the "game" advances either forward or backward along a single "line" of maps? Or can it be a tree of alternatives?

ROBIN WALKER: The map handling is done through a scripting language that hooks into the events passed to it by the server. It has the ability to note down any events, with any parameters it wants, and recall them later. So if the map wanted to know who destroyed a part of an installation, and at what time and with what weapon, it could note it down, and recall it further along in the campaign.

Our current campaigns are all linear, but the map scripting is perfectly capable of a branching structure. We stick with linear because our campaigns are designed to be played over the net with any mix of veterans and beginners, which restricts the complexity of our design a bit. The great thing about the scripting language is that it's external to the map, allowing you to alter the map's behavior without recompiling the map. You could take the maps from a couple of our linear campaigns and, within a few minutes, create a simple branching campaign out of them.