What about machinima, any interest in it? When HL2 comes out, it will probably be the dominating engine used. UT2k4 is already very popular. I am finishing up a project with it, though, and have become a bit under-whelmed. Am definitely going to be focusing on HL2 as soon as it comes out. Problem is that Valve was supposed to send me the SDK months ago, and I still don’t have it. From what I hear, though, it might be that nobody has it yet. Only thing available is the SoftImage XSI EXP for HL2 freeware.
Were you planning on doing any animation? Not necessarily the “acting” of whole scenes, but for HL2, certain facial keyframes will need to be set for use in the SDK.
Anyways, this project I’m on now is holding me up, but I will most definitely be working on HL2 stuff, hopefully with the help of some friends that are here in NYC and into machinima. Like the ILL Clan, and the other people that were on the Game On project that I helped out a bit on, which you can see here:
http://www.allnewv50.com/videos/3.html
My own work is here:
www.munansen.com/oursagain_divx.zip
Just a little flick I did on my own. Got played on G4TV, though.