This is his chat.

Valve hasn't announced a release date for tf2. {ed. Actually, they have, several years ago, when it was still a Q2 mod. Needless to say - they missed it}

The player persistent data (VPP) is being worked on. The major outstanding problems are security, and scaling to the huge halflife userbase. Timescale is months.

With VPP there will be a way to access player information just before entering a game. For example, to allow a player to choose a character to play or to restrict access to games based on stats for that character (such as experience level)

Valve has been quiet for a while, no reason, just been busy

In the next SDK there will be:

• A generalised networking interface, to allow clients/servers to send arbitary messages.
• The source-code for the VGUI
• Allowance for more than dm_base.bmp to have remappable colors.
• Better comments in the SDK, especially the APIs. Moving to a more component/interface based architecture. It should help figuring out the code and dependencies out a ton

SDK 1.1 was mainly designed with the intent that it would enable people to write OTHER types of games (RTS/RPG for example) - so get ON with it.

Note - yahn is referring to this SDK in the context as 'much better than HL1'

You can't do fog very well right now. Maybe at some point, that's a good feature request.

Yes, I want to make the game launcher entirely customizable. It'll probably be a vgui based launcher.

Yahn isn't totally happy with the client weapons system, it's hard to debug, valve'll improve it for tf2.

TF2 is not based on lithtech.

Valve has full rights to release any source they want. They probably won't release the world renderer.

The engine allows for something like 800 entities on the server. I wouldn't even try to come close to that though...

Not sure of what the map dimensions for tf2 will be. they'll be bigger than hl1 for sure

Ricochet will go into an update at some point.

Sprites will be going away and replaced with something easier to use ( more like a raw texture )

Valve aren't that interested in bezier patche, nurbs, or other reps for curves.

Going commercial is not a goal, creating a great mod and getting players should be the goal.

[Details]