About a week ago we started answering the questions that were posted in thisforum thread.

We recorded video responses to many of the questions, but we've been having some difficulty getting those into a format suitable for posting on the website. In lieu of having the video responses, I wrote up answers to all of the technical questions I saw.

When NS2 started out on the Source engine, was it being developed with the public Source SDK or did UWE obtain a private license?

Valve was kind enough to give us full access to the Source engine code. During the time that we worked with that engine, we made a lot of modifications to it which wouldn't have been possible without that level of access.

Do you regret not taking the easier route of using an already existing engine such as Unreal Engine, Source, Cryengine etc. which would have sped up your production time significantly?

I think it's a fallacy to say that using an existing engine is a faster route, at least for a team like ours. If you look at the timeline for the project, we spent about 1 year working with the Source engine, and about 2 years building/working with our own engine and tools. I don't mean to imply the Source engine is bad in anyway, but it was difficult for us to work with a codebase like that where we didn't understand a lot of it, and yet needed to make extensive changes to realize our vision.

Creating your own engine certainly brings a lot of difficulties, especially in the early stage when artists need tools so that they can be productive. When we made the decision to switch to our own engine we were hoping to continue to use the Valve toolset to avoid this problem. Unfortunately we weren't able to do the necessary licensing deal, so we had to shift gears and develop our own toolset. If that had been possible I believe our development time would have been significantly reduced, but things don't always go the way you want.

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Version 162 of the game had a semi-hidden feature. We began tracking game end statistics. When a game ends, the game server notifies a web server about a few pieces of information. We send the map name, game version number, game length, and the winning team number.

So far we have tracked 1,445 completed games in build 162.

While this data will mostly be used internally for play balancing, it is easy enough to make it publicly available.

Some options are version, length, and map. For example:

http://unknownworldsstats.appspot.com/displayendgamestats?map=ns2_tram&version=162&length=500

This will display stats for Tram on version 162 for games that last less than 500 seconds.

Now, you might be saying "There has got to be a better way to visualize this data than a weird Pokemon ball thing...". That is what we were thinking!

We have provided a way to access the raw data here.

This is in the standard JSON format. The catch is only the 100 most recent stats are returned. We can probably return more depending on usage.

Please let us know if you end up creating any cool visualizers! A better interface to sort by map, version, and length would be a good start

本文数据来源：Unknown Worlds Entertainment

Hey everyone,

We thought we'd try to answer some of your questions from this thread. We are hoping this will be a good and efficient way for us to communicate with you about the state of the game and why and how we've made certain artistic, design or technical decisions.

xVisions asks: "What do you have planned for the squad system?"

点击观看视频

If you like this video, we'll be releasing a lot more of them - perhaps even one a day. We filmed this past Thursday so that's why we say we "just noticed" the thread (we expect to get faster with this).

Thanks for the first question, xVisions! Look for more shortly.

本文数据来源：Unknown Worlds Entertainment