[HN Gopher] Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code
___________________________________________________________________
Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code
Author : davikr
Score : 1773 points
Date : 2025-02-18 19:57 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| jsheard wrote:
| This is good for modding but don't be misled, this is the
| TF2-specific code which sits on top of the still-closed-source
| Source engine. For example you couldn't port TF2 to a new
| platform with this, at least not without reimplementing Source or
| wrangling it into working with one of the leaked Source codebases
| and dealing with the legal fallout of that.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is
| not an exciting engine to work with in any way. There are at
| least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful
| and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked). Only people that
| have been involved with Source in the past decades would enjoy
| working with it.
|
| The community around the engine is vibrant and well-versed in
| the caveats of the Source workflow. With a GPL release, just
| like Carmack did with id tech, the amount of creative projects
| from indies would sky rocket. No longer bound by obscure deals.
| SXX wrote:
| I pretty sure you'll soon get reply about how making it open
| source will increase cheating. So for those people it's
| important to know that Source engine source code was leaked
| many many times and anyone who will spend 5 minutes will find
| sources.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The guy is saying Godot is comparable to a game engine with
| hundreds of millions of dollars of product development. I
| wouldn't be worrying about what other people might say.
| Me000 wrote:
| It almost worked on me.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Indeed it's possible for Godot and Source to be good game
| engines and also not at all substitutes for each other.
|
| The kind of discourse that litigates why that fact is
| true doesn't serve curiosity or add knowledge.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| Considering that Source is ancient and likely hasn't
| gotten an update from at least 2013 for TF2, the bar is
| low for how complete an engine needs to be for level
| comparisons.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Are you considering Source 2 in this assertion? That
| piece of software has received quite significant
| development effort.
| 6SixTy wrote:
| I'm not. Source 2 is very modern even by caveman gamer
| standards.
| enragedcacti wrote:
| I'm not really disagreeing with your point but I think in
| general Valve has kept their games that share an engine
| on the same trunk, so TF2 should be on a pretty recent
| version of source. The update accompanying this release
| includes the bicubic lightmap and radial fog
| implementations from the HL2: 20th Anniversary update.
|
| For Source 2 it ends up being a constant source of leaks
| where strings for engine features of in-development games
| get shipped out in Dota 2 and CS2 updates. We learned
| tons of stuff about Deadlock that way.
|
| https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238643
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Yeah last year Team Fortress 2 got the 64-bit update and
| replaced some commercial libraries. The branch of Source
| that it's on seems to get periodic security updates too.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Source got some significant updates such as HRTF audio in
| 2016 and Panorama UI in 2018. I don't know if TF2
| specifically ever got those changes, though, but Source
| engine itself did as used by CSGO.
| SXX wrote:
| For anyone not looking for super realistic 3D and primary
| targeting PC audience Godot is enough to make good game.
| Majority of game devs do not build AAA titles with
| $10,000,000+ budget. A lot of players play mostly indie
| games.
|
| FFS some of the best indie games out there made was made
| on RPG Maker and let's say it's far less advance than
| Godot. After all games are all about enjoyable core loop
| and player expirience. And no game engine magically give
| you any of it.
|
| Company I co-founded released 2 games on PC and about to
| release 3rd one on PC and all the consoles. One of them
| was made with Godot, two with Unity. The only reason we
| had to switch to Unity are consoles. And the reason why
| Godot cant efficiently complete on consoles is the fact
| that platforms are backward and proprietary.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Yeah. Listen, first person shooters are an enjoyable core
| loop and player experience. Unreal and Source definitely
| magically gives you like 80%, and maybe all the hard
| parts, of making that game.
|
| And of course I appreciate what you do. Thing is if you
| shoved it into a first person shooter, would it be even
| more successful? The answer to that question is often
| yes. Same as Roblox being basically Tavern Brawl but for
| third person platformers. Coming from a POV of game
| design for phones, Roblox games suck, but look: they are
| extremely popular and the clunky format of that engine
| makes them work. My point is that it's impossible to
| generalize, but basically there is nothing you could make
| better with Godot today than with Unity or Unreal, as
| lamentable as that is, and even the things they make you
| want to make, it's better to make those things instead.
| SXX wrote:
| You think that any game will be more popular just because
| majority of TOP100 titles are 3D FPS-like titles. Problem
| is that building such a game with modern graphics costs
| tens of millions of dollars. There are very few companies
| in the world with budgets big enough to even afford
| attempt on it and majority of such projects also flop.
|
| If you look past TOP100 most popular games by player
| count you will find there are hundreds of less popular
| niche titles and wast majority of them likely not even 3D
| at all and there is reason for this.
|
| Anyone who tried to start game development company and
| get their project funded knows that majority of
| publishers in the world operate well under $500,000 per
| project. This could sound unreal for US-based person who
| knows of FAANG salaries, but this is how game development
| industry is: lots of enthusiast trying to make some games
| working for penies.
|
| So nope, wast majority of game developers dont need
| Unreal or even Unity feature set simply because they dont
| have budget for building modern 3D game.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Ha ha, but _you_ needed Unity 's feature set, didn't you?
| You don't even belong to "the vast majority."
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| And you're equating money spent on development with
| quality, performance, features, and compatibility. Please
| _do_ tell me about how Source even remotely compares to
| Unity or Unreal?
|
| Do you see Source being used in virtual soundstages? No.
| Does Source support Metal or Vulkan? No.
|
| Does it have anything approaching the 3D or 2D or
| rendering style capabilities of any modern engine? No.
|
| Is Source going to be remotely relevant for metaverse
| stuff? No.
|
| All the money in the world won't change the fact that
| Source is an outdated pile of garbage.
|
| Respawn uses it to this day for Apex, and it's horrific.
| Its graphics quality is atrocious especially for the
| demands it places on hardware. It has the worst latency
| of any similar multiplayer game (some events can take
| _half a second_ to make it from a player 's action to
| another player's system!) It lacks modern features that
| have been in other games for many years, like variable
| event rates (some games, for example, will use much
| higher event update rates for stuff happening within the
| player's field of view.)
|
| Its game engine has so many bugs around inputs, movement,
| and collisions that high level play revolves around
| abusing all of them for competitive advantage in what is
| lauded as "movement", and because Respawn never treated
| these issues as exploits, they got painted into a corner
| where they can't ever switch to a modern game engine
| because trying to get the quirks of movement behavior
| would be impossible.
|
| The game's input processing _is done in relation to
| framerate_ , for fucks sakes....so input processing
| behavior _changes depending on framerate._
|
| The security and anti-cheat in the game is so hamstrung
| by Source that multiple world tournaments have been
| hacked live and ultimately had to be done in secret,
| later broadcast - because Respawn was so powerless to
| stop the hacker(s).
|
| With more Unity shifting to a royalty model you're going
| to see a lot more interest in open source game engines
| like Godot; Godot is, for example, working on being
| usable for massive multiplayer and open-world games.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| > Does Source support Metal or Vulkan?
|
| Vulkan support is now there (it was added in the last
| couple of years). Might not be for all engine branches
| though.
| account42 wrote:
| In Source 1? AFAIK that's only via DXVK.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Hmm I think so, at least initially? I know that Vulkan
| came to the Linux ports first but I think some of the
| Windows versions got it too.
| t0b1 wrote:
| > All the money in the world won't change the fact that
| Source is an outdated pile of garbage.
|
| Given that the engine has been in, essentially,
| maintenance mode for almost a decade now, that is not
| really surprising. A more apt comparison would be Source
| 2 I assume.
|
| > some events can take half a second to make it from a
| player's action to another player's system
|
| What are events here? At least in normal source this
| should be impossible for anything movement/input related
| as the server processes the input each tick and then
| distributes that to each client (the Apex implementation
| should still do this). If it takes half a second to
| forward such an action, the whole server should hang for
| this time in the eyes of each client.
|
| > The game's input processing is done in relation to
| framerate
|
| This is a behavior added by Respawn, not something normal
| Source does.
|
| > The security and anti-cheat in the game is so hamstrung
| by Source
|
| That is a really broad claim imo. AFAIK CSGO only had
| this issue once in its lifetime and that was caused not
| by an issue in the engine but in the matchmaking service.
| So isn't it more likely that Respawn just screwed
| something up?
| chefandy wrote:
| UE makes their engine source available even if it's not
| under a permissive license.
| davikr wrote:
| Indeed, I wish the first iteration gets released as GPL or
| something like that eventually. I get not wanting to open-
| source Source 2, but the original is another thing entirely.
| jsheard wrote:
| Most in-house game engines built after a certain point use a
| non-trivial amount of third party code, including console
| stuff which is under strict NDA, so it's a huge hassle to
| open source them. Most iterations of the Source engine use
| Havok physics for example.
|
| IdTech probably was only open sourced because Carmack pushed
| for it, but it helps that IdTech of that vintage was all in-
| house code exclusively targeting the PC. I think the only
| thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented
| shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.
| ThatPlayer wrote:
| Even the original Doom source code release was the Linux
| source code because the Dos version of the game uses a 3rd
| party audio library, DMX.
| dcrazy wrote:
| I believe DMX was also used for Descent, and the company
| successfully shut down open source projects to reverse
| engineer the file format. Interplay was also extremely
| protective of their full-motion video codec, which only
| got well-documented after the release of Baldur's Gate
| II.
| phire wrote:
| Id were using a 3rd party sound library for Doom to handle
| the nitty-gritty aspects of DOS sound hardware, so the open
| source release was based on the linux port of Doom. People
| had to port it back to DOS.
|
| They couldn't release the windows port of Doom either, as
| that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore
| include Microsoft copyrighted code.
|
| With Quake, Id did their own windows port, so it was
| possible to release the source code for winquake.
| stevage wrote:
| > as that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore
| include Microsoft copyrighted code.
|
| How does that follow? Normally copyright would transfer
| to the company paying for it.
| nocman wrote:
| It all depends on how the contract between Microsoft and
| Id was worded.
| phire wrote:
| If Id had paid Microsoft to do the port, it would
| automatically be work-for-hire and the copyrights would
| belong to Id, unless the contract said otherwise.
|
| But Microsoft essentially licensed the Doom source code
| and ported it themselves, it's not work-for-hire, so the
| copyright on any changes would default to Microsoft.
| Though, I'm really not sure if Microsoft paid anything
| for this licence, or if there even was a contract.
| kragen wrote:
| This is a comprehensively incorrect explanation of
| copyright and contract law.
| lmm wrote:
| > If Id had paid Microsoft to do the port, it would
| automatically be work-for-hire and the copyrights would
| belong to Id, unless the contract said otherwise.
|
| Nope, not true. Work by non employees is only work-for-
| hire if it falls into one of the qualifying categories
| and the contract explicitly says that it is work-for-
| hire.
| zeroq wrote:
| It's definitely a topic for a CSI: HN, but I think it's a
| was most likely a part of a larger agreement between a
| relatively small shop and a behemoth.
| bitwize wrote:
| Microsoft weren't hired by Id to port Doom. They did so
| exclusively for their own purposes: to show off Windows
| 95 with DirectX as a performance gaming platform. They
| licensed the Doom engine, made their own changes, and
| released Doom 95 usable with a retail copy of the game
| assets.
|
| Oddly enough, the project of "porting Doom to Windows"
| was started by Gabe Newell, who worked at Microsoft at
| the time,
| rzzzt wrote:
| The earliest(? - who knows) release of the port is from
| 1994, ran on 3.x and used the WinG and Win32s API:
|
| - https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/historic/wdoom
|
| - https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/historic/wdoom2
|
| - https://virtuallyfun.com/2011/03/29/windoom-wing-
| win32s-on-w...
| bitwize wrote:
| I knew Gaben's initial project was for 3.x and WinG, but
| I didn't know it was released!
| ndiddy wrote:
| The wording used in the release notes was:
|
| > The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on
| linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a
| copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a
| mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly
| don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft
| did to windows.
|
| > Still, the code is quite portable, and it should be
| straightforward to bring it up on just about any
| platform.
|
| It seems like they just didn't have immediate access to
| the code for the Windows version. The DOS source code
| eventually leaked a couple years ago along with the code
| to the Mac port of Doom.
| https://archive.org/details/doom-mac-source
| tadfisher wrote:
| Fun fact: Gabe Newell built the original WinDoom port,
| and led the team that built Doom95!
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| That IS a fun fact.
| sho_hn wrote:
| To be clear, Robert Hess was the primary engineer on
| WinDoom, Newell was the team lead.
| Scuds wrote:
| I thought Monolith worked on doom95.
| gmueckl wrote:
| If a team had access to some licensed source code related
| the third party component (e.g. restrictively
| licensed/NDA'd sample code), clearing the engine source for
| release may involve a thorough code audit. Who is going to
| put in that work to prepare a freebie?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| that and the hodgepodge structure of the codebase is
| probably embarrassing
| lawlessone wrote:
| ah, that NDA stuff is interesting, that probably explains
| it.
| chefandy wrote:
| I wonder how UE manages it. It compiles for consoles but
| you can download and modify the engine source. The
| license isn't open but you can still get the source.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| Not sure about UE but I've worked on other engines and
| usually you just have an interface that abstracts
| platform APIs and each platform implements the same
| interface
|
| The implementations get compiled in based on whatever
| platform you're compiling for using a bunch of #ifdef
| statements
|
| In that case it's just a matter of not including certain
| .h/.cpp files
| jsheard wrote:
| The source you can easily get access to doesn't include
| any of the console stuff, you have to prove you're
| licensed to develop on those consoles to get access to
| that code.
| znpy wrote:
| > Most in-house game engines built after a certain point
| use a non-trivial amount of third party code, including
| console stuff which is under strict NDA, so it's a huge
| hassle to open source them.
|
| reminds of the whole "opensourcing solaris" drama that
| Bryan Cantrill talked about in his speech at usenix some
| ten years ago.
|
| i wonder if the culprit is i18n again, "lol"
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Source does, although within the last year they replaced
| Miles for MP3 and Rad Games Tools for Bink with tinymp3 and
| free WebM library.
|
| Probably other stuff there but not sure off the top of my
| head.
| account42 wrote:
| You see WebM in quite a few projects that have had Linux
| ports. Apparently Bink requires separate licenses per
| platform. OGG is also popular instead of MP3 but with the
| MP3 patens expired that isn't a legal concern anymore,
| just a technical superiority one.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Oh, I didn't realise separate platforms required separate
| licenses so that makes sense.
|
| And yeah too much effort to re-encode all the game audio
| most likely.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > non-trivial amount of third party code, including console
| stuff which is under strict NDA
|
| This just seems like a lazy excuse. Ok so some of the code
| can't be released. Fine, what stops you from open sourcing
| the rest of it that isn't licensed? The OS community will
| surely fill in The blanks.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| exactly.
|
| I do think that the source code of source was leaked. Its
| just that valve has to themselves give the code of
| source. FLOSS community would really do it. Trust me.
| account42 wrote:
| Well for the FLOSS community to do anything Valve would
| not just need to release the coede but also put it under
| a free software license, which isn't the case even for
| the game code released here.
|
| Modders in general won't care though.
| L3viathan wrote:
| Well in a sense you are right that it is lazy, in that it
| would be quite a lot of work to disentangle those parts.
|
| So they could probably do it, but it would be costly,
| while just releasing the TF2 code is basically free.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Don't bother with subtle disentanglement. Just take an
| axe to it and release a broken mess. It will be fixed and
| running within a month.
| trinix912 wrote:
| It depends on how the code is structured. It might be
| that the licensed parts are sprinkled throughout the
| functions, or that they would have to reorganize things
| to not reveal too much about a specific NDA'd technology
| (like a console SDK)... The resulting code might end up
| being just as useless as no code at all, and I assume it
| would be very hard to get the management to allocate
| resources for that.
| account42 wrote:
| Perhaps, but a multiplatform codebase won't call the
| console SDK directly from hundreds of random functions.
| And even if the developers were that crazy those calls
| need to be excluded when building for other platforms so
| can also be stripped form the source code in an automated
| fashion.
| xienze wrote:
| > Perhaps, but a multiplatform codebase won't call the
| console SDK directly from hundreds of random functions.
|
| You'd think so, but some developers have a very
| adversarial relationship with abstractions, such as
| abstracting away platform-specific code behind a common
| interface. It happens more often than you'd think.
|
| > And even if the developers were that crazy those calls
| need to be excluded when building for other platforms so
| can also be stripped form the source code in an automated
| fashion.
|
| So they're going to leave people code that either doesn't
| compile or, if it does, doesn't work? And what's stripped
| out may have very important technical considerations that
| might only be known based on which function calls were
| yanked out.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > So they're going to leave people code that either
| doesn't compile or, if it does, doesn't work?
|
| I think that in general, potential open source developers
| would not care at all about that. Some code (that doesn't
| yet work) is better than no code. As someone else
| mentioned, a motivated open source group could probably
| easily fill in all the missing gaps within a month.
| mtkd wrote:
| There is always the risk that some of the code (non 3rd
| party) may look a lot similar to code of a previous
| employer of the person that committed it
|
| It's all legal risk with little commercial upside
| zbendefy wrote:
| Not just that, they had specific renderer backends, one for
| GeForce, one for GeForce3, one for Radeon 8500 that they
| had to cut out as they used proprietary information or code
| perhaps.
| skhr0680 wrote:
| > I think the only thing they had to cut out for legal
| reasons was the patented shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.
|
| I remember that being somewhere in the neighborhood of 1
| LOC to fix, and exactly where to change it was "common
| knowledge" the moment the source came out
| account42 wrote:
| It's quite silly that depth fail shadow volumes were ever
| granted a patent.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| I recall Ton Roosendaal saying something similar about the
| origins of Blender: convincing his then-employers to let
| him open source the original abandoned engine was a huge
| hassle, but the lack of third party code blocking it helped
| a lot.
| zeroq wrote:
| I had similar experience working for BigCo.
|
| On one hand, at one point we had CEO and CTO publicly
| stating in townhalls that they want us to be a
| technological forefront and looking for ways to showcase
| our capabilities. At the same time it was virtually
| impossible to open source even something as trivial as a
| string formatting library, because once you started
| talking to stakeholders about approval their POV was that
| it's part of a project that took X amount of employees Y
| amount of time and that equation is in millions, so that
| has to be really valuable.
| jandrese wrote:
| Middle managers look at that XKCD comic[1] and say "we
| need to buy out that guy in Nebraska and monetize it".
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/2347/
| account42 wrote:
| Even for the source release we have gotten it's not too
| uncommon that some proprietary middleware is missing and
| needs to be replaced before being able to build the code.
| 0x457 wrote:
| Probably because for it to be really opensource it has to
| have a proper documentation and other resources.
|
| if someone just does a `git push` and changes license it
| won't be much help to anyone until there is a proper
| documentation.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| Source has extensive documentation for years, both by Valve
| and modders. Mostly unified and indexed here:
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com
| deadbabe wrote:
| It will be easier to understand when you see the hundreds of
| Jira tickets to wade through to get it released and the fact
| they have better shit to do that contributes directly to
| revenue instead of trying to open source an old game engine
| that only a handful of people will even care about.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed.
| It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way.
|
| Source uses Havok, which is a licensed middleware. Convincing
| Havok to be also open source is likely a nonstarter. Repeat
| for any other middlewares they might have used, such as
| Adobe's ScaleForm used by CSGO, and it quickly is just an
| endless legal nightmare. idTech handled this by either
| spending time to rip out those components, allowing for a
| _partial_ open source release which is what you 're ripping
| on Valve for doing right this moment, or by avoiding using
| any licensed middlewares _at all_ which is a significant
| development limitation that not everyone can get away with.
|
| As Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed
| alternatives, it's _possible_ we might see that open sourced
| in the future. Who knows.
| klaussilveira wrote:
| You are right. But I wonder how much of Havok is there,
| given that Valve had its own thing:
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VPhysics
| meibo wrote:
| Most commercial engines that use libraries like havok
| will wrap them in some sort of internal library like this
| one to shield themselves from types from the middleware
| leaking into engine code, implementing convenience
| wrappers, and making it easier to update/swap them at
| some point if they ever wish to.
|
| There is a third-party implementation of vphysics based
| on an open source physics engine, for example - so for
| Valve that seems to have been successful:
| https://github.com/misyltoad/VPhysics-Jolt
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Havok also strikes me as a rather difficult piece to
| replace. A physics engine will often have hardcoded
| handling of special cases, and things can be sensitive to
| lots of numerical details.
|
| Haven't played TF2 but at least HL2 relies heavily on
| physics for gameplay, so while replacing the rendering
| engine might lead to rendering artifacts which can be
| annoying but tolerable in many cases, replacing the physics
| engine will probably lead to game-breaking issues.
|
| One could reverse engineer it, but then you're into
| copyright territory...
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| There have been a few attempts to replace VPhysics
| (Valve's library built on top of Havok:
| https://vghe.net/source-engine.html#vphysics
|
| They seem fairly functional but not fully drop-in
| replacements.
| account42 wrote:
| It's not like the Havok-using version of HL2 right now on
| Steam is free from physics bugs. Bugs can be fixed.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Of course, just feels like a physics engine is a few
| steps harder than many other dependencies.
|
| For example, one of the bugs might be inadvertently
| relied on in one of the map puzzles, unbeknownst to the
| map creator.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed
| alternatives
|
| Do you have a link for this? I know the sound system is
| theirs as they open sourced it.[0] What about physics?
|
| Also, I agree that they should open source Source 2 if
| possible. They gain almost nothing by having it closed
| source and gain a lot by giving developers a better deal
| than Unreal because more money saved on the engine means
| either cheaper or better/long games. (At least assuming
| both engines are equivalent which they are not, but in
| theory.) Meanwhile Epic is using Unreal as a carrot for
| developers to release their games in Epic Store.[1]
|
| [0] https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24258723/epic-games-
| store...
| jsheard wrote:
| > What about physics?
|
| Source 2 dropped Havok in favor of their in-house Rubikon
| physics engine.
|
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Rubikon
| TransAtlToonz wrote:
| I'm no game developer, but I understand that Unreal comes
| with a _massive_ ecosystem of tools and third-party
| addons. It seems like it would take a company about the
| size of Valve (or much larger) to compete with that kind
| of platform. You seem to know more about the industry
| than I do, so could you explain what Valve competing with
| Unreal would actually look like? That seems almost like a
| completely different market than they 've been in so far
| despite certainly having the technical chops.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Yeah doesn't seem like their strategy - probably much
| more profitable to run Steam and take a cut from huge
| volumes of game sales than to try and license an engine
| to as many companies as possible.
| iskela wrote:
| But giving an engine to developers to make games for free
| (to them to release on steam) would bring more merch and
| volume to the store
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| I think that was the case with Source 1 - I can't
| remember the details but if you licensed the engine and
| released it exclusively on Steam I think there were
| favourable terms.
|
| But maybe this wasn't execute well enough? Maybe Steam
| was too in its infancy to attract highly profitable
| licensees? Most of the non-Valve games made on Source 1
| weren't big-budget AAA games so it was likely only a
| modest return on investment.
| AJ007 wrote:
| The economics of a game engine engine business are
| grossly inferior to an app store. Steam charges 30% of
| gross (25% at high volume), Unity charges by seats and
| not fees after (huge backlash when they tried to go the
| other way and indies bailed to GODOT.) Unreal Engine
| 3.5-5% and maybe some seat fees now.
|
| If you were a developer you are looking the other way,
| getting those app store fees down.
|
| The App Stores - Steam, iOS, Google Play, are making
| higher margins per game than most game devs, and that's
| based on hard numbers not a guess. There is no meaningful
| way for game developers - artists, programmers, and
| everyone else involved - to make more money other than
| getting rid of the app store fees.
|
| There is a whole explanation about network effects here,
| and endless debate about what the fees should be. There
| is a cost to sell a game and it is not small. Several
| percent just go to credit card processing, refunds, and
| fraud. More has to go for the infrastructure to deliver
| games and updates. Then there has to be some margin. Then
| there maybe should be a premium that goes to the "app
| store" so that developers don't have to worry about
| distributing their app to thousands of locations. There
| is another premium that really is delivering demand for
| the game in the first place. Many sales would never
| happen on Steam if the users were not shown the game as
| featured or recommended. Most developers have no problem
| paying 30% for a sale that would otherwise never have
| happened.
|
| However, if I went back in a time machine to 1999 when
| you drove to a retail store to pick a game box off of a
| shelf, and you told me some arbitrary application would
| get to take 30% of all game sales decades in the future,
| I would have said that's fucking crazy. More developers
| should be able to seamlessly sell their games direct to
| their players, and I'm not entirely sure why they don't.
| Selling a digital item online is definitely simpler than
| developing a successful game.
|
| Edit: And if you look at Unity's financials they are in
| real trouble and probably will only survive if another
| larger, profitable, company acquires them. Not a great
| feeling for game developers who might suddenly be paying
| Facebook/Meta or someone worse their license fees.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| The question is do they need all those tools and third-
| party addons to meaningfully compete with Unreal? Or is
| it enough to not have to pay the Unreal license fee? I
| don't know. Many (most?) AAA studios have their own game
| engine and they are not bothered by not having access to
| third party tools and addons. There are large AA studios
| that are still using CryEngine for new games, and I doubt
| there is a large ecosystem for that (although I don't
| actually know). At the same time, those studios have more
| money and employees to build those tools on their own. I
| imagine Valve also has a lot of internal tools that they
| could potentially release as well. Perhaps it's my own
| desire to see the industry converge on a high quality
| open source engine (which they can then heavily modify to
| their needs) that is blind-slighting me here.
| MindSpunk wrote:
| > They gain almost nothing by having it closed source
|
| That's not really true. As a strictly internal engine
| they gain the massive benefit that the only users are
| themselves. They don't have to make affordances or adjust
| for third party users. If they released it with no
| intention to play nice with the community then all they
| open themselves up to is criticism and bad press when
| they inevitably break third party users. To keep their
| nice internal workflows without more engineering effort
| would make the release a dump of the source tree and a
| "have fun" message pledging zero support.
|
| Often in internal engines there are lots of workflows and
| tools that only work with access to the company's
| internal network. Things you can't make public. I work on
| (a different) internal AAA engine and our build system
| would not work without access to our internal network
| even if you had a dump of the entire source code. Do you
| rip that out or modify your internal workflows? Not so
| free to release it anymore.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| You're right. I was more thinking of "they gain almost
| nothing by protecting their copyright over the engine" as
| in having a competitive advantage using their engine as a
| secret sauce. Because Valve is barely in the game dev
| industry to begin with and makes most of their money from
| steam sales. But yes they would have to either support
| the engine or make the decision to not support it.
|
| >when they inevitably break third party users.
|
| Wouldn't versioned releases solve this issue? You can
| ship a new release every 3 years (lets say) and
| developers would expect things to break between versions
| which is the case for all engines.
| Gollapalli wrote:
| Honestly, a source dump with a "have fun" message is
| pretty useful. Adding a bit of documentation and some
| technical notes on how and why things work the way the
| work is gold.
|
| I haven't spent _that_ much time reading the doom3
| codebase, but when I go "I wonder how that should work,"
| it's a decent place to look.
|
| Having a base of useful code to read that's better than
| anything you've written is always a good thing.
| Ragnarork wrote:
| > They don't have to make affordances or adjust for third
| party users. If they released it with no intention to
| play nice with the community then all they open
| themselves up to is criticism and bad press when they
| inevitably break third party users
|
| I kinda get this but also don't get this. You can always
| open source something without giving any guarantees to
| third-party users about stability, feature requests,
| etc., no?
|
| It would still be useful as just having the possibility
| to look into the code, and if someone want to build on
| top of it, then they know the context and have to accept
| the conditions.
| motoxpro wrote:
| But then what is the benefit to them? If the don't
| maintain the repo (benefit from bug fixes, features,
| security, etc) and it's free for people to build on, how
| does that make them money?
| account42 wrote:
| By having people make better mods/games that they then
| likely release on steam because it's very Source-
| friendly. Even for free games this drives more users to
| Steam and keeps existing users from leaving so it's a
| benefit for Valve.
| account42 wrote:
| Zero/minimal support is the norm for game source code
| releases.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| surely the engine links to rather than contains proprietary
| third-party code. professional software developers wouldn't
| just copy-paste from another codebase into their project,
| right? that would be insane.
| aprilnya wrote:
| :)
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Definitely some copy+paste - the ICE encryption code is
| copy+pasted and is there in the SDK.
| account42 wrote:
| > professional software developers
|
| If you ever meet any you should ask them.
| keerthiko wrote:
| IMO the source engine codebase is probably chock-full of duct
| tape and cruft, full of undocumented, legacy, bespoke, hacky
| and deprecated stuff that it's not worth the dev resources
| for valve to bring it up to an OSS standard worthy of their
| reputation.
|
| Contributing to this is probably
|
| - custom external hooks (eg: homemade test framework,
| patchnotes publishing, steamapp backdoor integrations,
| hardware-specific firmware interfaces, 3rd party closed
| source SDK hooks)
|
| - assumptions about Valve's server
| architecture/implementation for most multiplayer stuff used
| by Valve games, the codebase(s) of which are probably as vast
| as Source itself and closed-source too
|
| - bespoke engine modifications made for specific games like
| HL2 or CS1.6 which hasn't been touched for a decade, the
| authors of which may not be accessible to document them
| trivially
|
| Adding sufficient documentation to a massive closed-source
| system meant for internal use, over multiple decades, to
| bring them up to par for functional OSS publication is a
| monumental feat that honestly probably isn't worth the risk
| of bad publicity from the modder community who'd just be mad
| about how unusable it would be.
| keyringlight wrote:
| Supposedly there's a texture of a coconut included in
| source games, along with either a filename or tagged with a
| comment to say that if it's removed then the game will
| break and noone knows why.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| That was a throwaway false joke on Reddit that the
| community has spread, this isn't true. It's just an
| unused texture from an old update.
| account42 wrote:
| Are you implying Valve has a repoutation for high quality
| code? Because I don't think user of Steam or their games
| shares that view.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today,
| way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot,
| Wicked).
|
| My general impression from lurking on these kinds of threads
| (with no relevant personal experience) was that Godot is a
| good 2D engine but not a good 3D engine. Do you find it
| comparable to the other two?
| SXX wrote:
| IDK about Wicked, but with certain non-photorealism styles
| you can easily make well performing 3D game on Godot. You
| can check their showreel and there are plenty 3D games in
| it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Lon_Q2T18
| sho_hn wrote:
| _Road to Vostok_ is probably the most relevant Godot-
| based 3D game, since it 's a FPS.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atb3yFNazmU
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIOmb1hseA
| jsheard wrote:
| Cruelty Squad is also a successful FPS title built with
| Godot, but its deliberately hideous aesthetic probably
| makes it the worst possible way to sell anyone on the
| merits of the engine.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| I unironically love cruelty squads aesthetic, its one of
| my favorite indie games in recent years. Even the store
| description calls it a "sewage infused garbage world"-
| and it is, but its also oddly charming, and perfectly
| suits the game's theme and atmosphere. Though its
| probably not very enjoyable for those with epilepsy
| jsheard wrote:
| I've heard its style described as the product of someone
| understanding good design but doing the exact opposite of
| that out of spite, which seems pretty fitting.
| KronisLV wrote:
| O3DE came from Amazon Lumberyard which came from CryEngine,
| so it's quite possibly one of the better looking open
| source 3D game engines that you can currently get, no
| strings attached: https://github.com/o3de/o3de
|
| Sadly, you need to put in a lot of work to get good results
| out of it (neither of its predecessors had a reputation for
| being easy to work with) and for whatever reason many
| studios aren't exactly rushing to invest a bunch of time
| into it (many just go for Unreal Engine 5, or stick with
| Unity etc., indies often opt for Godot), so you don't get
| much past simple example projects. Part of this is probably
| that it never generated a lot of hype or much of a
| community around it.
|
| Godot has a big community around it and is maturing pretty
| quickly, the early versions were pretty rough when it came
| to 3D (2.X and 3.X), but it's better now. Not as stable as
| Unity or Unreal but those have had the advantage of lots of
| years of work put into them, by more people than Godot has
| up until now.
|
| There's also more niche options like Stride
| (https://www.stride3d.net/) and Flax
| (https://flaxengine.com/) but they suffer from the same
| issues as O3DE, even if otherwise are promising.
| pnw wrote:
| Based on the Github commit history, O3DE started dying
| off in 2023 and never recovered. There is still not a
| single shipping game in https://o3de.org/showcase/
| either.
| bangaladore wrote:
| That's because its basically impossible for a normal
| developer to use CryEngine (what this is based on).
| CryEngine was always an industry engine. Its very complex
| and has poor documentation.
|
| My guess is the primary use for this is going to be corps
| cloning it for their own internal use, whatever that
| might be. I see lots of huawei-aligned commits.
| rozab wrote:
| If those engines are so capable then why do no AAA games use
| them? Source is still (kinda) used in games like Apex Legends
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Because almost all AAA games are built using in-house
| engines.
| account42 wrote:
| You mean in Unreal Engine.
| Nition wrote:
| Valve has given Facepunch the Source 2 license for S&Box[1]
| which will indirectly allow making games in Source 2. That's
| as far as they've gone towards releasing it as a game engine
| so far.
|
| [1]https://sbox.game or
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/
| djmips wrote:
| They've given out Source 2 to others AFAIK.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| To who? It seemed like Source 2 licensing wasn't really
| on their radar.
|
| https://vghe.net/source-2-engine.html#source-2-engine-
| games shows Valve almost exclusively.
| svelle wrote:
| It was on their radar. There's an old slide deck where
| they talk about releasing source 2 for free akin to
| unreal. But they scrapped that idea and gave the code to
| facepunch/Garry instead, for s&box to fill that hole.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Ah okay - I wasn't really paying any attention when
| Source 2 first came out but looking back now it hasn't
| been used for a whole lot of games.
| djmips wrote:
| Yes, OK I worked on Source 1 game (external to Valve) and
| before I left I was told that it was going to be moving
| to Source 2. I guess it left me with the impression that
| it was going to happen - apparently not? I followed up
| and it turns out that game moved over to UE.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Which game out of curiosity?
| Nition wrote:
| I don't think this is correct, but happy to be proven
| wrong if you can find one.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Is sbox closed source ?
| Rohansi wrote:
| Yes it is. The C# side of it is growing and that is easy
| enough to decompile though, if you're just curious.
| That's custom to S&box though and not a part of Source 2.
| greenchair wrote:
| maybe its release could lead to more attacks or cheating?
| lawlessone wrote:
| They are probably still working on something with it?
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Yes, there are still a bunch of their games running on
| Source. I can understand Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global
| Offensive being moved to Source 2 but the rest will stay as
| it's not worth it.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I filed a bug based on this:
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| so sad that people are shaming you for writing this , I
| think you spoke the silent part out loud , but that takes
| courage. I thank you man.
|
| PS: I am the guy who wrote the long paragraph about
| crowdfunding.
|
| After reading the hackernews , it became evident that yes
| it would be nice for foss source code but its never gonna
| happen because its gonna take effort and money for valve
| for what? they might not do it , because I guess they are
| there for making money ?
|
| I believe that crowdfunding is the way to go , Instead of
| forcing companies to give what we want for free , we need
| to provide an incentive for them.
|
| This crowdfunding could also be a great PR for valve itself
| as well. Crowdfunding is the win-win situation I could
| think of , but oh I am more than happy to eat my own word ,
| if I can get source's source code and really run team
| fortress 2 fully open source.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| But in my honest opinion , that rm -rf lawyers part was
| just a little bit less thought out and unprofessional and
| git push origin --all
|
| Maybe remove that part if you really want valve to listen
| to this professionally please ?
| pmarreck wrote:
| fair enough, on it, was trying to be funny
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Is there any relationship between those OS engine and the
| source model?
| lloeki wrote:
| > Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed
|
| Forget Source, what about GoldSrc.
|
| ... which was based on Quake which is now GPL.
|
| There's Xash3d which lives in a kind of licensing limbo
| because it was developed _mostly_ from scratch except for
| some header files which could now be replaced by GPL
| QuakeWorld ones yet the current Xash maintainers can 't do
| anything about it because they're tainted by non-clean-
| roomness.
|
| Even if the above issue was solved, this is about the
| _engine_ ; the HL1 _game_ code (the "SDK") is open but
| licensed by Valve in a way (MIT-ish permissive with a non-
| commercial clause) that is incompatible with the GPL.
|
| This makes both legally undistributable as binaries together.
| __jonas wrote:
| It's a fair question to ask but I wish people wouldn't spam
| the project with embarrassing LLM slop filled issues like
| this:
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624
|
| I don't think it reflects well on this site either
| novabridge wrote:
| Ever since I joined the industry, I've heard that many
| companies are reluctant to open source code because it's so
| bad that if they did, no one would dare use their products. I
| guess Source is one of them.
| eddieroger wrote:
| Aside from the good middleware licensing arguments, if my
| memory serves me, Valve employees get to shift their work to
| what interests them at the time, and who knows what tidbits
| of could-be versions of HL3, Portal 3, or other interesting
| but unannounced (let alone unreleased) games could be in
| there.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| When Winamp published their source code on Github, not only
| did they breach third party licenses, but they also had to
| deal with trolls who across the entire Internet that wanted
| to make a show out of them. It's hard to blame developers for
| avoiding open sourcing when you may not get anything out of
| that except for criticism.
| xandrius wrote:
| I am not sure I'd even remotely compare Source to Godot,
| never touched the other ones though.
| JojoFatsani wrote:
| Is there still some structural Source underlying the cash cow
| of CS2?
| thetoon wrote:
| Maybe that's where a project like Nuclide could step in? I'm
| always a bit confused between their projects' names, but I've
| read somewhere they had progress on the HL2 front.
| pityJuke wrote:
| What is Nuclide? I've found
| https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide and
| https://github.com/eukara/freehl.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I'm still a bit confused on why Source is close sourced when
| Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago. I suppose it'd
| becsuse there's some basic overlap, but they still also feel
| comfortable releasing their gsmes' source?
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago.
|
| I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be
| used to justify having Source2 open as well.
|
| After all, what value is there in keeping the game code
| private at all? The only things I can think of are a)
| anticheat, b) NDA'd 3rd party code, and c) protecting
| important secret sauces made by the company itself
|
| a) and b) are both solved by simply not releasing those
| portions of the code, while c) is a bit moot. Any competitor
| can already (legally) RE the binaries and recreate any juicy
| proprietary algorithms, unless they're patented. But in that
| case they would be protected even if the source was released
| so it's still the same situation.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| b) can get dicey, depending on how hard the 3rd party in
| question wants to defend their copyrights. _Google v.
| Oracle_ was resolved on the basis of being transformative,
| not on the basis of class and function declarations being
| too insignificant to copyright. So if you can 't even keep
| the 3rd-party headers, you're left with a bunch of function
| calls that you have to piece together the meaning of.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| You could just strip out all mentions of the 3rd party
| component on the codebase. Let the community figure out
| how to plug in a replacement.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Let the community figure out how to plug in a
| replacement._
|
| Far more likely the community kicks up a huge stink about
| how Valve released a crippled engine.
| maccard wrote:
| Like this exact thread where they release the game and
| the top comment is "but the engine isn't available".
| account42 wrote:
| This is just concern trolling now. Game source code
| releases are often not 100% complete due to parts that
| coulen't be released.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can
| be used to justify having Source2 open as well.on
|
| I'm not fully up to date but I'm under the impression that
| Source 2 is currently used by their modern games. I don't
| think that's the case for Source 1. The same logic wouldn't
| apply.
|
| >After all, what value is there in keeping the game code
| private at all?
|
| Pretty much what you said. It's all down to cost-benefit at
| the end of the day and of they think there's more cost
| (perceived or otherwise) to releasing source 2 code they
| won't bother.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| There are still games being developed on it:
| https://vghe.net/source-engine.html
|
| There are maybe four still in development and due hopefully
| this year, plus Apex Legends is still going strong.
| account42 wrote:
| "games" here being mods and indie games. I doubt Valve is
| making much if anything in engine licensing fees from
| these.
| progbits wrote:
| Given the leaks, the fact it's been over 10 years since last
| major game released using Source 1, and the fact most of the
| rendering code (probably the most valuable bits, aside from
| physics) in Source2 must have been rewritten given the new
| developments in game graphics; makes me wonder if there is any
| reason for them to keep it closed source.
|
| Do you think they will release it at any point? Maybe there are
| licensing issues where they don't have the rights to all of it
| and couldn't easily opensource it. Or maybe there is in fact
| still too much secret sauce left there?
| bayindirh wrote:
| There's always "too much secret sauce". I remember a time
| when CryTek published papers about how they implemented
| things, now they don't.
|
| There's always in-house ways to deal with graphics drivers
| and certain effects. Remember how Source 1 was _the only
| engine_ which was able to render HDR with measly ATI 9600XT,
| without a performance penalty most of the time?
|
| You carry this know how in evolved form for generations, and
| it gets buried under as the foundation of the new things
| you're building on top of it.
|
| This is what I remember from a friend who implemented his own
| game engine and created a company for it, and half the woes
| were making the graphics drivers and processors behave as
| they said in their manuals.
| kvirani wrote:
| Isn't UE4/5 fully source available?
| bayindirh wrote:
| You need to get a license to get the source. When you pay
| for the license, you also agree that you won't share that
| source.
|
| ID's engines are always called "The world's most
| expensive xcopy". You always get the source, but you
| never share it.
|
| Same model. Get the license, get the source.
|
| See the relevant page at:
| https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-
| engine/...
|
| From that page:
|
| > This page provides detailed instructions for
| _subscribers_ to download the source code for Unreal
| Engine (UE) from the Unreal Engine GitHub repository, and
| to get started working with the code.
|
| (Emphasis mine)
| jsheard wrote:
| The UE4/UE5 source code _is_ only available under
| license, but the bar to acquire said license couldn 't
| possibly be lower. You just connect a GitHub account,
| click through a EULA, and automatically get access to
| almost* the entire source code for free.
|
| * The NDA'ed console bits are hidden of course but all
| the PC code is there. Not just release snapshots either,
| you can see all of Epics commits in real time.
| bayindirh wrote:
| But it's source available, and it's not free software,
| correct?
|
| It's just free as in beer.
|
| "Click through EULA" is the mammoth in the room.
| jsheard wrote:
| Yes it's source available, not true free software.
| Kvirani never said it's free software though.
| NoahKAndrews wrote:
| I think the point is that you're not legally allowed to
| borrow its techniques
| account42 wrote:
| Something as abstract as "techniques" is in general not
| copyrightable. Worst case, there is a software patent but
| that is not something that is granted automatically.
| Gigachad wrote:
| It's not open source but it is free
| ZeWaka wrote:
| There's quite a lot of information given out on engine
| programming and 'tricks' at GDC every year. Some great
| talks by Unreal, Bungie, Guerrilla Games, etc...
| sneak wrote:
| IIRC (from memory) it was called Source because it was a
| derivative of the Quake 2 engine that id gave them a copy of
| after a meeting (on a cd simply labeled "source") even before
| they had a contract in place.
|
| If this apocryphal story is true, they might only have a
| license to it (making it a derivative work) and depending on
| the terms of their licensing agreement from id they might not
| be able to do that without having their legal people talk to
| ZeniMax's (they bought out id software and are their parent
| company now) lawyers, which runs to thousands of dollars in
| pure costs even if everyone is totally cooperative and on
| board and wants to make it happen immediately.
| jsheard wrote:
| The story goes that the name comes from their version
| control system. When they licensed the Quake engine (the
| original one, not Quake 2) they started a repository
| imaginatively called "src" to iterate on it. As Half Life 1
| approached completion that was forked into a stable branch
| called "goldsrc", which became a semi-official nickname for
| the HL1 engine, while more experimental work continued on
| the original "src" branch which eventually grew into...
| Source.
| Merad wrote:
| Close, but it's a little different. When they were making
| Half-Life their code was in a 'Src' directory. Around the
| time HL1 released they forked the code into a `GoldSrc`
| directory so that they could start moving ahead with other
| projects in Src. Internally they used "source" and "gold
| source" to refer to the HL2 vs HL1 engines, and it stuck.
| beeflet wrote:
| Good news everyone! They've already tried to reverse engineer
| the source engine for TF2 for some success!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CvpQrnTEY
| chedabob wrote:
| Damn, was hoping this would bring TF2 back to Mac. Haven't had
| a good LAN party in the office since Apple dropped 32-bit
| support.
| andrepd wrote:
| Do people even do LAN parties anymore? x)
| jsheard wrote:
| They do, but "LAN" has become a bit of a misnomer since few
| games actually have real LAN play options anymore. If
| you're playing modern titles then you end up with a bunch
| of PCs or consoles in the same room all connecting to a
| remote server over the internet. Internet connections are a
| lot better than they were back in the day at least.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Dang, wouldn't you run into serious internet problems
| with that? Do modern games use that much data? Could a
| single internet service handle 6 simultaneous
| connections?
| FreebasingLLMs wrote:
| Really is not that much data involved (not counting
| downloading the game itself). Streaming multi-player game
| data to/from an individual player can range from like
| 10kbps to 100kbps depending on the game and scale
| involved. Remember you are only sending the deltas (and
| occasional entire refreshes).
| superb_dev wrote:
| Latency is a lot more important than throughput for
| online games
| nightpool wrote:
| Lots of competitive games still have LAN options because
| they're basically required for reliable in-person
| tournaments. I'm familiar mostly with Nintendo games like
| Smash, Splatoon 3 and Mario Kart but even very modern
| games like Valorant have the technical ability to run LAN
| servers (even if the game's publishers keep the actual
| LAN servers closely guarded and only use them for large
| in-person events). And of course CS and LoL and similar
| have LAN modes
| josefx wrote:
| A fun weekend playing mostly older games once or twice a
| year.
| pathartl wrote:
| We do, sprinkled throughout the year. Or sessions see
| ~20-24 people and last about 14 hours.
| Maken wrote:
| There is still a chance for that. Since the HL2 anniversary
| update Valve seems to be moving their old titles to the
| modern 64 bits branch of Source.
| Angostura wrote:
| Me too. Loved playing it and I'm sad
| lnauta wrote:
| I'm still not quite sure how to take this, does this mean that:
|
| We can not fix problematic netcode (this is a running joke in
| the TF2 comminity)
|
| We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed
| through configs)?
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| > We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed
| through configs)?
|
| I think some of these fixes were through something a bit more
| complicated like sourcemod which hooks various methods.
| xyst wrote:
| Source engine is so outdated at this point anyways. Valve
| should use the profits from their cash cow, CSGO, and use it to
| invest in retooling with open source engines such as GoDot or
| Bevy.
|
| I remember downloading a leaked version of the source code for
| source engine, and in general it was laughable at how awful it
| was. I dont know if it was ever discussed mainstream but only
| based on recollection of IRC chats.
|
| I think it was about 6 months out of date, but even so it would
| explain why HL sequels would become vaporware despite years of
| teasing the community by Gabe Newell himself.
| somehnguy wrote:
| They're already using Source 2 -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2
| celsoazevedo wrote:
| In case you're not aware, CSGO was replaced by CS2, which
| uses Source 2.
| daelon wrote:
| It's just Godot, fyi.
| djmips wrote:
| It's pretty easy to criticize the Source Engine source code
| but y'know it worked!
| shdh wrote:
| Source 2 is quite a decent engine. Their level building tools
| with Hammer are top notch.
|
| Volumetrics, physical sound, pbr, great snapshot based
| networking.
|
| Godot doesn't really come close.
| anacrolix wrote:
| oh that's lame :(
| chamomeal wrote:
| I didn't realize source wasn't open source. Aren't titanfall
| and apex legends made with a modified source engine? I guess
| respawn licenses it from valve?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| can we not create a legal open source "source emulator".
|
| I am asking this from a total legal standpoint.
| ripdog wrote:
| "Emulator" is the wrong word, but the answer is yes. The word
| you actually meant was "re-implementation" - writing a
| completely new, clean-room program which reads Source data
| files (levels, assets, scripts) and allows the user to play a
| Source game is perfectly legal.
|
| It is necessary to avoid distributing any copyrighted
| material, so the user must provide the game assets from a
| legitimate copy for using the program to be legal. In
| addition, the 'clean-room' must be maintained by ensuring
| that no contributors to the re-implementation have ever seen
| the source code for Source, or they become tainted with
| forbidden knowledge.
|
| Indeed, it's quite common for beloved old games to be re-
| implemented on new codebases to allow easy play on modern
| OS's and at high resolution, etc.
|
| See https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity,
| https://openrct2.io/, https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz
| zamalek wrote:
| A somewhat notorious example of "never having seen the
| proprietary code" was the whole Mono and Rotor fiasco.
| Rotor was a source-available implementation of .Net
| (Framework, Core didn't exist), with a highly restrictive
| license. _If memory serves,_ someone had read the Rotor
| source and contributed to Mono: causing a legal nightmare.
| LorenDB wrote:
| Valve just keeps on winning.
|
| I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a
| worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose
| its way after the original generation is gone.
| pityJuke wrote:
| Off-topic: this is genuinely cool, along with many things Valve
| do, but Valve does generate a significant amount from gambling
| (and underaged gambling) so I won't give a complete pass to
| being a great company.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| This is a little complicated. There are many companies that
| sell gambling products. Nothing special about that. The
| tragedy is when you list your game on Steam and it gets
| popular, you are paying Valve 30% for the privilege of
| finding new users for CSGO and DOTA2. That is how they make
| money.
| almatabata wrote:
| And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on
| every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on
| the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on
| the gambling it will impact their bottom line.
|
| As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling
| products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa
| super team.
|
| Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that
| they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
| SXX wrote:
| I guess it will sounds like I being Valve advocate here,
| but it's just not only a bottom line. Valve simply dont
| have headcount to crackdown on many things and neither
| they have headcount to do lots of predatory stuff too.
|
| Valve is under 400 people and wast majority of them do
| not work on Steam or specific game like CSGO. Likely each
| project support team is like 30-50 people at most.
|
| To compare numbers for other companies in 2023-2024:
| * Epic Games - 4000 * Nintendo - 7,724 * Sony
| Interactive Entertainment - 12,700 * Take-Two
| Interactive - 12,371 * Electronic Arts - 13,700
| * Activision Blizzard - 17,000 * Mircosoft Gaming -
| 20,100
|
| Might be they do have to go to hire 100 more people to
| solve this problem and might be it's fully their fault,
| but expectations many people have of this certainly rich,
| but small company are not realistic.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Also looking at things like pirate sites, it would be
| never ending process. Close one and lock the their
| inventories and 3 will popup somewhere else. It is
| unlikely to be solvable issue.
| almatabata wrote:
| Just because you cannot "solve" an issue, does not mean
| you should do nothing. By that logic valve should not
| implement VAC, because after all, cheaters will always
| find a way.
|
| They play the anti-cheat game of cat and mouse, because
| if they do not, users will stop playing. No one wants to
| play with cheaters unless they are cheating.
|
| They could definitely invest some resources into this.
| But they have no monetarily incentive thus they do
| nothing. I fully expect legal action or fear of it, will
| eventually make them do something.
| almatabata wrote:
| They can definitely hire 2-5 people to do something, and
| at least try to crack down.
| jmb99 wrote:
| > As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling
| products.
|
| Counter strike cases are a gambling product. They cost
| money to buy, they cost money to open, and they reward
| with an item worth real money. This is indisputable, and
| arguing otherwise is either in bad faith or due to
| ignorance of the platform and surrounding ecosystem.
|
| Valve wouldn't be making over a billion dollars a year on
| case openings alone if the outcome of opening a case was
| worthless 100% of the time.
| beeflet wrote:
| Yeah the 30% cut is insane, and its surprising to me that
| game publishers tolerate it under steam. But if you look at
| the PC games market, you can clearly be successful doing
| the "self publish" route like Minecraft did.
|
| I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a
| value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item
| trading and such convenience features. And I say this as
| someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like
| Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface
| is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Publishers have discovered that pc gamers prefer Steam
| over all other platforms. Basically all the big
| publishers are back on Steam or entering it. After trying
| to manage outside.
| softawre wrote:
| Which is true because people already have large Steam
| game libraries. I barely game anymore but I must have
| 3000 games in Steam.
|
| Epic is gnawing at the lead, at least with me, as they
| give out a free game every week. I must have 300 games in
| Epic - I've even paid for a few.
| ZeWaka wrote:
| Traditional publishers before Steam took even more - this
| is why companies tolerate it.
| account42 wrote:
| Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule. You
| really need to get lucky to make it big without being on
| Steam.
| fhars wrote:
| From what I gather about the game market, you need to get
| lucky to make it big being on Steam, too.
| MonitorBird wrote:
| Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to
| redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without
| spending it? In that case isn't the entire game industry
| guilty of trying to rip money from the credit cards of
| unsuspecting parents? Isn't the entire modern web just a tool
| to suck cash out of cards, or try and get your card sucked?
| What are we talking about here. I cut my teeth on CS:S, but
| haven't played much after that. I know the newer games have
| lootbox mechanics, but I assumed it was for items you could
| potentially grind? Just like.. every other modern online
| multiplayer money sucking game that exists. Warframe,
| Fortnite, Roblox, I dunno. Everything these days seems to be
| a bloodsucker. Steam gets a full pass from me, I'm not a
| prude.
| pityJuke wrote:
| > Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to
| redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without
| spending it?
|
| Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results
| in a couple of downstream effects:
|
| 1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded
| for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people
| to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items
| have been sold for >$1m [0]).
|
| 2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate
| for money in casinos, or for sports betting.
|
| 3. This can even lead to money laundering [1].
|
| As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites
| running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for
| a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use
| that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on
| literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know
| because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even
| cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt
| to do identity validation.
|
| Some video resources that might be useful:
|
| - Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
|
| - People Make Games:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g
|
| [0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-
| sells-for-o...
|
| [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50262447
| chipgap98 wrote:
| And Valve should get rid of item trading because it could
| potentially be used this way?
|
| Edit: this is a genuine question. What is the solution
| here?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It is used this way. Whether you think valve should
| remove it depends on your disposition on gambling.
| pityJuke wrote:
| Like, if Valve do want to keep item trading in (and
| potentially be used this way is an understatement, these
| are multi-million dollar gambling businesses), they could
| at least try to stop them.
|
| Valve's enforcement was one round of C&Ds in 2016 (!),
| and then some technical measures [0] in 2024. For Valve
| to take heed the problem, they literally had to have a
| stage invasion at their esport event [1].
|
| [0]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/730/view/418
| 56069942...
|
| [1]: https://internettalk.xyz/blog/cults-vendettas-
| gambling-how-a... - article I published, Coffeezilla also
| has a video on this event:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE
| jmb99 wrote:
| The solution is fairly straightforward. The list of
| gambling and item-selling (for real money) sites is
| finite and known. Valve could either stop allowing their
| bots to trade items, or (even more usefully) ban and burn
| any items that pass through those sites.
|
| The problem is, if you can no longer cash out the items
| for real money, they're going to lose a lot (>95% I'd
| guess) of their value. Nobody wants $25k of steam wallet
| money, they want $25k, period. This would be terrible for
| valve, since it would severely diminish the value of all
| items (thus diminishing their cut of every on-platform
| sale), as well as cut the demand for unboxings (which
| they of course also make a cut on). Valve obviously cares
| more about their money printer than the fact that it
| facilities children gambling, so they do nothing.
|
| It's pretty easy to see why they allow this. They made
| over a billion dollars in 2023 on unboxings alone,
| ignoring the sale/trade fees. I doubt anything will
| change without a major US lawsuit, which I doubt will
| come any time soon if it hasn't already.
| jorvi wrote:
| You throw a $8-$15 into the case slot machine (by buying a
| key), it usually gives you a crap prize, sometimes its a
| decent prize, and once every 100 000 - 1 000 000 times you
| get something great.
|
| You can wrangle that with words in any way you want, its
| gambling. Same for Team Fortress 2 and stuff like hats.
| keoneflick wrote:
| I think a few replies have missed a key issue: Valve's CS
| monetization is the worst in the industry.
|
| Most current monetization for cosmetics allows you to both
| (1) grind for items without paying anything and (2) if you
| want to pay, show you exactly what you are paying for.
|
| Even games that still use lootboxes (i.e. don't follow #2)
| allow you to grind for items.
|
| CS is one of the very few (or only current) game where you
| can't get a cosmetic without paying (must purchase keys to
| open lootboxes) and you don't know what you are getting
| (lootboxes).
|
| It's bad and there is no excuse.
|
| The trading mechanic, which adds a real world value to
| these cosmetics, and encourages players to pay for
| lootboxes makes it worse.
|
| People sometimes hate on popular games like Fortnite and
| COD, but they have way better/more fair monetization
| practices.
| Toqoz_ wrote:
| > CS is one of the very few (or only current) game where
| you can't get a cosmetic without paying (must purchase
| keys to open lootboxes) and you don't know what you are
| getting (lootboxes).
|
| You get dropped items through playtime which you can sell
| on the community market to gain steam wallet funds, which
| you can then use to purchase most other cosmetics or even
| games.
| keoneflick wrote:
| I do not believe CS:GO free tier had any cosmetic drops,
| only lootbox drops. But I certainly could be mistaken. In
| either case, any truly free cosmetics were much rarer
| than other games.
| jmb99 wrote:
| I don't believe you get any drops without Prime, period.
| But even if you only get lootboxes, they also have value
| and can be sold on the marketplace (which is what I do
| with all of mine).
| beeflet wrote:
| Having played TF2 and such as a kid, the bottleneck was
| always asking your parents for their credit card or getting
| steam cards/vanilla credit cards for your birthday.
|
| I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't
| really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast
| that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see
| how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top
| trumps" and pokemon cards and such).
|
| Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet
| porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff
| like loot boxes.
|
| I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually
| adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's
| savings into a game.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of
| internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-
| adjacent stuff like loot boxes.
|
| I think that's more because people don't want to teach
| children about sex, while people do demonstrate what
| gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're
| letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can
| potentially be disasterous.
|
| That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame
| on your own biological body and treating parts of it as
| taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be
| taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a
| complicated thing.
| Funes- wrote:
| >I think that's more because people don't want to teach
| children about sex
|
| Come on now. It's hard to find anything more immediately
| exciting and alluring than sex, especially for teenagers.
| The biological imperatives and inclinations are too
| strong regarding sex for virtually everyone, compared to
| anything related to gambling. And OP is absolutely right
| that the barrier to entry is a great deterrent in the
| case of gambling, as well. Just based on that alone,
| easy-access, sex-related stuff is always going to have a
| potentially greater effect on almost anyone, regardless
| of their previous knowledge about it or warnings received
| by other people during their childhood.
|
| >people do demonstrate what gambling is early on
|
| Talk about going out on a limb. What are you basing this
| affirmation on? I don't see any parents lending any word
| of advice to their children about gambling-like
| activities, in any case, as most of them indulge in those
| themselves, let alone their own kids.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >t's hard to find anything more immediately exciting and
| alluring than sex, especially for teenagers.
|
| And? More reason to educate them early. Similar to why we
| have a strong desire while young to devour sweets. Now
| imagine we ignore diet and leave a kid to eat whatever
| they feel like.
|
| >compared to anything related to gambling.
|
| My theme is education and awareness, not playing a one up
| contest on what is worse. Could we both agree that these
| are factors to teach to kids early?
|
| >What are you basing this affirmation on?
|
| My upbringing and education? You think 3rd/4th graders
| learning about "number cubes" won't equate that to
| gambling? They also love talking about card games later
| on. Parent taught me plenty of common games as well,
| alongside Dominoes. And ofc Z the media. Kids have eyes
| and can see adults gamble. They don't need a deep dive
| into a dedicated class to learn the deal (but yes, I was
| taught that gambling is bad).
| globular-toast wrote:
| Curious how you think education would help with porn. I
| had sex education prior to puberty. I still think porn
| was enormously harmful.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Ymmv as always. There will always be great and not great
| teachers. Really hard to judge on any individual case.
| globular-toast wrote:
| But what would a great teacher teach them? That's what
| I'm curious about. Is this just an awareness thing? Like
| say "by the way, porn exists, but wanking off to it is
| nothing like real sex and it might make the real thing
| worse". Is this accepted now, or is it still just one
| dude's theory (the your brain on porn guy)?
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The earlier times tried and failed with that fear based
| approach. Worked about as well as D.A.R.E. I hope Manu
| schools learned by now that you can't just turn off a
| teenager's sexual curiosity and that casting it off as
| taboo only strengthens such curiosity.
|
| You're not trying to sway people away from internet porn,
| you're telling people how sex actually works in reality.
| My teachers taught about the basic biology of genetalia
| (especially wrt sexual function), how to perform safe
| sex, STD's, Pregnancy, and school resources (we had
| condoms at the nurses office, for example).
|
| I feel those are the basics needs everyone should he
| taught. A decent teacher would also have an open Q&A
| about sex and help in dispelling any potentially bad
| notions learned from elsewhere. The best lessons come
| from.those who seek knowledge themselves.
|
| It's not perfect. I wish my education also taught more
| about genetalia care (there's still so so much
| misinformation about foreskin) and dove more into what
| consent actually is (that was more in college). But the
| point was to counter balance whatever people was seeing
| on the internet, not necessarily demonize it. Just like
| how understanding how to calculate probability can change
| your approach to gambling, learning more about your body
| and other humans' behavior can change your approach to
| how you interpret porn online. Even if people continue to
| consume it after being educated.
| softawre wrote:
| I'm a parent to 11/7 year olds, and just yesterday we
| were talking about how dangerous and addictive gambling
| is. If you ask them about gambling they will say "it's
| for stupid people". I doubt it's super common but I'm
| sure others are doing it if I am.
| culi wrote:
| Also they still take a huge cut of profits from game sales.
| That's 30% of each sale going to the platform (compared to
| 12% by Epic). Indie game devs suffer if people don't opt to
| buy directly or from platforms like itch.io
|
| But they have a near-monopoly on the pc gaming market so
| selling on Steam is a must
| dralley wrote:
| At least they're funding a lot of useful open source
| development with that money pile.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| It's okay, if you're a AAA company with something like like
| 25-50m in sales, y9u get a tax cut to 20%
|
| When you put it that way, the model makes so much more
| sense to matching how the US operates.
| jsheard wrote:
| In a sense it's worse than that - when the mega-publishers
| started leaving Steam in favor of their own stores with
| better margins, Valve conceded by introducing a tiered
| system where their cut drops to 25% after $10M in sales and
| again to 20% after $50M in sales. It's deliberately
| structured to give a discount to the mega-corps which least
| need it (EA, Ubisoft, etc) while ensuring that indies with
| no leverage over Valve mostly remain on the 30% bracket.
|
| Even more ironically those indies typically use negligible
| amounts of Steams infrastructure, while the AAA games which
| enjoy the 20% revenue share are the ones regularly pushing
| 200GB downloads though Steams servers.
| CodeArtisan wrote:
| 30% may be a lot but you get more than a store page;
|
| - anticheat
|
| - voice chat, friend list, ...
|
| - matchmaking
|
| - marketplace for mods, maps, skins, ...
|
| - clips and videos
|
| - forums/ discussion board
|
| - cloud saves
|
| - rankings
|
| An indie would have to implement and host those by itself
| or rely on third party services.
|
| https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/
| BoorishBears wrote:
| The problem is the margins are so high these digital
| storefront cuts almost become arbitrary. So to try and
| come up with a somewhat objective measure... 30% is too
| much based on their _own_ historical pricing.
|
| Steam was taking 30% when they did heavy curation and
| hand picked every game. At that point being on Steam was
| probably as valuable as a traditional publisher
| distribution wise because just being on Steam assured
| some level of quality.
|
| Greenlight was the start of the decline in that value,
| and then with Steam Direct its just officially insane
| that they're still pricing their cut at the same rates
| they did at launch.
|
| The value adds you listed also got much easier to build
| over time and got commoditized. EGS offers most of that
| for free for example, sans gambling enabling
| marketplaces.
| adra wrote:
| Don't forget about their REAL expenses: credit processing
| fees and chargebacks.
| account42 wrote:
| Those are not even remotely close to 30%. If the cut was
| based on real expenses for services provided you'd see it
| change over time. That it's been stuck ack 30% for so
| long shows that there is only one reason for such a high
| cut: because they can get away with it.
| righthand wrote:
| Most games don't have or need that functionality.
| Charging 30% because you could use that stuff if only you
| put in the development time is pretty rich thinking.
|
| For example the Forums feature is seen as a plague, many
| of the forums on Steam are filled with neo nazi content
| and spam.
| kibwen wrote:
| Especially relevant to this conversation is that TF2 is the
| game that single-handedly popularized the lootbox model
| outside of Korea.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Ye it was unfortunate. I remember at the time I thought it
| was silly but innocent. I don't think I even knew you could
| buy loot boxes for money.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Also, their primary reason for existence is to add DRM to
| software.
| ranger207 wrote:
| Well, no, Steam provides a bunch of services to gamedevs
| that might be tied to an account, like matchmaking or mod
| support. But if the games don't use that they're not
| encumbered. I've got a bunch of hours in KSP that aren't on
| my account because I launched the exe through the CKAN mod
| manager rather than Steam
| koolala wrote:
| A win would be supporting TF2 Source 2.
| beeflet wrote:
| Maybe the next step is releasing TF3 or some competitor game
| to overtake TF2
| wingerlang wrote:
| I assumed this is what they are trying to do with Deadlock
| [0]?
|
| [0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422450/Deadlock/
| Corrado wrote:
| I tried playing Deadlock for a bit but it seems too much
| like an Overwatch clone. I like TF2 for it's simplicity
| and visual ease. Some of the current FPS games just
| clutter up the screen with soooo much stuff ... it's hard
| to see what I'm trying to shoot. Maybe I'm just old but
| having too much stuff on the screen is distracting and
| knocks my enjoyment way down.
| wiseowise wrote:
| Why? TF2 looks and performs amazing.
| datenyan wrote:
| TF2 definitely looks amazing, but it very much does not
| perform amazing - at least, not anymore.
|
| Source really wasn't built for the amount of particles
| present in the cosmetics (especially the "Unusuals")
| wiseowise wrote:
| Ah, you mean modern cancer. Solution is to return to pre
| 2012 era, not try to bandaid disease.
| schmorptron wrote:
| They ported it to 64Bit proper last year, and that helped
| performance on modern systems a bunch! Of course, it's
| still a far cry of being able to run on the hardware of
| the time it came out in 2000.
| sergiotapia wrote:
| If his son inherits Valve, it's over. He will probably sell it
| because why not -- he's not a gamer whatsoever.
| nicce wrote:
| It is less about gaming but more about understanding what is
| best for the end users.
| MisterTea wrote:
| To me Valve lost its way as a game developer long ago. What
| have they released recently? CS 2 in 2023? That IP came from a
| mod they bought 25 years ago just like every other game they
| released since HL. The only thing "new" have in the pipeline is
| a MOBA FPS.
|
| I am however eternally grateful Steam allows me to painlessly
| run Windows games on Linux so I never have to deal with MS in
| my personal life ever again. As a game distributor they are
| awesome. And that is what Valve does best, distribute games.
| AlphaCerium wrote:
| if by "DOTA FPS" you mean their new MOBA Deadlock, AFAIK it's
| not related to DOTA in any way.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Thanks. Yes, I mixed up the acronyms.
| sundarurfriend wrote:
| Other than being developed by the same guy, IceFrog, that
| originally developed (the final versions of) DotA. That's
| been the community "common knowledge" for a good while at
| least, I don't know if it was ever officially confirmed.
| hbn wrote:
| Yeah seems to me Valve almost entirely stopped being a game
| developer in the early 2010s after Dota 2. Which I suppose
| more or less coincides with when PC gaming became a real
| mainstream alternative to consoles in the gaming space, and
| it became beneficial to lock themselves in as the PC gaming
| platform provider.
| pynappo wrote:
| Well, they released Artifact in 2018 (to poor reception),
| DOTA Underlords in 2019 (and stopped updating it after a
| while), and half life alyx in 2020.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC.
| ..
|
| They also likely have another half-life game in the works, as
| mentions of half-life-esque things have popped up around
| their codebase (as published through updates of their
| existing source 2 games):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWlRkzwHLwI
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Not exactly recent but they definitely delivered in VR. The
| SteamVR demo (a collection of minigames/experiences) is
| awesome, and so is Half-Life Alyx.
|
| Half-Life Alyx actually took me by surprise. As in: "What?
| Valve still makes games?". And while it is the Half-Life
| franchise, it is different enough to stand on its own.
| MisterTea wrote:
| Is VR a big market? I used a few of the early devices and
| was impressed but not moved to invest in it (before Alyx
| was announced I had regular access to a private Vive setup
| in a dedicated room.) Two friends bought Oculus but lost
| interest after a while. They haven't touched them in over a
| year and one friend has kids who don't care about it at
| all. Gamer people I know either don't care about it or like
| me think it's cool but not compelled to invest in. They
| lack compelling titles. For me to play Alyx, I'd have to
| invest hundreds of dollars on hardware in addition to
| buying the game. I can play hl2 right now on my existing
| PC.
|
| Maybe I'm not enough of a hardcore gamer to like DOTA or
| MOBA style games. I loved TF2 but you can only play for so
| long.
|
| I would like to see Valve come up with some fresh new
| imaginative IP that isn't something decades old. Half life
| was a ground breaking game and to this day I will fire it
| up and play through about once a year after I get the urge.
| On a rail was my favorite part. I feel dread when I get to
| Zen because I know the end of the game is near.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| To play Alyx costs $299 if you were to buy a Quest 3S.
| Even less (~$200) if you were to buy a used Quest 2,
| which for PCVR isn't that much different in terms of
| overall experience. The barrier to entry is extremely
| low. Hundreds of dollars sure, but only _just, barely_
| hundreds.
|
| But PCVR isn't really why people buy these things (which
| they do, Quest headsets cumulatively have sold ~30
| million units) it's a value-add, most engagement is with
| Meta's store. The reason why this engagement isn't
| noticed by you is because the demographic showing the
| fastest uptake for VR is kids and teens, while you, I and
| everyone else posting here is old as fuck.
| bspammer wrote:
| For what it's worth, it is an exceptional MOBA FPS. It's
| genuinely one of my favourite multiplayer games of all time,
| and it's not even released yet. I know MOBAs aren't
| everyone's thing, but Deadlock may be the peak of the genre.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I don't know why you think it's Gabe that has the most impact,
| most of the original team behind Half-Life are gone, and people
| didn't buy their products for Steam. They bought their games.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| I'd argue the opposite and that Gabe needs to retire (and
| hopefully have Robin Walker take over).
|
| Valve's release cycle has slowed down to almost nothing, and
| are just feeding off their cash cows. Gabe is 62 and seems more
| interested in his Neuralink competitor.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| I would argue Valve _already_ lost its way, it 's just that
| their enshittification took the form of gambling-adjacent
| lootboxes. People forget that TF2 was one of the first western
| games to add lootboxes, way before Overwatch even existed. Even
| _Portal 2_ had them crowbarred into the co-op mode for reasons.
| That 's why they stopped[1] shipping single-player experiences.
|
| CS:GO is the worst offender; to the point where there's third-
| party gambling[0] sites to gamble cosmetic gun skins with, that
| specifically cater to children. Basically all of CS:GO's pro
| scene is sponsored by it.
|
| [0] The skin gambling sites are not officially condoned by
| Valve, but they absolutely do not do shit to try and stop it.
|
| [1] Half-Life: Alyx notwithstanding
| foxandmouse wrote:
| The fact that they did this before bothering to recompile it for
| 64-bit Mac says a lot--Valve clearly doesn't see Apple as a
| friendly place to do business. Makes sense, with Apple trying to
| lock game devs into the App Store.
| ender341341 wrote:
| from various interviews I've seen of folks in the games
| industry apple has historically been actively hostile to
| working with game companies, it seems to have softened with the
| iphone appstore.
|
| People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was
| heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and
| they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
| foxandmouse wrote:
| Don't think that's the case anymore, "Game Porting Toolkit 2"
| seemingly opened the floodgates on gaming on a mac.. It's up
| to the developers if they think it's worth the time/ effort;
| but with how great apple the hardware is, and how easy it is
| to port a game, I think we're going to see a huge influx of
| mac gaming.
| jsheard wrote:
| Isn't the Game Porting Toolkit still under that weird
| license where developers are only allowed to use the
| DirectX translation layer for "evaluation purposes"? End-
| users can use it to run Windows games if they want, but
| AFAICT developers are categorically not allowed to build
| their own ports around it, they still have to port their
| game over to Metal the hard way.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Given developers' experiences with Apple Arcade[1] I'm not
| holding my breath. Either Apple just doesn't really care
| about gaming, or they're culturally unable to provide an
| environment that would attract game developers. No amount
| of game porting toolkits will help with this. iPhone still
| gets plenty of (mobile) games simply because the potential
| audience is too big to ignore. The Mac doesn't have this
| luxury.
|
| [1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-
| frustratio...
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| It's not going to happen. No one feels that way in the
| industry.
| imiric wrote:
| > Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a
| monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
|
| I think "courting" is underselling what they actually did.
|
| They invested heavily into building tooling and APIs
| specifically for games, which eventually powered their own
| gaming console. They were practically the only company doing
| this on PCs since the mid '90s, and they became a monopoly
| because nobody else was focused on this. Developers and
| consumers jumped aboard because there was nowhere else to go.
| This is the same reason Steam won. For many years, there were
| just no alternatives.
|
| Microsoft gets a lot of flack for many things, but they
| deserve a ton of credit for inventing and supporting the PC
| gaming landscape as we know it today.
| thefz wrote:
| Exactly. DirectX is what, 25-30 years old?
| madrox wrote:
| As much as I'd like to give Microsoft credit for this, I
| don't think they deserve it. There's multiple historical
| writeups documenting how management had written off Windows
| as a gaming platform and did not support the original
| DirectX project. If it weren't for the tenacity of the
| original three DirectX engineers who basically did this as
| a passionate side project the gaming landscape would look a
| lot different. Microsoft got this monopoly somewhat in
| spite of itself.
| imiric wrote:
| I'd be interested in reading those reports, if you can
| share them.
|
| Regardless, it seems silly to claim that Microsoft's 30+
| years of supporting Windows to make it the dominant
| gaming platform on PC rests on the shoulders of 3
| employees. I don't have any insider knowledge, but it
| would be safe to assume that this was a long-term
| strategic decision for the company. I can imagine the
| existence of internal detractors at every step of this
| direction, but what they've achieved and their position
| today is surely the result of the successful execution of
| this vision, and not something they stumbled into by
| chance.
| Vilian wrote:
| Their 30 years destroying any type of competition trying
| to grow also can't be forget
| madrox wrote:
| It's on DirectX's wikipedia page with citations. Indeed,
| the way DirectX got received caused Microsoft to change
| their stance, but it really was the work of three
| engineers who didn't take no for an answer.
| softawre wrote:
| Microsoft at the very least didn't fire these developers
| and didn't convince them to not work on DirectX. Someone
| at Microsoft gets the credit, even if it's not upper
| management.
| bearjaws wrote:
| Mac accounts for 1.4% of users, which is 25% less than Linux...
|
| That is actually more than I thought, but its clear without
| compatible games there is very little reason to install Steam.
|
| Also, Apple only recently started to be more gaming friendly,
| so it's really not surprising they would try to port a 20 year
| old game.
| Kovah wrote:
| > without compatible games
|
| About 30% of the games I own on Steam would run on my Mac. I
| think that's quite much for a platform that nobody likes to
| develop for. But to be fair, I have few mainstream games like
| CoD, LoL or whatever.
| Rohansi wrote:
| Are you estimating based on hardware capability? Probably -
| but even if devs put the work in to port their games to Mac
| they will all slowly drop out of compatibility. Many games
| stop being updated after a while and you can't expect
| everyone to put effort into maintaining compatibility with
| newer versions of macOS. There are so many games in my
| Steam library that can't be played on Mac anymore because
| they were built for 32-bit x86. Eventually Apple will nuke
| Rosetta and you'll further lose access to even more games.
| isametry wrote:
| (This is probably terribly obvious, but should be mentioned
| anyway: that's 1.4% Mac and 2.06% Linux users _of Steam_. Not
| users in general.)
| weaksauce wrote:
| steamdeck runs on linux so that should eventually make games
| on linux mostly compatible and maybe even one day make it so
| that pc gamers don't have to have windows at all... chicken
| and egg thing though
| heliophobicdude wrote:
| Do you still also need to compile a mac build on a Mac?
| account42 wrote:
| You can cross-compile to a mac if that's what you are asking.
| Not as easily as to Windows/Linux though, but that's just
| because there is less interest.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| You're over-analyzing it. TF2 is 17 years old, and basically
| has a skeleton crew keeping it running. They simply decided
| it's not worth the effort. I'm mad about it too, but hard to
| blame them.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| There was a video explaining to why Valve games were never
| ported to the Macintosh.
|
| I can't find it. But essentially it was Apple not wanting their
| machines to be used for gaming. And so axed all the work of the
| port and refused to publish the game.
|
| The best I can find is from 2007 from Gabe:
|
| > We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them,
| people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should
| do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are
| three things you could do to make that better", and then they
| say OK, and then we never see them again. The cycle then
| repeats itself when a new group of people replace the old ones
| at Apple.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| All of their games were ported to Mac in 2013 or so but that
| support has been wound back in the last year or so with Intel
| Macs dying, 32-bit Mac support dying and presumably no
| interest from Apple in helping keep the Mac ports alive.
| stephen_g wrote:
| From the blog post accompanying the source release [1], it
| sounds like the classic Source engine is only being made
| fully 64-bit just now.
|
| > We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer
| back-catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM,
| CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable
| HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
|
| So it sounds more like Valve just hadn't done the work to
| make it possible to run on more modern macOS (that has long
| been 64-bit only) until now. Not much Apple could have done
| except maybe tried to directly pay them to do it earlier...
|
| 1. https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Yeah. If it's been ported to 64-bit now they've probably
| dealt with the x86 assembly as well.
| mentos wrote:
| I always wonder if Apples disdain for games is a relic from
| Steve Jobs time at Atari.
| jeffhuys wrote:
| They don't have a disdain for games... At least not anymore.
| They're actively pushing it on both mobile and mac, even
| introducing "Game Mode" and the like. You wouldn't do that if
| you have a disdain for games.
| dundarious wrote:
| From TFA:
|
| > As [1]announced on the official TF2 website
|
| [1] https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 states:
|
| > We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer back-
| catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM, CS:S, and
| HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI,
| prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!
|
| So that seems to be coming, at least in the sense of x86-64
| which Apple Silicon supports better via Rosetta 2.
| Vilian wrote:
| Until they kill Roseta like they did with e very other
| compatibility layer
| Vilian wrote:
| Mac don't support vulkan nor opengl, so it didn't recompiled to
| mac
| pjmlp wrote:
| Technically so doesn't Windows, nor game consoles in spite of
| urban myths (Switch being the exception).
|
| Windows Vulkan and OpenGL drivers exist, because Microsot
| still hasn't removed the ICD plugin interface from the OS,
| which is used by GPU vendors themselves, not Microsoft, to
| provide drivers on Windows for VUlkan and OpenGL.
|
| Likewise, Valve could have use MoltenVK if they actually
| wanted to.
| scheeseman486 wrote:
| Not "likewise". MoltenVK is a compatibility shim that wraps
| Vulkan to Metal, not a true hardware interface. This has
| impacts on performance and compatibility, some features
| straight up don't work because Metal doesn't provide an
| equivalent. Given the apparent legal entanglements between
| Kronos Group and Apple re: Vulkan, it seems unlikely that
| true Vulkan support on Apple hardware will ever happen
| outside of Linux.
|
| Valve didn't bother with Metal because Apple are hostile to
| their business model, they've given up dedicating serious
| rescources to the platform and at this point Steam only
| exists on MacOS out of inertia.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And you think ICD driver infrastructure as originally
| designed for OpenGL 1.0 is any better?
| account42 wrote:
| The venodor provided OpenGL and Vulkan drivers on Windows
| are not shims over DirectX and are instead full-featured
| implementations of those APIs for the vendor hardware
| without weird limitations that a shim brings. So yes, the
| situation on Windows is better, by miles.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Writing games for Mac seems like a great challenge. You have a
| relatively non-standard CPU architecture with a proprietary
| graphics API for a small set of devices, many of which embed
| screens with ridiculously high resolutions while coupled to a
| GPU that's "good enough" at best. Apple proudly announced the
| mid-tier Tomb Raider 2 graphics, which doesn't promise much for
| game devs that don't have support from Apple's promotional
| campaign. All of that, on a platform that's smaller than Linux
| based on player count.
|
| Unless you know for sure that you're going to get a decent
| player base, I don't think optimising for Mac makes much
| business sense for games companies. Users that can afford a Mac
| can probably also afford a console anyway.
|
| You can trick games into running by using the same wrappers and
| workarounds that you'd use to game on Linux (except you need to
| optimise the wrappers yourself because they're less mature) but
| gaming on Linux already has plenty of DRM/anti-cheat
| incompatibility issues, and using less mature tools will only
| make that worse. And, of course, Apple doesn't care much about
| backwards compatibility; they've killed 32 bit for no apparent
| reason other than "we don't want to maintain compatibility" and
| who knows how long they'll maintain the current set of
| replacement APIs. Linux suffers from similar issues, and that's
| why the go-to method of playing games on Linux is to run them
| in an emulated Windows environment.
|
| I think games companies will recompile games for Snapdragon
| before they'll bother with Mac. By the time they got all their
| 32 bit x86 libraries to work on ARM without emulation, Apple
| has probably switched around a couple of APIs and requirements
| anyways, so why bother.
| andai wrote:
| > Linux suffers from similar issues, and that's why the go-to
| method of playing games on Linux is to run them in an
| emulated Windows environment.
|
| See also: _Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
| pityJuke wrote:
| The official blog post:
| https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
|
| (Also includes links to recent updates for other Source engine
| titles)
| Lammy wrote:
| I hope this is good news for TF2 Classic.
|
| edit: here's the announcement from the TF2C Discord:
|
| ==============
|
| @everyone We'll have more to say later, but you might not be able
| to launch TF2 Classic for a little bit due to the massive SDK
| update and public release of Team Fortress 2's code.
|
| We're already preparing for the porting efforts and a potential
| Steam release now that we've been legally enabled to pursue that,
| but in the meantime, you will have to shift Source SDK Base 2013
| Multiplayer to the "previous2021" beta branch that still has the
| previous revision of the SDK files to continue playing. See the
| screenshot for an example.
|
| Thank you, and we'll have more news soon!
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| Given they call out derivative works of the original games
| being ok, and those works can be released as new games on steam
| seems to clear the way for TF2 Classic.
| jeffybefffy519 wrote:
| What is tf2 classic?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| https://tf2classic.com/
|
| and
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2
| lelandfe wrote:
| Wow! They're making landing pages like the old TF2 updates
| and even making shorts. This is obsessive. I love it. Also,
| check out how big the team is. Holy crud.
|
| They don't have Valve's humor but... who does.
| Lammy wrote:
| It's very good. Most of my TF2 hours back in The Day were
| on 360 which never got Valve's original class updates
| anyway, so TF2 Classic feels to me like if TF2 had ever
| gotten updates at all :p
|
| A good example of the stuff they're trying is the Jump
| Pad PDA, the alternate to Teleporters for Engineer. I
| like them a lot because they really open up the
| verticality of the maps to players who aren't obsessive
| rocket/sticky-jumpers:
| https://wiki.tf2classic.com/wiki/Jump_Pads
|
| It's fun as Engineer too since they make that slot more
| useful in circumstances where Teleporters are a waste. A
| single Jump Pad costs more metal than a single
| Teleporter, but then it's also useful on its own instead
| of requiring the complete pair. It's great if there's an
| enemy Spy who has made it their mission to constantly
| harass your buildings, and on maps/modes where the
| objective is so close to spawn (like the first phase of
| Payload as BLU and the final phases of Payload as RED)
| that Teleporters are less tactically important.
|
| e: also the obvious visible fact that TF2C maintains the
| original cohesive art style with meaningful silhouettes,
| something Valve made a huge deal about in the TF2
| developer commentaries only to throw away in favor of
| becoming Very Rich via gambling for colorful sparkly hats
| lol https://ia904504.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?arch
| ive=/11...
| beeflet wrote:
| Woah... woah WOAH I wasn't expecting to see this on HN. I've been
| expecting this for a long time, and if I was valve I would have
| done something like this a long time ago: release a "final"
| celebratory content update, port the game to vulkan, and open
| source the codebase (keeping the item servers and whatnot tied to
| valve's servers). I don't know if this is the beginning of the
| end or the end of the beginning of TF2. There have been leaks
| before but this is huge news.
| Rooster61 wrote:
| > Woah... woah WOAH
|
| I see what you did there
| epaga wrote:
| Well...I don't, care to enlighten us non-insiders?
| reportgunner wrote:
| probably a reference to Scout or something
| Rooster61 wrote:
| It's a line from Portal. In the final fight, GLaDOS says it
| in a panicked, glitchy voice while being dismantled.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Beginning of the end? It's been the end for years - they're
| passing it off to the community, as they should! The team for
| TF2 is probably very low double digits now and it's almost 18
| years old, it's time to outsource the continuing developments.
| Starlevel004 wrote:
| > The team for TF2 is probably very low double digits now
|
| Double digits? That's very very optimistic. It's closer to
| like two people.
| HaZeust wrote:
| Ok, well, the more the reason!
| beeflet wrote:
| thats more than double digits if you counting the hands at
| the keyboard
| ssalazar wrote:
| Double digits, in binary, at least
| skupig wrote:
| The entire TF2 team was famously one guy for years
| sophacles wrote:
| The janitor did the best work they could... it was just too
| much for any one human.
| subjectsigma wrote:
| In the 90's, iD made Doom, made money off of it for a few
| years, and then released the source code. They then did the
| same with Quake. This is part of the reason companies like
| Valve exist today, as their early games used modified engines
| from Doom and Quake. Valve is now continuing that 25+ year
| tradition. People are _still_ making new Doom maps and playing
| the game. If history is anything to go by, people could be
| playing TF2 in some form in the 2050's and beyond.
| hx8 wrote:
| Except it only took 3 years for iD to release the Quake code.
| 65 wrote:
| Wondering if this is so Valve doesn't have to keep updating TF2.
| It's a 17 year old game and the last real update was Jungle
| Inferno in 2017. I wonder if it's going to turn into more of a
| community maintained "sandbox" game.
| sylware wrote:
| Meanwhile... the "steam client" on elf/linux is still 32bits and
| hardcoded for x11/GL (nope, no tables of functions with
| wayland/vulkan/gpu fallbacks...) ... and don't forget about those
| bash-only scripts carefully using all those (often GNU) niche
| options of commands...
|
| Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount
| namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the
| "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries,
| namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the
| binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the
| readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of
| core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically
| linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]).
|
| Oh and lately, I had to build the original lsof command to please
| the steam webhelper... and there is a liblsof library they could
| have linked statically...
|
| Valve "linux" devs should be worry putting "valve" on their
| resume, this could backfire... seriously.
| Vilian wrote:
| You managed to be wrong in every single point that you're
| trying to make, that required dedication
| sylware wrote:
| AI?
| account42 wrote:
| > Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive
| "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for
| what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits
| ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd
| part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man
| page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries),
| dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs
| (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy
| libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]).
|
| Steam launched without any runtime. They added all that because
| yes, the average game developer cannot manage to build portable
| libraries.
| sylware wrote:
| ... and valve is unable to generate clean 64bits ELF
| binaries, like the "below average game developer" for the
| blink gogol web engine they use as the steam client ("cef")
| since it requires pressure-vessel.
| pie_flavor wrote:
| The game appears to have been renamed "Frog Fortress 2".
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2...
| jsheard wrote:
| I'd guess that's to distinguish it from the official TF2 if you
| build and install the code without changing the name.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| It's kind of an inside joke - look at who's the committer ;)
|
| frogs and graphics programming are good friends.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| And here I was hoping for a surprise Frog Fractions 3 :)
| James_K wrote:
| I wonder if they'll start accepting pull requests. There are a
| lot of bugs I'd like to see fixing in the game. I've been annoyed
| by the Medigun beam not lining up with the model for about ten
| years by this point.
| RockRobotRock wrote:
| I really really really doubt it. But hopefully someone can
| champion a community fork of the game which runs on Steam.
| jisnsm wrote:
| They have been ignoring almost all bugs in the goldsrc tracker
| for years.
| account42 wrote:
| This is just how valve works. Someone does a work on one of
| the games and will look at the bug tracker for a bit before
| eventually moving on.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| I think this is just a dump to GitHub and not connected to
| their internal stuff in any way.
|
| Same with the Half-Life repo - when the 25th anniversary stuff
| was released it was just pushed as one mega-patch.
| SXX wrote:
| I feel like under every news regarding Valve, Steam or their
| games people tend to find some crazy conspiracies on why Valve
| did that or didn't do this. When actual truth is that Valve is
| ~400 people company plus some contractor artists making items for
| CSGO / Dota / etc.
|
| Valve is not 40,000+ company, not even 4,000+. 400 people. That's
| it.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Well, now this makes me feel old that I thought TFC was the bee's
| knees and felt TF2 was too new fangled and fancy so I never got
| into it.
| sophacles wrote:
| There's still people getting into it right now, in 2025. It's
| not too late (and it's a lot of fun...).
| sevenf0ur wrote:
| As someone who used mod TF2 on the server side, this is
| fantastic. I've spent countless hours analyzing the binaries in
| IDA and now you can just open github. This will definitely
| accelerate new features and bugfixes from the community.
|
| It's about damn time, really. The TF2 source code has already
| leaked twice. And a group even made a cloned version of the game
| in an earlier version of the engine. The community support this
| game still has is massive.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Was this an accident? Why is the link to a github diff? Why is
| there no announcement?
| datenyan wrote:
| Definitely not an accident - the announcement was made on the
| TF blog [0]
|
| [0] - https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
| wiseowise wrote:
| So that's why they didn't challenge TF2C this time, it's all
| coming together.
| njintje wrote:
| This is the final nail in the coffin for Team Fortress 2, isn't
| it?
| neuroelectron wrote:
| TF3 confirmed jk
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| Valve be like:
|
| Initial commit
|
| +1153568 -222431 lines changed
| Cribbin wrote:
| LGTM, ship it
| declan_roberts wrote:
| This is great. If someone wouldn't mind updating the instructions
| for a native 2025 ARM64 build of HL2 that would be great.
|
| Existing instructions use the old, leaked source engine. Time to
| make it official and native.
| Jotalea wrote:
| A HL2 ARM64 Linux build would eventually lead to a native
| release for Android, or am I wrong?
| pityJuke wrote:
| Believe this already exists for NVIDIA's Tegra machines, and
| a cursory Google search reveals people seem to have ripped it
| and made it playable on generic Android.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| This is just the game code not the engine code.
| dangoodmanUT wrote:
| that is very readable cpp
| RobRivera wrote:
| Yes
| jheriko wrote:
| this is unexciting.
| pavo-etc wrote:
| Open PRs from 2013, makes me feel better
| Scuds wrote:
| I'm kind of surprised that after all these years TF2 and Source
| are still separate entities. Like, is there any TF2-only code in
| Source that only runs if TF2 is the current mod?
| nomilk wrote:
| Never played the game, don't intend to, but huge respect to Valve
| for releasing the code! I wish more games studios would do this!
| SLWW wrote:
| Missed out, when it was at its peak, true kino
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Should I not be surprised that TF2 on its own, without the game
| engine's source code, is >1,000,000 LOC? That seems crazy to me.
| The full diff doesn't load on GitHub. Perhaps a lot of this is
| auto-generated.
| parasti wrote:
| Ever wonder why TF2 stopped stopped receiving regular updates?
| My theory was always that the game had turned into a massive
| ball of code that nobody dares touch anymore.
| LauraMedia wrote:
| The fact the entire code of the Source engine comes ontop of
| that...
|
| It makes sense they decided to focus on Source 2 instead...
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| One of the few posts which had gotten me genuinely interested.
|
| Shame that source itself is proprietory.But still its leaked so
| its "theoretically" possible to be open source. IDK.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| By reading these comments on hackernews , I came across the bug
| report of asking source's code
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624
|
| it was heavily disliked by people. So I think I have come across
| the solution of crowdfunding.
|
| I have presented various benefits to the crowdfunding & I am
| writing this again so that this can be a comment of its own so
| that it can be much more easier for hackernews people to see I
| suppose for better discussion purposes I suppose.
|
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624#...
| remram wrote:
| Your tone is more likely to get them to never release anything
| again. Wtf.
| Corrado wrote:
| I wonder how this will affect the MegaCheatersDB
| (https://mcdb.neocities.org/) and the MegaAntiCheat system
| (https://github.com/oenu/MegaAntiCheat). Those projects are doing
| what they can to track down and label TF2 cheaters. I hope this
| helps them out.
|
| On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers? That
| would be unfortunate indeed.
| hofrogs wrote:
| It might make cheat creators life a little bit easier, but not
| by much. Security through obscurity is not a great practice in
| the first place, I think the benefits of allowing modders to
| make new games based on TF2 are much much greater than the
| potential damage from cheaters having to do less reverse
| engineering.
| WhereIsTheTruth wrote:
| github struggling to display that page is sad, github devs should
| feel embarrassed
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Maybe I'm closer to their caching servers but I'm not seeing
| any performance issues scrolling through this on my phone.
| That's despite Firefox on Android having a tendency to fall
| over because of memory leaks in addons.
| maltris wrote:
| TF2 was a great game and a halloween tradition for me and some
| friends. Unfortunately it became public-unplayable with all the
| bots going on and around.
| burrish wrote:
| This got fixed a while ago
| rockbruno wrote:
| There's also some small HL3 files in the diff:
| https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759...
| burgerquizz wrote:
| anyone would have recommendations on a lightweight physics engine
| in javascript? building my own js game now and having a hard time
| with movements and collisions. i would like to avoid importing a
| whole game engine library if possible.
| leonewton253 wrote:
| Now if they just release the code for the Steam Client!
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