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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 alternati

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
      - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
        Yeah last year Team Fortress 2 got the 64-bit update and replaced some commercial libraries. The branch of Source that it's on seems to get periodic security updates too.
    - kllrnohj 2y ago
      Source got some significant updates such as HRTF audio in 2016 and Panorama UI in 2018. I don't know if TF2 specifically ever got those changes, though, but Source engine itself did as used by CSGO.
  - SXX 2y ago
    For anyone not looking for super realistic 3D and primary targeting PC audience Godot is enough to make good game. Majority of game devs do not build AAA titles with $10,000,000+ budget. A lot of players play mostly indie games. FFS some of the best indie games out there made was made on RPG Maker and let's say it's far less advance than Godot. After all games are all about enjoyable core loop and player expirience. And no game engine magically give you any of it. Company I co-founded released 2 games on PC and about to release 3rd one on PC and all the consoles. One of them was made with Godot, two with Unity. The only reason we had to switch to Unity are consoles. And the reason why Godot cant efficiently complete on consoles is the fact that platforms are backward and proprietary.
    - doctorpangloss 2y ago
      Yeah. Listen, first person shooters are an enjoyable core loop and player experience. Unreal and Source definitely magically gives you like 80%, and maybe all the hard parts, of making that game. And of course I appreciate what you do. Thing is if you shoved it into a first person shooter, would it be even more successful? The answer to that question is often yes. Same as Roblox being basically Tavern Brawl but for third person platformers. Coming from a POV of game design for phones, Roblox games suck, but look: they are extremely popular and the clunky format of that engine makes them work. My point is that it’s impossible to generalize, but basically there is nothing you could make better with Godot today than with Unity or Unreal, as lamentable as that is, and even the things they make you want to make, it’s better to make those things instead.
      - SXX 2y ago
        You think that any game will be more popular just because majority of TOP100 titles are 3D FPS-like titles. Problem is that building such a game with modern graphics costs tens of millions of dollars. There are very few companies in the world with budgets big enough to even afford attempt on it and majority of such projects also flop. If you look past TOP100 most popular games by player count you will find there are hundreds of less popular niche titles and wast majority of them likely not even 3D at all and there is reason for this. Anyone who tried to start game development company and get their project funded knows that majority of publishers in the world operate well under $500,000 per project. This could sound unreal for US-based person who knows of FAANG salaries, but this is how game development industry is: lots of enthusiast trying to make some games working for penies. So nope, wast majority of game developers dont need Unreal or even Unity feature set simply because they dont have budget for building modern 3D game.
  - KennyBlanken 2y ago
    And you're equating money spent on development with quality, performance, features, and compatibility. Please do tell me about how Source even remotely compares to Unity or Unreal? Do you see Source being used in virtual soundstages? No. Does Source support Metal or Vulkan? No. Does it have anything approaching the 3D or 2D or rendering style capabilities of any modern engine? No. Is Source going to be remotely relevant for metaverse stuff? No. All the money in the world won't change the fact that Source is an outdated pile of garbage. Respawn uses it to this day for Apex, and it's horrific. Its graphics quality is atrocious especially for the demands it places on hardware. It has the worst latency of any similar multiplayer game (some events can take half a second to make it from a player's action to another player's system!) It lacks modern features that have been in other games for many years, like variable event rates (some games, for example, will use much higher event update rates for stuff happening within the player's field of view.) Its game engine has so many bugs around inputs, movement, and collisions that high level play revolves around abusing all of them for competitive advantage in what is lauded as "movement", and because Respawn never treated these issues as exploits, they got painted into a corner where they can't ever switch to a modern game engine because trying to get the quirks of movement behavior would be impossible. The game's input processing is done in relation to framerate, for fucks sakes....so input processing behavior changes depending on framerate. The security and anti-cheat in the game is so hamstrung by Source that multiple world tournaments have been hacked live and ultimately had to be done in secret, later broadcast - because Respawn was so powerless to stop the hacker(s). With more Unity shifting to a royalty model you're going to see a lot more interest in open source game engines like Godot; Godot is, for example, working on being usable for massive multiplayer and open-world games.
    - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
      > Does Source support Metal or Vulkan? Vulkan support is now there (it was added in the last couple of years). Might not be for all engine branches though.
      - account42 2y ago
        In Source 1? AFAIK that's only via DXVK.
- chefandy 2y ago
  UE makes their engine source available even if it’s not under a permissive license.
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
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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.

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
    - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
      Yeah last year Team Fortress 2 got the 64-bit update and replaced some commercial libraries. The branch of Source that it's on seems to get periodic security updates too.
  - kllrnohj 2y ago
    Source got some significant updates such as HRTF audio in 2016 and Panorama UI in 2018. I don't know if TF2 specifically ever got those changes, though, but Source engine itself did as used by CSGO.
- SXX 2y ago
  For anyone not looking for super realistic 3D and primary targeting PC audience Godot is enough to make good game. Majority of game devs do not build AAA titles with $10,000,000+ budget. A lot of players play mostly indie games. FFS some of the best indie games out there made was made on RPG Maker and let's say it's far less advance than Godot. After all games are all about enjoyable core loop and player expirience. And no game engine magically give you any of it. Company I co-founded released 2 games on PC and about to release 3rd one on PC and all the consoles. One of them was made with Godot, two with Unity. The only reason we had to switch to Unity are consoles. And the reason why Godot cant efficiently complete on consoles is the fact that platforms are backward and proprietary.
  - doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Yeah. Listen, first person shooters are an enjoyable core loop and player experience. Unreal and Source definitely magically gives you like 80%, and maybe all the hard parts, of making that game. And of course I appreciate what you do. Thing is if you shoved it into a first person shooter, would it be even more successful? The answer to that question is often yes. Same as Roblox being basically Tavern Brawl but for third person platformers. Coming from a POV of game design for phones, Roblox games suck, but look: they are extremely popular and the clunky format of that engine makes them work. My point is that it’s impossible to generalize, but basically there is nothing you could make better with Godot today than with Unity or Unreal, as lamentable as that is, and even the things they make you want to make, it’s better to make those things instead.
    - SXX 2y ago
      You think that any game will be more popular just because majority of TOP100 titles are 3D FPS-like titles. Problem is that building such a game with modern graphics costs tens of millions of dollars. There are very few companies in the world with budgets big enough to even afford attempt on it and majority of such projects also flop. If you look past TOP100 most popular games by player count you will find there are hundreds of less popular niche titles and wast majority of them likely not even 3D at all and there is reason for this. Anyone who tried to start game development company and get their project funded knows that majority of publishers in the world operate well under $500,000 per project. This could sound unreal for US-based person who knows of FAANG salaries, but this is how game development industry is: lots of enthusiast trying to make some games working for penies. So nope, wast majority of game developers dont need Unreal or even Unity feature set simply because they dont have budget for building modern 3D game.
- KennyBlanken 2y ago
  And you're equating money spent on development with quality, performance, features, and compatibility. Please do tell me about how Source even remotely compares to Unity or Unreal? Do you see Source being used in virtual soundstages? No. Does Source support Metal or Vulkan? No. Does it have anything approaching the 3D or 2D or rendering style capabilities of any modern engine? No. Is Source going to be remotely relevant for metaverse stuff? No. All the money in the world won't change the fact that Source is an outdated pile of garbage. Respawn uses it to this day for Apex, and it's horrific. Its graphics quality is atrocious especially for the demands it places on hardware. It has the worst latency of any similar multiplayer game (some events can take half a second to make it from a player's action to another player's system!) It lacks modern features that have been in other games for many years, like variable event rates (some games, for example, will use much higher event update rates for stuff happening within the player's field of view.) Its game engine has so many bugs around inputs, movement, and collisions that high level play revolves around abusing all of them for competitive advantage in what is lauded as "movement", and because Respawn never treated these issues as exploits, they got painted into a corner where they can't ever switch to a modern game engine because trying to get the quirks of movement behavior would be impossible. The game's input processing is done in relation to framerate, for fucks sakes....so input processing behavior changes depending on framerate. The security and anti-cheat in the game is so hamstrung by Source that multiple world tournaments have been hacked live and ultimately had to be done in secret, later broadcast - because Respawn was so powerless to stop the hacker(s). With more Unity shifting to a royalty model you're going to see a lot more interest in open source game engines like Godot; Godot is, for example, working on being usable for massive multiplayer and open-world games.
  - jamesfinlayson 2y ago
    > Does Source support Metal or Vulkan? Vulkan support is now there (it was added in the last couple of years). Might not be for all engine branches though.
    - account42 2y ago
      In Source 1? AFAIK that's only via DXVK.
chefandy 2y ago
UE makes their engine source available even if it’s not under a permissive license.

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

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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.