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1. Alex, how are things over at Ionstorm Austin? Alex Duran: They're doing pretty well. I enjoy what I'm working on and the future lookseven more exciting. 2. Can you give us a brief summary to what each of the new patches does?What does that mean to the mod community? Alex Duran: The singleplayer patch mainly fixes some issues with the singleplayer game.Mainly it improves Direct3D support and adds OpenGL support so that userswithout 3dfx cards should have better performance. It also incorporatessome of the more important improvements that we made for the multiplayerpatch and fixes a few other bugs. Since the multiplayer patch is a supersetof the singleplayer patch, the singleplayer patch is for those people whodon't feel like downloading the much larger multiplayer patch.The multiplayer patch adds, obviously, multiplayer. It also incorporatesall the fixes from the singleplayer patch as well as a few other changesthat affect singleplayer. As far as the mod community goes, the multiplayerpatch also includes some changes to make it easier to make mods. Text filescan now exist in packages other than DeusExText.u, and it is now simpler andsafer to have player classes and teams other than those we provided. Moddevelopers are encouraged to develop from the multiplayer code base, as,although it unfortunately makes a few things a bit harder to do, it makesmany things a lot easier.
The new SDK includes our header files, which were requested by some of thecommunity. We aren't sure how useful you'll find them, but best of luck. 3. Is this the last of the patches we'll see for Deus Ex, or are stillgoing to be working on future bugs and other issues? Alex Duran: I expect that there will not be any more PC patches. We've tried to fixeverything that we felt was reasonable to fix, and although some issues mayhave slipped by, we've moved on to other projects. That's not to say therearen't patches for other systems... The Macintosh patch was just released,you can find it here: http://www.apple.com/games/patches/deus_ex/. 4. What has Ionstorm been doing to assist the mod community, other thanthe obvious of providing the tools? Alex Duran: Mainly we've just provided tools. Several of us have spent some time on theDeus-Ex.Org forums to figure out what needed to be changed in the patch to make the life of the mod community easier. We've also been known to talk to mod developers via ICQ and email. Now that the new patch is out, I'll probably spend a little time there again answering questions about some of our mod-related changes. Finally, there's a mapmaking contest for DeusEx with lots of cool prizes. I encourage people to enter, mostly for selfish reasons so that I can play cool Deus Ex maps. You can find information about it here: http://www.planetdeusex.com/features/contests/map/. 5. Will you be on the development team for Deus Ex 2 or Thief 3? Can yougive us any updates about either? Alex Duran: I'm on the development team for Deus Ex 2. I can't really give you anyupdates, mum's the word at the moment. 6. As per the recent announcement of the GotY edition, what will be inthat package? Alex Duran:That will include the game built from the same version from which themultiplayer patch was built. It will also include the SDK, desktop themes,and an audio CD with all of the Deus Ex music. 7. Anything else you'd like to comment on at this time? Alex Duran: Only that I know many of us are looking forward to what the mod communitywill do with the tools. We certainly wish we had more time to include alarger variety of multiplayer gametypes for the patch and hope thatinterested parties out there will pick up where we left off.
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