Valve's Robin Walker talks TF2

From the player's perspective of that client, he still had the exact same condition. For example if you run across a gap and run behind the wall, the lagged player may shoot you when you've passed behind the wall. From his perspective, he saw you for the same amount of time a normal player would have seen you, and he made the shot in the same amount of time, and the game's rewarding him as it should, taking lag out of the equation. So it's actually not really true.

We've always wanted to do that. We're not going to support that out of the box. The Steam Community stuff we're doing is pushing a lot more customisation in - like everyone on the scoreboard in TF has a little avatar, and that's all player-set - and we're pushing more and more of that stuff in, so I think it'll be a long time before we run out of stuff we'll let players control in the game. I think we'd want to do that for sure.

This is a good question because it sort of goes back to our philosophy. We have this philosophy that putting more stuff on the screen is bad actually, not better, in that the more and more the game starts to talk to you through interface the less you look at the world and the more you look at the interface. And a really perfect example of this is the Spy. As I said, if we're on the same team and you're disguised, I still see you as a Spy because it's confusing if you look like an enemy. Our earliest versions, we put an icon above your head to show that you're disguised as a Heavy or something, and what we found is that if you solve all your interface problems that way, you start looking at the icons above everyone's heads instead of the characters, and so what we did instead is we put the mask on the guy and it's much more interesting and solves the same problem.

What we've found is that every time we've said to ourselves, 'no, you don't just get to add a HUD element, you don't just get to put a bracket around that, you don't get to put a logo above everyone's head,' we tend to solve the problem in a more interesting way. The game's more fun for it. So in general our focus has been how do we convey that information in the world, on the characters, not in overlaid HUD elements.

There's a lot of different factors in there. The thing we're trying to solve that we've tried to solve in the past and are continuing to solve better is this problem of distribution. As a producer of content, way back before we even shipped Half-Life 1, if you made content for Quake, which I did, the problem was how do you get people who have Quake to even find it. In those days I tried to get PlanetQuake or someone to put a message up, so with Half-Life 1 we said, if I'm a customer and own Half-Life 1, I should be able to go and find Half-Life 1 mods - and so we built the mod-browser, and that was aimed at solving that problem of distribution. And the Half-Life 1 mod scene is larger than anything anyone had ever seen, and we think that was part of that.

So what we're trying to do with the new Steam stuff is trying to get to the point where that point-of-distribution problem gets solved for other people, not just mods. Steam already links Garry's Mod and so on and can solve mod-distribution better, but we're still not doing a good job of... if you just made a map, or maybe you just made a sound pack, or maybe you made a new model pack. The distribution system for those is the same today as it was for mods in Quake. We always try to look at the problems that are facing someone producing content and try and solve them, and right now we think that the biggest problem for those guys is distribution. How do you get people to find your map? And if your map's one of the best Counter-Strike maps, how do people know that? How do we help people find the best pieces of third-party-produced content? And that's part of the new Steam Community thing.

Like any Valve product you buy it and you're gonna get plenty of stuff after you ship it. We already have some plans for what we'll be working on afterward, but I don't think we're going to talk about it just yet, but yes, like any Valve product I think you can be confident you'll get plenty of free stuff after we ship.

We're always pushing the technology, the engine, etc. In terms of extra content, we have a few things we're messing around with already. Our plan is that each map should have some new facet, some new experience. If you look at the TF maps, the six maps we're shipping, every one is actually unique. There's common building blocks - like control points are in multiple maps - but the way that different maps use control points... like Hydro uses control points and so does Well, but the mechanics are totally different, and so each map is unique in terms of how they use the building blocks, and I think that whatever maps we produce afterwards will similarly be doing something interesting.