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Erik Johnson Interview - April 9 - 2002
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 In the latest CS-Extreme feature I took a closer look on Valves Tracker (be sure to check it out if you haven't already),
and as a part of it, I wanted to do an interview with Valve software. Erik Johnson works as project manager at Valve
which means he's responsible for continued support for the Half-Life community, and the updates for Counter-Strike.
As you could imagine this requires a lot of time, and since Erik is such a busy man, I received the answers
with a few weeks delay.
Q. What exactly is "Tracker" and what can it do for the community?
[Erik Johnson] Tracker is the internal name for the instant messenger/game
finding program we've developed.
The community benefits from this in a few ways. First, it makes it much
easier to find and play with friends. You can see from your Windows desktop
when one of your friends has entered a game. It's a mouse click from there
to join the server with them.
What makes this more interesting from a gamer's perspective is that it works
exactly the same when you are at your Windows desktop as when you are
running one of our games. You can carry on a conversation with someone in a
Day of Defeat game while you're working on a spreadsheet.
Q. Will Tracker be included in CS 1.4 Final?
[Erik Johnson] Tracker will only be available through Steam, which is due to
ship as part of the CS 1.5 update (now CS 1.6).
Q. Will there be any additions to Tracker - if yes, which?
[Erik Johnson] It's actually the other way around. Tracker is going to be
integrating into our new user interface. We're going to take the current
launcher and expose all of its functionality through VGUI (rather than the
current MFC version).
This will allow us to do a bunch of much more interesting things with the
interface to work better with Steam, as well as solve a lot of the nasty
bugs (like ALT-TAB) that our current launcher has.
We're going to be rolling out this version of the UI in a couple of weeks to
the Steam beta.
Q. I've been searching for some software which could enable chatting with
your friends during a HLTV match - so will Tracker run in HLTV sessions
as well?
[Erik Johnson] Yes, we'd like to have most in-engine chatting to happen
through Tracker.
Q. And finally - what will you do to prevent Tracker being used for ghosting
on the servers?
[Erik Johnson] That's an issue that is on the table right now. On one hand,
we're wary of doing things that prevents people in the community from
communicating with to each other. Server operators have some options on
their servers to prevent people from ghosting as well.
This being said, we might add some functionally into Tracker or our engine
that makes ghosting a little less trivial.
Thank you, Erik, for taking the time to answer these questions.
Even though Tracker won't be released until CS 1.6 is finished, it's already now possible for you and your friends
to test Tracker through the Steam beta.
Useful links:
CS-Extreme's Tracker preview
Steampowered.com - try the Steam technology and Tracker yourself here.
Valve Software
Direct your questions or comments to Garmer
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