I was hacking around in jME (a game engine for Java) today, and I am pretty amazed by how much work goes into such software. This is to all appearances and amat

I was hacking around in jME (a game engine for Java) today, and I am pretty amazed by how much work goes into such software. This is to all appearances and amateur production which has still received an incredible amount of work. Comparing what it took to get a bit of code running in that versus j3d made me realize that a good, cross-platform engine for developing games could be a serious economic advantage for a developer. And it appears that that is what Valve is doing here. Very impressive.