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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
It's not automatically work-for-hire; that has to be stipulated in the contract. Recently there was a lawsuit about this involving, of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog. An artist and writer named Ken Penders, working for Archie Comics on Sonic comic books, sued his former employer claiming ownership over certain characters created for the comic, most notably those connected to Knuckles the Echidna. Because Archie couldn't prove that Penders's comic work was work for hire (they lost the original contract), they settled out of court in favor of Penders. This ended up losing the Sonic license and had various effects on the Sonic universe. For example, he threatened to sue Paramount over the idea of Knuckles having a father, because Knuckles's Archie Comic universe father was a Penders creation. So rather than depict his father directly for the Knuckles series, they represented him with a puppet in an abstract sequence -- a puppet bearing a suspiciously Penders-like moustache.
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,
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.
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.
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.
hell, when I joined the frontend circus in 2013 I was flabbergasted that most people needed to install 3rd party library to perform "isEven(num)" operation
... not to mention that aforementioned library had at least 3 dependencies itself.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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 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.
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
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.
> 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.
>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]
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Probably - it seems like Source 2 is an iteration on Source, and certainly there are some Source 2 back-ports in Source, but I suspect the engine has undergone much more change than the game code.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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).
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?
> 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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?archive=/11...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
>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).
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)?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers?
I doubt it - there have been at three or four Source engine leaks over the years, as well as the Team Fortress 2 game code. I suspect anything they don't know they reverse engineer from the Linux and Mac builds, and I'm sure anything Windows specific is easy to find as they'd have IDA scripts to automate what they need to find.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The Source engine powers more than just Team Fortress 2 so of course they'd be separate.
There might be some Team Fortress 2-specific stuff in the engine (certainly the GoldSource engine tweaks a couple of things based on which game is running) but I doubt it - the Source engine relies a lot more on expecting game code to implement a bunch of interfaces.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fun fact: Gabe Newell built the original WinDoom port, and led the team that built Doom95!
To be clear, Robert Hess was the primary engineer on WinDoom, Newell was the team lead.
That IS a fun fact.
[dead]
I thought Monolith worked on doom95.
> 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.
It all depends on how the contract between Microsoft and Id was worded.
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.
This is a comprehensively incorrect explanation of copyright and contract law.
> 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.
It's not automatically work-for-hire; that has to be stipulated in the contract. Recently there was a lawsuit about this involving, of all things, Sonic the Hedgehog. An artist and writer named Ken Penders, working for Archie Comics on Sonic comic books, sued his former employer claiming ownership over certain characters created for the comic, most notably those connected to Knuckles the Echidna. Because Archie couldn't prove that Penders's comic work was work for hire (they lost the original contract), they settled out of court in favor of Penders. This ended up losing the Sonic license and had various effects on the Sonic universe. For example, he threatened to sue Paramount over the idea of Knuckles having a father, because Knuckles's Archie Comic universe father was a Penders creation. So rather than depict his father directly for the Knuckles series, they represented him with a puppet in an abstract sequence -- a puppet bearing a suspiciously Penders-like moustache.
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.
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,
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...
I knew Gaben's initial project was for 3.x and WinG, but I didn't know it was released!
Ah, that makes sense, thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
strong leftPad vibes here
hell, when I joined the frontend circus in 2013 I was flabbergasted that most people needed to install 3rd party library to perform "isEven(num)" operation
... not to mention that aforementioned library had at least 3 dependencies itself.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Correction, I didnt remember correctly as those are actually there in the code release, here is the r200 (radeon 8500) renderer specific code:
https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3/blob/master/neo/render...
> 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
It's quite silly that depth fail shadow volumes were ever granted a patent.
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.
> 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"
ah, that NDA stuff is interesting, that probably explains it.
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.
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
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.
Makes sense. Definitely something valve would have to deliberately set up and it probably would be more complicated than it seems at the outset.
that and the hodgepodge structure of the codebase is probably embarrassing
> 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.
>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...
> 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Zero/minimal support is the norm for game source code releases.
> What about physics?
Source 2 dropped Havok in favor of their in-house Rubikon physics engine.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Rubikon
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
It's not like the Havok-using version of HL2 right now on Steam is free from physics bugs. Bugs can be fixed.
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.
Yeah I've heard that it's Havok with a bunch of Valve changes and fixes on top. So presumably it's a fairly outdated version of Havok.
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
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
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.
> professional software developers
If you ever meet any you should ask them.
:)
Definitely some copy+paste - the ICE encryption code is copy+pasted and is there in the SDK.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
They've given out Source 2 to others AFAIK.
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.
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.
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.
Which game out of curiosity?
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.
I don't think this is correct, but happy to be proven wrong if you can find one.
Is sbox closed source ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Are you considering Source 2 in this assertion? That piece of software has received quite significant development effort.
I'm not. Source 2 is very modern even by caveman gamer standards.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ha ha, but you needed Unity's feature set, didn't you? You don't even belong to "the vast majority."
It almost worked on me.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
In Source 1? AFAIK that's only via DXVK.
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.
UE makes their engine source available even if it’s not under a permissive license.
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.
> 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.
Yes, open-source GoldSource would be wonderful.
I steer clear of Xash3D because of it's legal grey area too.
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.
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.
If those engines are so capable then why do no AAA games use them? Source is still (kinda) used in games like Apex Legends
Because almost all AAA games are built using in-house engines.
You mean in Unreal Engine.
I am not sure I'd even remotely compare Source to Godot, never touched the other ones though.
Is there still some structural Source underlying the cash cow of CS2?
Probably - it seems like Source 2 is an iteration on Source, and certainly there are some Source 2 back-ports in Source, but I suspect the engine has undergone much more change than the game code.
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.
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
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
Is there any relationship between those OS engine and the source model?
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.
I filed a bug based on this:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624
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.
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 ?
fair enough, on it, was trying to be funny
They are probably still working on something with it?
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.
maybe its release could lead to more attacks or cheating?
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.
Source has extensive documentation for years, both by Valve and modders. Mostly unified and indexed here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com
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?
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.
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...
Isn't UE4/5 fully source available?
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)
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.
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.
Yes it's source available, not true free software. Kvirani never said it's free software though.
I think the point is that you're not legally allowed to borrow its techniques
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.
It's not open source but it is free
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Me too. Loved playing it and I'm sad
Do people even do LAN parties anymore? x)
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.
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
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?
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).
Latency is a lot more important than throughput for online games
Absolutely - especially when we are talking about first person shooters.
A fun weekend playing mostly older games once or twice a year.
We do, sprinkled throughout the year. Or sessions see ~20-24 people and last about 14 hours.
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?
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.
"games" here being mods and indie games. I doubt Valve is making much if anything in engine licensing fees from these.
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
Like this exact thread where they release the game and the top comment is "but the engine isn't available".
This is just concern trolling now. Game source code releases are often not 100% complete due to parts that coulen't be released.
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
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)?
> 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.
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?
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.
What is Nuclide? I've found https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide and https://github.com/eukara/freehl.
can we not create a legal open source "source emulator".
I am asking this from a total legal standpoint.
"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
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.
Eh, I think someone tried to do this with the GoldSource engine a few years ago and got shut down by Valve's lawyers before too long.
oh that's lame :(
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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.
They're already using Source 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2
In case you're not aware, CSGO was replaced by CS2, which uses Source 2.
It's pretty easy to criticize the Source Engine source code but y'know it worked!
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.
It's just Godot, fyi.
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.
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!
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.
What is tf2 classic?
https://tf2classic.com/
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2
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.
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?archive=/11...
The game appears to have been renamed "Frog Fortress 2".
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2...
I'd guess that's to distinguish it from the official TF2 if you build and install the code without changing the name.
It's kind of an inside joke - look at who's the committer ;)
frogs and graphics programming are good friends.
And here I was hoping for a surprise Frog Fractions 3 :)
The official blog post: https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
(Also includes links to recent updates for other Source engine titles)
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.
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.
> 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.
Double digits, in binary, at least
Ok, well, the more the reason!
thats more than double digits if you counting the hands at the keyboard
The entire TF2 team was famously one guy for years
The janitor did the best work they could... it was just too much for any one human.
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.
Except it only took 3 years for iD to release the Quake code.
why wouldn't you expect to see this on HN?
> Woah... woah WOAH
I see what you did there
Well...I don't, care to enlighten us non-insiders?
It's a line from Portal. In the final fight, GLaDOS says it in a panicked, glitchy voice while being dismantled.
probably a reference to Scout or something
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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Their 30 years destroying any type of competition trying to grow also can't be forget
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.
Exactly. DirectX is what, 25-30 years old?
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.
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.
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...
It's not going to happen. No one feels that way in the industry.
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.
Until they kill Roseta like they did with e very other compatibility layer
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.
(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.)
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Mac don't support vulkan nor opengl, so it didn't recompiled to mac
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.
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.
And you think ICD driver infrastructure as originally designed for OpenGL 1.0 is any better?
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.
Do you still also need to compile a mac build on a Mac?
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.
I always wonder if Apples disdain for games is a relic from Steve Jobs time at Atari.
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.
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.
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.
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
Yeah. If it's been ported to 64-bit now they've probably dealt with the x86 assembly as well.
There's also some small HL3 files in the diff: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759...
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
>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).
Curious how you think education would help with porn. I had sex education prior to puberty. I still think porn was enormously harmful.
Ymmv as always. There will always be great and not great teachers. Really hard to judge on any individual case.
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)?
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.
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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
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/
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.
Don't forget about their REAL expenses: credit processing fees and chargebacks.
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.
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.
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.
At least they're funding a lot of useful open source development with that money pile.
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.
Especially relevant to this conversation is that TF2 is the game that single-handedly popularized the lootbox model outside of Korea.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.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.
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.
They can definitely hire 2-5 people to do something, and at least try to crack down.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule. You really need to get lucky to make it big without being on Steam.
From what I gather about the game market, you need to get lucky to make it big being on Steam, too.
Traditional publishers before Steam took even more - this is why companies tolerate it.
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.
> 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
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?
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.
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/41856069942...
[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
It is used this way. Whether you think valve should remove it depends on your disposition on gambling.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
Also, their primary reason for existence is to add DRM to software.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
if by "DOTA FPS" you mean their new MOBA Deadlock, AFAIK it's not related to DOTA in any way.
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.
Oh, is Deadlock by IceFrog too? I've been keeping on its development but hadn't heard that.
Thanks. Yes, I mixed up the acronyms.
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
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.
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.
A win would be supporting TF2 Source 2.
Why? TF2 looks and performs amazing.
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")
Ah, you mean modern cancer. Solution is to return to pre 2012 era, not try to bandaid disease.
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.
Maybe the next step is releasing TF3 or some competitor game to overtake TF2
I assumed this is what they are trying to do with Deadlock [0]?
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422450/Deadlock/
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.
IDK i've never played it
If his son inherits Valve, it's over. He will probably sell it because why not -- he's not a gamer whatsoever.
It is less about gaming but more about understanding what is best for the end users.
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.
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.
I really really really doubt it. But hopefully someone can champion a community fork of the game which runs on Steam.
They have been ignoring almost all bugs in the goldsrc tracker for years.
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.
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.
> On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers?
I doubt it - there have been at three or four Source engine leaks over the years, as well as the Team Fortress 2 game code. I suspect anything they don't know they reverse engineer from the Linux and Mac builds, and I'm sure anything Windows specific is easy to find as they'd have IDA scripts to automate what they need to find.
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.
Open PRs from 2013, makes me feel better
Valve be like:
Initial commit
+1153568 -222431 lines changed
LGTM, ship it
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.
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.
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!
Missed out, when it was at its peak, true kino
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.
This got fixed a while ago
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?
The Source engine powers more than just Team Fortress 2 so of course they'd be separate.
There might be some Team Fortress 2-specific stuff in the engine (certainly the GoldSource engine tweaks a couple of things based on which game is running) but I doubt it - the Source engine relies a lot more on expecting game code to implement a bunch of interfaces.
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.
This is just the game code not the engine code.
A HL2 ARM64 Linux build would eventually lead to a native release for Android, or am I wrong?
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.
So that’s why they didn’t challenge TF2C this time, it’s all coming together.
Was this an accident? Why is the link to a github diff? Why is there no announcement?
Definitely not an accident - the announcement was made on the TF blog [0]
[0] - https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
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.
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.
that is very readable cpp
TF3 confirmed jk
github struggling to display that page is sad, github devs should feel embarrassed
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.
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.
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.
The fact the entire code of the Source engine comes ontop of that...
It makes sense they decided to focus on Source 2 instead...
Now if they just release the code for the Steam Client!
Yes
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.
There's still people getting into it right now, in 2025. It's not too late (and it's a lot of fun...).
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this is unexciting.
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Unfortunately, this is not the place to scam ppl
This scam almost feels quaint compared to contemporary LLM astroturfing.
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.
You managed to be wrong in every single point that you're trying to make, that required dedication
AI?
> 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.
... 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.
This is the final nail in the coffin for Team Fortress 2, isn't it?
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#...
Your tone is more likely to get them to never release anything again. Wtf.