UKTerrorist

Valve's Yahn Bernier Interviewed

Posted by Myers at 09:45 11/8/2004.

Sogamed have conducted an interview with Valve's Yahn Bernier. Who's Yahn Bernier you ask? Well Yahn Bernier is a senior engineer working on network and demo coding. Which makes him responsible for many a comedic moment when a bizarre Gordan Freeman skin appears midway through a CS demo.

Let's start with some questions about the demo recording system in Half-Life games. HL (I will refer to it as "HL", but I mean Half-Life and all HL mods) is one of the games that allow demorecording during a game. However, if you look at Q3, the filesizes are significantly smaller than HL demos. Why is that?

Not knowing the details of what Q3 is doing, I can only assume that this is due to a bunch of factors including framerate of the HL client, number of network packets being recorded, and the size of the actual payload of those packets. We try to compress down the .dem files as much as is possible without doing a lot of extra work, but in the end the size of the files hasn’t been a huge priority.

Is the ability to record demos an important aspect of the game to Valve? Or is it just a feature that you are glad to have, but not excactly a priority to update and maintain?

I think this is more important now than it was for HL. We do see things like HLTV and ongoing moviemaking work as important areas for us to invest in. Inside the company we’ve used it most for recording trade show demos, but again, I think that’ll change with HL2 where we’ve got a much richer toolset for doing in-engine moviemaking.

The interview does not go too in depth on any subject matter, especially Valve's plans for HL2/CSS demos. For those of you looking to kill a precious minute or two at work, it could be vaguely interesting.