16 ms·

Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code

1863 points by davikr 2y ago

jsheard 2y ago
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.
- chamomeal 2y ago
  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?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- klaussilveira 2y ago
  Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way. There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked). Only people that have been involved with Source in the past decades would enjoy working with it. The community around the engine is vibrant and well-versed in the caveats of the Source workflow. With a GPL release, just like Carmack did with id tech, the amount of creative projects from indies would sky rocket. No longer bound by obscure deals.
  - SXX 2y ago
    I pretty sure you'll soon get reply about how making it open source will increase cheating. So for those people it's important to know that Source engine source code was leaked many many times and anyone who will spend 5 minutes will find sources.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      The guy is saying Godot is comparable to a game engine with hundreds of millions of dollars of product development. I wouldn’t be worrying about what other people might say.
      - Me000 2y ago
        It almost worked on me.
        doctorpangloss 2y ago
        Indeed it’s possible for Godot and Source to be good game engines and also not at all substitutes for each other. The kind of discourse that litigates why that fact is true doesn’t serve curiosity or add knowledge.
      - 6SixTy 2y ago
        Considering that Source is ancient and likely hasn't gotten an update from at least 2013 for TF2, the bar is low for how complete an engine needs to be for level comparisons.
        ZeWaka 2y ago
        Are you considering Source 2 in this assertion? That piece of software has received quite significant development effort.
        6SixTy 2y ago
        I'm not. Source 2 is very modern even by caveman gamer standards.
        enragedcacti 2y ago
        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 https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238643
  - davikr 2y ago
    Indeed, I wish the first iteration gets released as GPL or something like that eventually. I get not wanting to open-source Source 2, but the original is another thing entirely.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Most in-house game engines built after a certain point use a non-trivial amount of third party code, including console stuff which is under strict NDA, so it's a huge hassle to open source them. Most iterations of the Source engine use Havok physics for example. IdTech probably was only open sourced because Carmack pushed for it, but it helps that IdTech of that vintage was all in-house code exclusively targeting the PC. I think the only thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.
    - ThatPlayer 2y ago
      Even the original Doom source code release was the Linux source code because the Dos version of the game uses a 3rd party audio library, DMX.
      - dcrazy 2y ago
        I believe DMX was also used for Descent, and the company successfully shut down open source projects to reverse engineer the file format. Interplay was also extremely protective of their full-motion video codec, which only got well-documented after the release of Baldur’s Gate II.
    - phire 2y ago
      Id were using a 3rd party sound library for Doom to handle the nitty-gritty aspects of DOS sound hardware, so the open source release was based on the linux port of Doom. People had to port it back to DOS. They couldn't release the windows port of Doom either, as that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore include Microsoft copyrighted code. With Quake, Id did their own windows port, so it was possible to release the source code for winquake.
      - stevage 2y ago
        > 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.
  - 0x457 2y ago
    Probably because for it to be really opensource it has to have a proper documentation and other resources. if someone just does a `git push` and changes license it won't be much help to anyone until there is a proper documentation.
    - klaussilveira 2y ago
      Source has extensive documentation for years, both by Valve and modders. Mostly unified and indexed here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com https://developer.valvesoftware.com
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    It will be easier to understand when you see the hundreds of Jira tickets to wade through to get it released and the fact they have better shit to do that contributes directly to revenue instead of trying to open source an old game engine that only a handful of people will even care about.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    > Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way. Source uses Havok, which is a licensed middleware. Convincing Havok to be also open source is likely a nonstarter. Repeat for any other middlewares they might have used, such as Adobe's ScaleForm used by CSGO, and it quickly is just an endless legal nightmare. idTech handled this by either spending time to rip out those components, allowing for a partial open source release which is what you're ripping on Valve for doing right this moment, or by avoiding using any licensed middlewares at all which is a significant development limitation that not everyone can get away with. As Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed alternatives, it's possible we might see that open sourced in the future. Who knows.
    - klaussilveira 2y ago
      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 https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VPhysics
      - meibo 2y ago
        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 https://github.com/misyltoad/VPhysics-Jolt
    - magicalhippo 2y ago
      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...
  - keerthiko 2y ago
    IMO the source engine codebase is probably chock-full of duct tape and cruft, full of undocumented, legacy, bespoke, hacky and deprecated stuff that it's not worth the dev resources for valve to bring it up to an OSS standard worthy of their reputation. Contributing to this is probably - custom external hooks (eg: homemade test framework, patchnotes publishing, steamapp backdoor integrations, hardware-specific firmware interfaces, 3rd party closed source SDK hooks) - assumptions about Valve's server architecture/implementation for most multiplayer stuff used by Valve games, the codebase(s) of which are probably as vast as Source itself and closed-source too - bespoke engine modifications made for specific games like HL2 or CS1.6 which hasn't been touched for a decade, the authors of which may not be accessible to document them trivially Adding sufficient documentation to a massive closed-source system meant for internal use, over multiple decades, to bring them up to par for functional OSS publication is a monumental feat that honestly probably isn't worth the risk of bad publicity from the modder community who'd just be mad about how unusable it would be.
    - keyringlight 2y ago
      Supposedly there's a texture of a coconut included in source games, along with either a filename or tagged with a comment to say that if it's removed then the game will break and noone knows why.
      - ZeWaka 2y ago
        That was a throwaway false joke on Reddit that the community has spread, this isn't true. It's just an unused texture from an old update.
    - account42 2y ago
      Are you implying Valve has a repoutation for high quality code? Because I don't think user of Steam or their games shares that view.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked). My general impression from lurking on these kinds of threads (with no relevant personal experience) was that Godot is a good 2D engine but not a good 3D engine. Do you find it comparable to the other two?
    - SXX 2y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Lon_Q2T18
      - sho_hn 2y ago
        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=Atb3yFNazmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIOmb1hseA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIOmb1hseA
        jsheard 2y ago
        Cruelty Squad is also a successful FPS title built with Godot, but its deliberately hideous aesthetic probably makes it the worst possible way to sell anyone on the merits of the engine.
        cheeseomlit 2y ago
        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
        2y ago
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - rozab 2y ago
    If those engines are so capable then why do no AAA games use them? Source is still (kinda) used in games like Apex Legends
    - ZeWaka 2y ago
      Because almost all AAA games are built using in-house engines.
      - account42 2y ago
        You mean in Unreal Engine.
  - Nition 2y ago
    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 https://sbox.game or https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/
    - djmips 2y ago
      They've given out Source 2 to others AFAIK.
      - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
        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 https://vghe.net/source-2-engine.html#source-2-engine-games shows Valve almost exclusively.
        svelle 2y ago
        It was on their radar. There's an old slide deck where they talk about releasing source 2 for free akin to unreal. But they scrapped that idea and gave the code to facepunch/Garry instead, for s&box to fill that hole.
        jamesfinlayson 2y ago
        Ah okay - I wasn't really paying any attention when Source 2 first came out but looking back now it hasn't been used for a whole lot of games.
        djmips 2y ago
        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.
  - greenchair 2y ago
    maybe its release could lead to more attacks or cheating?
  - lawlessone 2y ago
    They are probably still working on something with it?
    - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
      Yes, there are still a bunch of their games running on Source. I can understand Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive being moved to Source 2 but the rest will stay as it's not worth it.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    I filed a bug based on this: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624
    - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
      so sad that people are shaming you for writing this , I think you spoke the silent part out loud , but that takes courage. I thank you man. PS: I am the guy who wrote the long paragraph about crowdfunding. After reading the hackernews , it became evident that yes it would be nice for foss source code but its never gonna happen because its gonna take effort and money for valve for what? they might not do it , because I guess they are there for making money ? I believe that crowdfunding is the way to go , Instead of forcing companies to give what we want for free , we need to provide an incentive for them. This crowdfunding could also be a great PR for valve itself as well. Crowdfunding is the win-win situation I could think of , but oh I am more than happy to eat my own word , if I can get source's source code and really run team fortress 2 fully open source.
    - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
      But in my honest opinion , that rm -rf lawyers part was just a little bit less thought out and unprofessional and git push origin --all Maybe remove that part if you really want valve to listen to this professionally please ?
      - pmarreck 2y ago
        fair enough, on it, was trying to be funny
  - DiggyJohnson 2y ago
    Is there any relationship between those OS engine and the source model?
  - lloeki 2y ago
    > 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.
    - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
      Yes, open-source GoldSource would be wonderful. I steer clear of Xash3D because of it's legal grey area too.
  - __jonas 2y ago
    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 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624 I don't think it reflects well on this site either
  - novabridge 2y ago
    Ever since I joined the industry, I've heard that many companies are reluctant to open source code because it's so bad that if they did, no one would dare use their products. I guess Source is one of them.
  - eddieroger 2y ago
    Aside from the good middleware licensing arguments, if my memory serves me, Valve employees get to shift their work to what interests them at the time, and who knows what tidbits of could-be versions of HL3, Portal 3, or other interesting but unannounced (let alone unreleased) games could be in there.
  - AlienRobot 2y ago
    When Winamp published their source code on Github, not only did they breach third party licenses, but they also had to deal with trolls who across the entire Internet that wanted to make a show out of them. It's hard to blame developers for avoiding open sourcing when you may not get anything out of that except for criticism.
  - xandrius 2y ago
    I am not sure I'd even remotely compare Source to Godot, never touched the other ones though.
  - JojoFatsani 2y ago
    Is there still some structural Source underlying the cash cow of CS2?
    - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
      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.
- thetoon 2y ago
  Maybe that's where a project like Nuclide could step in? I'm always a bit confused between their projects' names, but I've read somewhere they had progress on the HL2 front.
  - pityJuke 2y ago
    What is Nuclide? I've found https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide and https://github.com/eukara/freehl https://github.com/eukara/freehl.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I'm still a bit confused on why Source is close sourced when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago. I suppose it'd becsuse there's some basic overlap, but they still also feel comfortable releasing their gsmes' source?
  - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
    > when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago. I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be used to justify having Source2 open as well. After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all? The only things I can think of are a) anticheat, b) NDA'd 3rd party code, and c) protecting important secret sauces made by the company itself a) and b) are both solved by simply not releasing those portions of the code, while c) is a bit moot. Any competitor can already (legally) RE the binaries and recreate any juicy proprietary algorithms, unless they're patented. But in that case they would be protected even if the source was released so it's still the same situation.
    - LegionMammal978 2y ago
      b) can get dicey, depending on how hard the 3rd party in question wants to defend their copyrights. Google v. Oracle was resolved on the basis of being transformative, not on the basis of class and function declarations being too insignificant to copyright. So if you can't even keep the 3rd-party headers, you're left with a bunch of function calls that you have to piece together the meaning of.
      - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
        You could just strip out all mentions of the 3rd party component on the codebase. Let the community figure out how to plug in a replacement.
        nemothekid 2y ago
        >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.
- progbits 2y ago
  Given the leaks, the fact it's been over 10 years since last major game released using Source 1, and the fact most of the rendering code (probably the most valuable bits, aside from physics) in Source2 must have been rewritten given the new developments in game graphics; makes me wonder if there is any reason for them to keep it closed source. Do you think they will release it at any point? Maybe there are licensing issues where they don't have the rights to all of it and couldn't easily opensource it. Or maybe there is in fact still too much secret sauce left there?
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    There's always "too much secret sauce". I remember a time when CryTek published papers about how they implemented things, now they don't. There's always in-house ways to deal with graphics drivers and certain effects. Remember how Source 1 was the only engine which was able to render HDR with measly ATI 9600XT, without a performance penalty most of the time? You carry this know how in evolved form for generations, and it gets buried under as the foundation of the new things you're building on top of it. This is what I remember from a friend who implemented his own game engine and created a company for it, and half the woes were making the graphics drivers and processors behave as they said in their manuals.
    - kvirani 2y ago
      Isn't UE4/5 fully source available?
      - bayindirh 2y ago
        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/downloading-unreal-engine-source-code 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)
- beeflet 2y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CvpQrnTEY
- chedabob 2y ago
  Damn, was hoping this would bring TF2 back to Mac. Haven't had a good LAN party in the office since Apple dropped 32-bit support.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    Do people even do LAN parties anymore? x)
    - jsheard 2y ago
      They do, but "LAN" has become a bit of a misnomer since few games actually have real LAN play options anymore. If you're playing modern titles then you end up with a bunch of PCs or consoles in the same room all connecting to a remote server over the internet. Internet connections are a lot better than they were back in the day at least.
      - wholinator2 2y ago
        Dang, wouldn't you run into serious internet problems with that? Do modern games use that much data? Could a single internet service handle 6 simultaneous connections?
        FreebasingLLMs 2y ago
        Really is not that much data involved (not counting downloading the game itself). Streaming multi-player game data to/from an individual player can range from like 10kbps to 100kbps depending on the game and scale involved. Remember you are only sending the deltas (and occasional entire refreshes).
        superb_dev 2y ago
        Latency is a lot more important than throughput for online games
        2y ago
- lnauta 2y ago
  I'm still not quite sure how to take this, does this mean that: We can not fix problematic netcode (this is a running joke in the TF2 comminity) We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)?
  - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    > We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)? I think some of these fixes were through something a bit more complicated like sourcemod which hooks various methods.
- xyst 2y ago
  Source engine is so outdated at this point anyways. Valve should use the profits from their cash cow, CSGO, and use it to invest in retooling with open source engines such as GoDot or Bevy. I remember downloading a leaked version of the source code for source engine, and in general it was laughable at how awful it was. I dont know if it was ever discussed mainstream but only based on recollection of IRC chats. I think it was about 6 months out of date, but even so it would explain why HL sequels would become vaporware despite years of teasing the community by Gabe Newell himself.
  - somehnguy 2y ago
    They're already using Source 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2
  - celsoazevedo 2y ago
    In case you're not aware, CSGO was replaced by CS2, which uses Source 2.
  - daelon 2y ago
    It's just Godot, fyi.
  - djmips 2y ago
    It's pretty easy to criticize the Source Engine source code but y'know it worked!
  - shdh 2y ago
    Source 2 is quite a decent engine. Their level building tools with Hammer are top notch. Volumetrics, physical sound, pbr, great snapshot based networking. Godot doesn't really come close.
- anacrolix 2y ago
  oh that's lame :(
- jheriko 2y ago
  [flagged]
- Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
  can we not create a legal open source "source emulator". I am asking this from a total legal standpoint.
  - ripdog 2y ago
    "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://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity, https://openrct2.io/ https://openrct2.io/, https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz
    - zamalek 2y ago
      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.
  - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    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.
LorenDB 2y ago
Valve just keeps on winning. I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose its way after the original generation is gone.
- pityJuke 2y ago
  Off-topic: this is genuinely cool, along with many things Valve do, but Valve does generate a significant amount from gambling (and underaged gambling) so I won't give a complete pass to being a great company.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    This is a little complicated. There are many companies that sell gambling products. Nothing special about that. The tragedy is when you list your game on Steam and it gets popular, you are paying Valve 30% for the privilege of finding new users for CSGO and DOTA2. That is how they make money.
    - almatabata 2y ago
      And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on the gambling it will impact their bottom line. As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team. Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
      - SXX 2y ago
        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.
foxandmouse 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ender341341 2y ago
  from various interviews I've seen of folks in the games industry apple has historically been actively hostile to working with game companies, it seems to have softened with the iphone appstore. People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
  - foxandmouse 2y ago
    Don't think that's the case anymore, "Game Porting Toolkit 2" seemingly opened the floodgates on gaming on a mac.. It's up to the developers if they think it's worth the time/ effort; but with how great apple the hardware is, and how easy it is to port a game, I think we're going to see a huge influx of mac gaming.
    - jsheard 2y ago
      Isn't the Game Porting Toolkit still under that weird license where developers are only allowed to use the DirectX translation layer for "evaluation purposes"? End-users can use it to run Windows games if they want, but AFAICT developers are categorically not allowed to build their own ports around it, they still have to port their game over to Metal the hard way.
    - AlexandrB 2y ago
      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-frustrations-persist-for-developers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-frustratio...
pityJuke 2y ago
The official blog post: https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 (Also includes links to recent updates for other Source engine titles)
Lammy 2y ago
I hope this is good news for TF2 Classic. edit: here's the announcement from the TF2C Discord: ============== @everyone We'll have more to say later, but you might not be able to launch TF2 Classic for a little bit due to the massive SDK update and public release of Team Fortress 2's code. We're already preparing for the porting efforts and a potential Steam release now that we've been legally enabled to pursue that, but in the meantime, you will have to shift Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer to the "previous2021" beta branch that still has the previous revision of the SDK files to continue playing. See the screenshot for an example. Thank you, and we'll have more news soon!
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  Given they call out derivative works of the original games being ok, and those works can be released as new games on steam seems to clear the way for TF2 Classic.
- jeffybefffy519 2y ago
  What is tf2 classic?
  - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    https://tf2classic.com/ https://tf2classic.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2
    - lelandfe 2y ago
      Wow! They’re making landing pages like the old TF2 updates and even making shorts. This is obsessive. I love it. Also, check out how big the team is. Holy crud. They don’t have Valve’s humor but… who does.
      - Lammy 2y ago
        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 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/items/fanboys_202106/Fanboys.zip&file=Fanboys%2F475.png https://ia904504.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/11...
beeflet 2y ago
Woah... woah WOAH I wasn't expecting to see this on HN. I've been expecting this for a long time, and if I was valve I would have done something like this a long time ago: release a "final" celebratory content update, port the game to vulkan, and open source the codebase (keeping the item servers and whatnot tied to valve's servers). I don't know if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning of TF2. There have been leaks before but this is huge news.
- Rooster61 2y ago
  > Woah... woah WOAH I see what you did there
  - epaga 2y ago
    Well...I don't, care to enlighten us non-insiders?
    - reportgunner 2y ago
      probably a reference to Scout or something
    - Rooster61 2y ago
      It's a line from Portal. In the final fight, GLaDOS says it in a panicked, glitchy voice while being dismantled.
- HaZeust 2y ago
  Beginning of the end? It's been the end for years - they're passing it off to the community, as they should! The team for TF2 is probably very low double digits now and it's almost 18 years old, it's time to outsource the continuing developments.
  - Starlevel004 2y ago
    > 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.
65 2y ago
Wondering if this is so Valve doesn't have to keep updating TF2. It's a 17 year old game and the last real update was Jungle Inferno in 2017. I wonder if it's going to turn into more of a community maintained "sandbox" game.
sylware 2y ago
Meanwhile... the "steam client" on elf/linux is still 32bits and hardcoded for x11/GL (nope, no tables of functions with wayland/vulkan/gpu fallbacks...) ... and don't forget about those bash-only scripts carefully using all those (often GNU) niche options of commands... Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]). Oh and lately, I had to build the original lsof command to please the steam webhelper... and there is a liblsof library they could have linked statically... Valve "linux" devs should be worry putting "valve" on their resume, this could backfire... seriously.
- Vilian 2y ago
  You managed to be wrong in every single point that you're trying to make, that required dedication
  - sylware 2y ago
    AI?
- account42 2y ago
  > Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]). Steam launched without any runtime. They added all that because yes, the average game developer cannot manage to build portable libraries.
  - sylware 2y ago
pie_flavor 2y ago
The game appears to have been renamed "Frog Fortress 2". https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2e8e179d5352d81d0d4aaded72c1704b7a9/game/mod_tf/gameinfo.txt#L3 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2...
- jsheard 2y ago
  I'd guess that's to distinguish it from the official TF2 if you build and install the code without changing the name.
- Pannoniae 2y ago
  It's kind of an inside joke - look at who's the committer ;) frogs and graphics programming are good friends.
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    And here I was hoping for a surprise Frog Fractions 3 :)
James_K 2y ago
I wonder if they'll start accepting pull requests. There are a lot of bugs I'd like to see fixing in the game. I've been annoyed by the Medigun beam not lining up with the model for about ten years by this point.
- RockRobotRock 2y ago
  I really really really doubt it. But hopefully someone can champion a community fork of the game which runs on Steam.
- jisnsm 2y ago
  They have been ignoring almost all bugs in the goldsrc tracker for years.
  - account42 2y ago
    This is just how valve works. Someone does a work on one of the games and will look at the bug tracker for a bit before eventually moving on.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  I think this is just a dump to GitHub and not connected to their internal stuff in any way. Same with the Half-Life repo - when the 25th anniversary stuff was released it was just pushed as one mega-patch.
SXX 2y ago
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.
unit149 2y ago
[dead]
IncreasePosts 2y ago
Well, now this makes me feel old that I thought TFC was the bee's knees and felt TF2 was too new fangled and fancy so I never got into it.
- sophacles 2y ago
  There's still people getting into it right now, in 2025. It's not too late (and it's a lot of fun...).
sevenf0ur 2y ago
As someone who used mod TF2 on the server side, this is fantastic. I've spent countless hours analyzing the binaries in IDA and now you can just open github. This will definitely accelerate new features and bugfixes from the community. It's about damn time, really. The TF2 source code has already leaked twice. And a group even made a cloned version of the game in an earlier version of the engine. The community support this game still has is massive.
phendrenad2 2y ago
Was this an accident? Why is the link to a github diff? Why is there no announcement?
- datenyan 2y ago
  Definitely not an accident - the announcement was made on the TF blog [0] [0] - https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
wiseowise 2y ago
So that’s why they didn’t challenge TF2C this time, it’s all coming together.
njintje 2y ago
This is the final nail in the coffin for Team Fortress 2, isn't it?
neuroelectron 2y ago
TF3 confirmed jk
koakuma-chan 2y ago
Valve be like: Initial commit +1153568 -222431 lines changed
- Cribbin 2y ago
  LGTM, ship it
declan_roberts 2y ago
This is great. If someone wouldn't mind updating the instructions for a native 2025 ARM64 build of HL2 that would be great. Existing instructions use the old, leaked source engine. Time to make it official and native.
- Jotalea 2y ago
  A HL2 ARM64 Linux build would eventually lead to a native release for Android, or am I wrong?
  - pityJuke 2y ago
    Believe this already exists for NVIDIA’s Tegra machines, and a cursory Google search reveals people seem to have ripped it and made it playable on generic Android.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  This is just the game code not the engine code.
merillecuz56 2y ago
[flagged]
- freecodyx 2y ago
  Unfortunately, this is not the place to scam ppl
- RestartKernel 2y ago
  This scam almost feels quaint compared to contemporary LLM astroturfing.
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
that is very readable cpp
RobRivera 2y ago
Yes
jheriko 2y ago
this is unexciting.
cytocync 2y ago
[flagged]
pavo-etc 2y ago
Open PRs from 2013, makes me feel better
Scuds 2y 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?
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  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.
nomilk 2y ago
Never played the game, don't intend to, but huge respect to Valve for releasing the code! I wish more games studios would do this!
- SLWW 2y ago
  Missed out, when it was at its peak, true kino
teaearlgraycold 2y ago
Should I not be surprised that TF2 on its own, without the game engine's source code, is >1,000,000 LOC? That seems crazy to me. The full diff doesn't load on GitHub. Perhaps a lot of this is auto-generated.
- parasti 2y ago
  Ever wonder why TF2 stopped stopped receiving regular updates? My theory was always that the game had turned into a massive ball of code that nobody dares touch anymore.
- LauraMedia 2y ago
  The fact the entire code of the Source engine comes ontop of that... It makes sense they decided to focus on Source 2 instead...
Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
One of the few posts which had gotten me genuinely interested. Shame that source itself is proprietory.But still its leaked so its "theoretically" possible to be open source. IDK.
Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
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 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#issuecomment-2667621034 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624#...
- remram 2y ago
  Your tone is more likely to get them to never release anything again. Wtf.
Corrado 2y ago
I wonder how this will affect the MegaCheatersDB (https://mcdb.neocities.org/ https://mcdb.neocities.org/) and the MegaAntiCheat system (https://github.com/oenu/MegaAntiCheat https://github.com/oenu/MegaAntiCheat). Those projects are doing what they can to track down and label TF2 cheaters. I hope this helps them out. On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers? That would be unfortunate indeed.
- hofrogs 2y ago
  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.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  > 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.
WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago
github struggling to display that page is sad, github devs should feel embarrassed
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  Maybe I'm closer to their caching servers but I'm not seeing any performance issues scrolling through this on my phone. That's despite Firefox on Android having a tendency to fall over because of memory leaks in addons.
maltris 2y ago
TF2 was a great game and a halloween tradition for me and some friends. Unfortunately it became public-unplayable with all the bots going on and around.
- burrish 2y ago
  This got fixed a while ago
rockbruno 2y ago
There's also some small HL3 files in the diff: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759e2e8e179d5352d81d0d4aaded72c1704b7a9#diff-b3e6528ec2a1aedae6ac2cc72ddf56b0c94205be3b1efc86ef6ea5a558da4e6c https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
burgerquizz 2y ago
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.
nullbyte808 2y ago
Now if they just release the code for the Steam Client!

1863 points by davikr 2y ago

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.

chamomeal 2y ago
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?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
klaussilveira 2y ago
Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way. There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked). Only people that have been involved with Source in the past decades would enjoy working with it. The community around the engine is vibrant and well-versed in the caveats of the Source workflow. With a GPL release, just like Carmack did with id tech, the amount of creative projects from indies would sky rocket. No longer bound by obscure deals.
- SXX 2y ago
  I pretty sure you'll soon get reply about how making it open source will increase cheating. So for those people it's important to know that Source engine source code was leaked many many times and anyone who will spend 5 minutes will find sources.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    The guy is saying Godot is comparable to a game engine with hundreds of millions of dollars of product development. I wouldn’t be worrying about what other people might say.
    - Me000 2y ago
      It almost worked on me.
      - doctorpangloss 2y ago
        Indeed it’s possible for Godot and Source to be good game engines and also not at all substitutes for each other. The kind of discourse that litigates why that fact is true doesn’t serve curiosity or add knowledge.
    - 6SixTy 2y ago
      Considering that Source is ancient and likely hasn't gotten an update from at least 2013 for TF2, the bar is low for how complete an engine needs to be for level comparisons.
      - ZeWaka 2y ago
        Are you considering Source 2 in this assertion? That piece of software has received quite significant development effort.
        6SixTy 2y ago
        I'm not. Source 2 is very modern even by caveman gamer standards.
      - enragedcacti 2y ago
        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 https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238643
- davikr 2y ago
  Indeed, I wish the first iteration gets released as GPL or something like that eventually. I get not wanting to open-source Source 2, but the original is another thing entirely.
- jsheard 2y ago
  Most in-house game engines built after a certain point use a non-trivial amount of third party code, including console stuff which is under strict NDA, so it's a huge hassle to open source them. Most iterations of the Source engine use Havok physics for example. IdTech probably was only open sourced because Carmack pushed for it, but it helps that IdTech of that vintage was all in-house code exclusively targeting the PC. I think the only thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.
  - ThatPlayer 2y ago
    Even the original Doom source code release was the Linux source code because the Dos version of the game uses a 3rd party audio library, DMX.
    - dcrazy 2y ago
      I believe DMX was also used for Descent, and the company successfully shut down open source projects to reverse engineer the file format. Interplay was also extremely protective of their full-motion video codec, which only got well-documented after the release of Baldur’s Gate II.
  - phire 2y ago
    Id were using a 3rd party sound library for Doom to handle the nitty-gritty aspects of DOS sound hardware, so the open source release was based on the linux port of Doom. People had to port it back to DOS. They couldn't release the windows port of Doom either, as that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore include Microsoft copyrighted code. With Quake, Id did their own windows port, so it was possible to release the source code for winquake.
    - stevage 2y ago
      > 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.
- 0x457 2y ago
  Probably because for it to be really opensource it has to have a proper documentation and other resources. if someone just does a `git push` and changes license it won't be much help to anyone until there is a proper documentation.
  - klaussilveira 2y ago
    Source has extensive documentation for years, both by Valve and modders. Mostly unified and indexed here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com https://developer.valvesoftware.com
- deadbabe 2y ago
  It will be easier to understand when you see the hundreds of Jira tickets to wade through to get it released and the fact they have better shit to do that contributes directly to revenue instead of trying to open source an old game engine that only a handful of people will even care about.
- kllrnohj 2y ago
  > Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way. Source uses Havok, which is a licensed middleware. Convincing Havok to be also open source is likely a nonstarter. Repeat for any other middlewares they might have used, such as Adobe's ScaleForm used by CSGO, and it quickly is just an endless legal nightmare. idTech handled this by either spending time to rip out those components, allowing for a partial open source release which is what you're ripping on Valve for doing right this moment, or by avoiding using any licensed middlewares at all which is a significant development limitation that not everyone can get away with. As Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed alternatives, it's possible we might see that open sourced in the future. Who knows.
  - klaussilveira 2y ago
    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 https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VPhysics
    - meibo 2y ago
      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 https://github.com/misyltoad/VPhysics-Jolt
  - magicalhippo 2y ago
    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...
- keerthiko 2y ago
  IMO the source engine codebase is probably chock-full of duct tape and cruft, full of undocumented, legacy, bespoke, hacky and deprecated stuff that it's not worth the dev resources for valve to bring it up to an OSS standard worthy of their reputation. Contributing to this is probably - custom external hooks (eg: homemade test framework, patchnotes publishing, steamapp backdoor integrations, hardware-specific firmware interfaces, 3rd party closed source SDK hooks) - assumptions about Valve's server architecture/implementation for most multiplayer stuff used by Valve games, the codebase(s) of which are probably as vast as Source itself and closed-source too - bespoke engine modifications made for specific games like HL2 or CS1.6 which hasn't been touched for a decade, the authors of which may not be accessible to document them trivially Adding sufficient documentation to a massive closed-source system meant for internal use, over multiple decades, to bring them up to par for functional OSS publication is a monumental feat that honestly probably isn't worth the risk of bad publicity from the modder community who'd just be mad about how unusable it would be.
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    Supposedly there's a texture of a coconut included in source games, along with either a filename or tagged with a comment to say that if it's removed then the game will break and noone knows why.
    - ZeWaka 2y ago
      That was a throwaway false joke on Reddit that the community has spread, this isn't true. It's just an unused texture from an old update.
  - account42 2y ago
    Are you implying Valve has a repoutation for high quality code? Because I don't think user of Steam or their games shares that view.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked). My general impression from lurking on these kinds of threads (with no relevant personal experience) was that Godot is a good 2D engine but not a good 3D engine. Do you find it comparable to the other two?
  - SXX 2y ago
    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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1Lon_Q2T18
    - sho_hn 2y ago
      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=Atb3yFNazmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIOmb1hseA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIOmb1hseA
      - jsheard 2y ago
        Cruelty Squad is also a successful FPS title built with Godot, but its deliberately hideous aesthetic probably makes it the worst possible way to sell anyone on the merits of the engine.
        cheeseomlit 2y ago
        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
        2y ago
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rozab 2y ago
  If those engines are so capable then why do no AAA games use them? Source is still (kinda) used in games like Apex Legends
  - ZeWaka 2y ago
    Because almost all AAA games are built using in-house engines.
    - account42 2y ago
      You mean in Unreal Engine.
- Nition 2y ago
  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 https://sbox.game or https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/
  - djmips 2y ago
    They've given out Source 2 to others AFAIK.
    - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
      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 https://vghe.net/source-2-engine.html#source-2-engine-games shows Valve almost exclusively.
      - svelle 2y ago
        It was on their radar. There's an old slide deck where they talk about releasing source 2 for free akin to unreal. But they scrapped that idea and gave the code to facepunch/Garry instead, for s&box to fill that hole.
        jamesfinlayson 2y ago
        Ah okay - I wasn't really paying any attention when Source 2 first came out but looking back now it hasn't been used for a whole lot of games.
        djmips 2y ago
        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.
- greenchair 2y ago
  maybe its release could lead to more attacks or cheating?
- lawlessone 2y ago
  They are probably still working on something with it?
  - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    Yes, there are still a bunch of their games running on Source. I can understand Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive being moved to Source 2 but the rest will stay as it's not worth it.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  I filed a bug based on this: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624
  - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
    so sad that people are shaming you for writing this , I think you spoke the silent part out loud , but that takes courage. I thank you man. PS: I am the guy who wrote the long paragraph about crowdfunding. After reading the hackernews , it became evident that yes it would be nice for foss source code but its never gonna happen because its gonna take effort and money for valve for what? they might not do it , because I guess they are there for making money ? I believe that crowdfunding is the way to go , Instead of forcing companies to give what we want for free , we need to provide an incentive for them. This crowdfunding could also be a great PR for valve itself as well. Crowdfunding is the win-win situation I could think of , but oh I am more than happy to eat my own word , if I can get source's source code and really run team fortress 2 fully open source.
  - Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
    But in my honest opinion , that rm -rf lawyers part was just a little bit less thought out and unprofessional and git push origin --all Maybe remove that part if you really want valve to listen to this professionally please ?
    - pmarreck 2y ago
      fair enough, on it, was trying to be funny
- DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Is there any relationship between those OS engine and the source model?
- lloeki 2y ago
  > 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.
  - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    Yes, open-source GoldSource would be wonderful. I steer clear of Xash3D because of it's legal grey area too.
- __jonas 2y ago
  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 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624 I don't think it reflects well on this site either
- novabridge 2y ago
  Ever since I joined the industry, I've heard that many companies are reluctant to open source code because it's so bad that if they did, no one would dare use their products. I guess Source is one of them.
- eddieroger 2y ago
  Aside from the good middleware licensing arguments, if my memory serves me, Valve employees get to shift their work to what interests them at the time, and who knows what tidbits of could-be versions of HL3, Portal 3, or other interesting but unannounced (let alone unreleased) games could be in there.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  When Winamp published their source code on Github, not only did they breach third party licenses, but they also had to deal with trolls who across the entire Internet that wanted to make a show out of them. It's hard to blame developers for avoiding open sourcing when you may not get anything out of that except for criticism.
- xandrius 2y ago
  I am not sure I'd even remotely compare Source to Godot, never touched the other ones though.
- JojoFatsani 2y ago
  Is there still some structural Source underlying the cash cow of CS2?
  - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    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.
thetoon 2y ago
Maybe that's where a project like Nuclide could step in? I'm always a bit confused between their projects' names, but I've read somewhere they had progress on the HL2 front.
- pityJuke 2y ago
  What is Nuclide? I've found https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide and https://github.com/eukara/freehl https://github.com/eukara/freehl.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
I'm still a bit confused on why Source is close sourced when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago. I suppose it'd becsuse there's some basic overlap, but they still also feel comfortable releasing their gsmes' source?
- EMIRELADERO 2y ago
  > when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago. I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be used to justify having Source2 open as well. After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all? The only things I can think of are a) anticheat, b) NDA'd 3rd party code, and c) protecting important secret sauces made by the company itself a) and b) are both solved by simply not releasing those portions of the code, while c) is a bit moot. Any competitor can already (legally) RE the binaries and recreate any juicy proprietary algorithms, unless they're patented. But in that case they would be protected even if the source was released so it's still the same situation.
  - LegionMammal978 2y ago
    b) can get dicey, depending on how hard the 3rd party in question wants to defend their copyrights. Google v. Oracle was resolved on the basis of being transformative, not on the basis of class and function declarations being too insignificant to copyright. So if you can't even keep the 3rd-party headers, you're left with a bunch of function calls that you have to piece together the meaning of.
    - EMIRELADERO 2y ago
      You could just strip out all mentions of the 3rd party component on the codebase. Let the community figure out how to plug in a replacement.
      - nemothekid 2y ago
        >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.
progbits 2y ago
Given the leaks, the fact it's been over 10 years since last major game released using Source 1, and the fact most of the rendering code (probably the most valuable bits, aside from physics) in Source2 must have been rewritten given the new developments in game graphics; makes me wonder if there is any reason for them to keep it closed source. Do you think they will release it at any point? Maybe there are licensing issues where they don't have the rights to all of it and couldn't easily opensource it. Or maybe there is in fact still too much secret sauce left there?
- bayindirh 2y ago
  There's always "too much secret sauce". I remember a time when CryTek published papers about how they implemented things, now they don't. There's always in-house ways to deal with graphics drivers and certain effects. Remember how Source 1 was the only engine which was able to render HDR with measly ATI 9600XT, without a performance penalty most of the time? You carry this know how in evolved form for generations, and it gets buried under as the foundation of the new things you're building on top of it. This is what I remember from a friend who implemented his own game engine and created a company for it, and half the woes were making the graphics drivers and processors behave as they said in their manuals.
  - kvirani 2y ago
    Isn't UE4/5 fully source available?
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      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/downloading-unreal-engine-source-code 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)
beeflet 2y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CvpQrnTEY
chedabob 2y ago
Damn, was hoping this would bring TF2 back to Mac. Haven't had a good LAN party in the office since Apple dropped 32-bit support.
- andrepd 2y ago
  Do people even do LAN parties anymore? x)
  - jsheard 2y ago
    They do, but "LAN" has become a bit of a misnomer since few games actually have real LAN play options anymore. If you're playing modern titles then you end up with a bunch of PCs or consoles in the same room all connecting to a remote server over the internet. Internet connections are a lot better than they were back in the day at least.
    - wholinator2 2y ago
      Dang, wouldn't you run into serious internet problems with that? Do modern games use that much data? Could a single internet service handle 6 simultaneous connections?
      - FreebasingLLMs 2y ago
        Really is not that much data involved (not counting downloading the game itself). Streaming multi-player game data to/from an individual player can range from like 10kbps to 100kbps depending on the game and scale involved. Remember you are only sending the deltas (and occasional entire refreshes).
        superb_dev 2y ago
        Latency is a lot more important than throughput for online games
        2y ago
lnauta 2y ago
I'm still not quite sure how to take this, does this mean that: We can not fix problematic netcode (this is a running joke in the TF2 comminity) We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)?
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  > We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)? I think some of these fixes were through something a bit more complicated like sourcemod which hooks various methods.
xyst 2y ago
Source engine is so outdated at this point anyways. Valve should use the profits from their cash cow, CSGO, and use it to invest in retooling with open source engines such as GoDot or Bevy. I remember downloading a leaked version of the source code for source engine, and in general it was laughable at how awful it was. I dont know if it was ever discussed mainstream but only based on recollection of IRC chats. I think it was about 6 months out of date, but even so it would explain why HL sequels would become vaporware despite years of teasing the community by Gabe Newell himself.
- somehnguy 2y ago
  They're already using Source 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2
- celsoazevedo 2y ago
  In case you're not aware, CSGO was replaced by CS2, which uses Source 2.
- daelon 2y ago
  It's just Godot, fyi.
- djmips 2y ago
  It's pretty easy to criticize the Source Engine source code but y'know it worked!
- shdh 2y ago
  Source 2 is quite a decent engine. Their level building tools with Hammer are top notch. Volumetrics, physical sound, pbr, great snapshot based networking. Godot doesn't really come close.
anacrolix 2y ago
oh that's lame :(
jheriko 2y ago
[flagged]
Imustaskforhelp 2y ago
can we not create a legal open source "source emulator". I am asking this from a total legal standpoint.
- ripdog 2y ago
  "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://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity, https://openrct2.io/ https://openrct2.io/, https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz
  - zamalek 2y ago
    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.
- jamesfinlayson 2y ago
  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.

LorenDB 2y ago

Valve just keeps on winning. I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose its way after the original generation is gone.

pityJuke 2y ago
Off-topic: this is genuinely cool, along with many things Valve do, but Valve does generate a significant amount from gambling (and underaged gambling) so I won't give a complete pass to being a great company.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  This is a little complicated. There are many companies that sell gambling products. Nothing special about that. The tragedy is when you list your game on Steam and it gets popular, you are paying Valve 30% for the privilege of finding new users for CSGO and DOTA2. That is how they make money.
  - almatabata 2y ago
    And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on the gambling it will impact their bottom line. As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team. Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
    - SXX 2y ago
      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.

foxandmouse 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ender341341 2y ago
from various interviews I've seen of folks in the games industry apple has historically been actively hostile to working with game companies, it seems to have softened with the iphone appstore. People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.
- foxandmouse 2y ago
  Don't think that's the case anymore, "Game Porting Toolkit 2" seemingly opened the floodgates on gaming on a mac.. It's up to the developers if they think it's worth the time/ effort; but with how great apple the hardware is, and how easy it is to port a game, I think we're going to see a huge influx of mac gaming.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    Isn't the Game Porting Toolkit still under that weird license where developers are only allowed to use the DirectX translation layer for "evaluation purposes"? End-users can use it to run Windows games if they want, but AFAICT developers are categorically not allowed to build their own ports around it, they still have to port their game over to Metal the hard way.
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    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-frustrations-persist-for-developers/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-frustratio...

pityJuke 2y ago

The official blog post: https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 (Also includes links to recent updates for other Source engine titles)

Lammy 2y ago

I hope this is good news for TF2 Classic. edit: here's the announcement from the TF2C Discord: ============== @everyone We'll have more to say later, but you might not be able to launch TF2 Classic for a little bit due to the massive SDK update and public release of Team Fortress 2's code. We're already preparing for the porting efforts and a potential Steam release now that we've been legally enabled to pursue that, but in the meantime, you will have to shift Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer to the "previous2021" beta branch that still has the previous revision of the SDK files to continue playing. See the screenshot for an example. Thank you, and we'll have more news soon!

__turbobrew__ 2y ago
Given they call out derivative works of the original games being ok, and those works can be released as new games on steam seems to clear the way for TF2 Classic.
jeffybefffy519 2y ago
What is tf2 classic?
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  https://tf2classic.com/ https://tf2classic.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2
  - lelandfe 2y ago
    Wow! They’re making landing pages like the old TF2 updates and even making shorts. This is obsessive. I love it. Also, check out how big the team is. Holy crud. They don’t have Valve’s humor but… who does.
    - Lammy 2y ago
      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 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/items/fanboys_202106/Fanboys.zip&file=Fanboys%2F475.png https://ia904504.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/11...

beeflet 2y ago

Woah... woah WOAH I wasn't expecting to see this on HN. I've been expecting this for a long time, and if I was valve I would have done something like this a long time ago: release a "final" celebratory content update, port the game to vulkan, and open source the codebase (keeping the item servers and whatnot tied to valve's servers). I don't know if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning of TF2. There have been leaks before but this is huge news.

Rooster61 2y ago
> Woah... woah WOAH I see what you did there
- epaga 2y ago
  Well...I don't, care to enlighten us non-insiders?
  - reportgunner 2y ago
    probably a reference to Scout or something
  - Rooster61 2y ago
    It's a line from Portal. In the final fight, GLaDOS says it in a panicked, glitchy voice while being dismantled.
HaZeust 2y ago
Beginning of the end? It's been the end for years - they're passing it off to the community, as they should! The team for TF2 is probably very low double digits now and it's almost 18 years old, it's time to outsource the continuing developments.
- Starlevel004 2y ago
  > 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.

65 2y ago

Wondering if this is so Valve doesn't have to keep updating TF2. It's a 17 year old game and the last real update was Jungle Inferno in 2017. I wonder if it's going to turn into more of a community maintained "sandbox" game.

sylware 2y ago

Meanwhile... the "steam client" on elf/linux is still 32bits and hardcoded for x11/GL (nope, no tables of functions with wayland/vulkan/gpu fallbacks...) ... and don't forget about those bash-only scripts carefully using all those (often GNU) niche options of commands... Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]). Oh and lately, I had to build the original lsof command to please the steam webhelper... and there is a liblsof library they could have linked statically... Valve "linux" devs should be worry putting "valve" on their resume, this could backfire... seriously.

Vilian 2y ago
You managed to be wrong in every single point that you're trying to make, that required dedication
- sylware 2y ago
  AI?
account42 2y ago
> Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]). Steam launched without any runtime. They added all that because yes, the average game developer cannot manage to build portable libraries.
- sylware 2y ago

pie_flavor 2y ago

The game appears to have been renamed "Frog Fortress 2". https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2e8e179d5352d81d0d4aaded72c1704b7a9/game/mod_tf/gameinfo.txt#L3 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2...

jsheard 2y ago
I'd guess that's to distinguish it from the official TF2 if you build and install the code without changing the name.
Pannoniae 2y ago
It's kind of an inside joke - look at who's the committer ;) frogs and graphics programming are good friends.
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  And here I was hoping for a surprise Frog Fractions 3 :)

James_K 2y ago

I wonder if they'll start accepting pull requests. There are a lot of bugs I'd like to see fixing in the game. I've been annoyed by the Medigun beam not lining up with the model for about ten years by this point.

RockRobotRock 2y ago
I really really really doubt it. But hopefully someone can champion a community fork of the game which runs on Steam.
jisnsm 2y ago
They have been ignoring almost all bugs in the goldsrc tracker for years.
- account42 2y ago
  This is just how valve works. Someone does a work on one of the games and will look at the bug tracker for a bit before eventually moving on.
jamesfinlayson 2y ago
I think this is just a dump to GitHub and not connected to their internal stuff in any way. Same with the Half-Life repo - when the 25th anniversary stuff was released it was just pushed as one mega-patch.

SXX 2y ago

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.

unit149 2y ago

[dead]

IncreasePosts 2y ago

Well, now this makes me feel old that I thought TFC was the bee's knees and felt TF2 was too new fangled and fancy so I never got into it.

sophacles 2y ago
There's still people getting into it right now, in 2025. It's not too late (and it's a lot of fun...).

sevenf0ur 2y ago

As someone who used mod TF2 on the server side, this is fantastic. I've spent countless hours analyzing the binaries in IDA and now you can just open github. This will definitely accelerate new features and bugfixes from the community. It's about damn time, really. The TF2 source code has already leaked twice. And a group even made a cloned version of the game in an earlier version of the engine. The community support this game still has is massive.

phendrenad2 2y ago

Was this an accident? Why is the link to a github diff? Why is there no announcement?

datenyan 2y ago
Definitely not an accident - the announcement was made on the TF blog [0] [0] - https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

wiseowise 2y ago

So that’s why they didn’t challenge TF2C this time, it’s all coming together.

njintje 2y ago

This is the final nail in the coffin for Team Fortress 2, isn't it?

neuroelectron 2y ago

TF3 confirmed jk

koakuma-chan 2y ago

Valve be like: Initial commit +1153568 -222431 lines changed

Cribbin 2y ago
LGTM, ship it

declan_roberts 2y ago

This is great. If someone wouldn't mind updating the instructions for a native 2025 ARM64 build of HL2 that would be great. Existing instructions use the old, leaked source engine. Time to make it official and native.

Jotalea 2y ago
A HL2 ARM64 Linux build would eventually lead to a native release for Android, or am I wrong?
- pityJuke 2y ago
  Believe this already exists for NVIDIA’s Tegra machines, and a cursory Google search reveals people seem to have ripped it and made it playable on generic Android.
jamesfinlayson 2y ago
This is just the game code not the engine code.

merillecuz56 2y ago

[flagged]

freecodyx 2y ago
Unfortunately, this is not the place to scam ppl
RestartKernel 2y ago
This scam almost feels quaint compared to contemporary LLM astroturfing.

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

that is very readable cpp

RobRivera 2y ago

Yes

jheriko 2y ago

this is unexciting.

cytocync 2y ago

[flagged]

pavo-etc 2y ago

Open PRs from 2013, makes me feel better

Scuds 2y 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?

jamesfinlayson 2y ago
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.

nomilk 2y ago

Never played the game, don't intend to, but huge respect to Valve for releasing the code! I wish more games studios would do this!

SLWW 2y ago
Missed out, when it was at its peak, true kino

teaearlgraycold 2y ago

Should I not be surprised that TF2 on its own, without the game engine's source code, is >1,000,000 LOC? That seems crazy to me. The full diff doesn't load on GitHub. Perhaps a lot of this is auto-generated.

parasti 2y ago
Ever wonder why TF2 stopped stopped receiving regular updates? My theory was always that the game had turned into a massive ball of code that nobody dares touch anymore.
LauraMedia 2y ago
The fact the entire code of the Source engine comes ontop of that... It makes sense they decided to focus on Source 2 instead...

Imustaskforhelp 2y ago

One of the few posts which had gotten me genuinely interested. Shame that source itself is proprietory.But still its leaked so its "theoretically" possible to be open source. IDK.

Imustaskforhelp 2y ago

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 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#issuecomment-2667621034 https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624#...

remram 2y ago
Your tone is more likely to get them to never release anything again. Wtf.

Corrado 2y ago

I wonder how this will affect the MegaCheatersDB (https://mcdb.neocities.org/ https://mcdb.neocities.org/) and the MegaAntiCheat system (https://github.com/oenu/MegaAntiCheat https://github.com/oenu/MegaAntiCheat). Those projects are doing what they can to track down and label TF2 cheaters. I hope this helps them out. On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers? That would be unfortunate indeed.

hofrogs 2y ago
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.
jamesfinlayson 2y ago
> 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.

WhereIsTheTruth 2y ago

github struggling to display that page is sad, github devs should feel embarrassed

jeroenhd 2y ago
Maybe I'm closer to their caching servers but I'm not seeing any performance issues scrolling through this on my phone. That's despite Firefox on Android having a tendency to fall over because of memory leaks in addons.

maltris 2y ago

TF2 was a great game and a halloween tradition for me and some friends. Unfortunately it became public-unplayable with all the bots going on and around.

burrish 2y ago
This got fixed a while ago

rockbruno 2y ago

There's also some small HL3 files in the diff: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759e2e8e179d5352d81d0d4aaded72c1704b7a9#diff-b3e6528ec2a1aedae6ac2cc72ddf56b0c94205be3b1efc86ef6ea5a558da4e6c https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759...

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

burgerquizz 2y ago

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.

nullbyte808 2y ago

Now if they just release the code for the Steam Client!