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Programming First Person Shooters (Games) IT Technology

Source Engine SDK Released 54

Posted by Zonk from the make-your-own-black-mesa dept.
wolrahnaes writes "It's finally available to the public. According to a post on The Valve ERC Collective, the tools needed to create maps and mods for Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and other Source engine based titles are now available on Steam. Some documentation is available here."
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Source Engine SDK Released More

Source Engine SDK Released

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  • Natural Selection... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dhakbar ( 783117 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @08:01PM (#10744173)
    Oh my!

    I sure hope to see creative mods such as Natural Selection ported from HL to HL2. That would be a dream come true.
    • That would certainly be cool. It certainly make things different. Imagine a skulk that pushes a barrel in front of him to block gun fire or an Onos that smashes threw a unfortified wall.

      Unfortunatly with all the work being done to Natural Selection on the old Half-Life engine it may be some time before a port is even considered.

    • Re:Natural Selection... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Flayra ( 79912 ) on Sunday November 07, 2004 @11:55PM (#10751915) Homepage
      Hey guys,

      I'm glad there's interest here. :) The 'SDK' that was released doesn't have any actual code or coding information. It seems to be the new model viewer and updated version of Hammer (the map editor). So we still can't experiment with it, to see how much work it would be to move the code-base over.

      If and when we do move NS over, we'll likely keep the gameplay exactly the same (at least for now) and then stop supporting the original NS. Trying to balance and support two versions would be a lot of unnecessary work.

      Also, I've started design (and funding) work on a next-gen game in the Natural Selection universe, but there are no details available there yet (unless you want to help fund it).

      Cheers,

      -Charlie
      • Cool, a post by Flayra!
        As a huge fan of NS (constellation member, and OldF member) I'm glad to see future work on Natural Selection is being scoped. While I'd love to see NS ported to Source, wherever NS goes, lots will follow.
        We've been seeing a lot of new players recently. Just last night there were three or four newbies playing which was great to see, though made for some different style games since the servers are usually packed with regulars.
        NS is truly one of the more innovative games I've seen
      • I'd just like to say that I honestly think NS is the most enjoyable, interesting and challenging multiplayer game I have ever seen. Well... discounting Starcontrol 2 of course.

        I would love to see a Source NS. Is Valve offering any help to large 3rd party Mods for HL? It seems like the CS Source was a major push, is there any weight left for you guys?

        Oh yeah, when I get swallowed by an Onos and I happen to have my knife out, I'd like to be able to stab that beast as I die.

        Thanks.

  • ...AND VALVE BREATH A SIGH OF RELIEF (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hine_uk ( 783556 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @08:10PM (#10744215)
    because all those people who can make good games are going to save their asses again. Dont get me wrong, Half life kicked ass and I am sure that half life 2 will kick ass too but the only reason half life is so fondly remembered is due to the number of world class mods that came out. Valve made a good game, amateur coders made their engine a phenomenon.

  • Learning Curve (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Phatboy ( 805714 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @08:14PM (#10744233) Homepage
    For people that will use this:
    How does the increasing complexity of producing artwork/maps for a game affect the amateur scene?
    Do you think the steeper learning curve makes the mods that finally come out better, or does it just make the whole process more demanding and less fun?

    • Re:Learning Curve (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Propagandhi ( 570791 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @08:26PM (#10744291) Journal
      Tough question..

      In Doom 3's case the new lighting methods along with the shear level of level geometry expected of a mapper/modder has certainly slowed the rate of release for new levels and mods. It also takes quite a beast of a machine to run Doom3ed stabily and that eliminates a lot of the community from contributing.

      From what we've seen HL 2 isn't quite so extreme. The basic geometry of cbble (its source is included with Hammer, so it serves as a good example) is a lot simpler than Doom 3's multiplayer maps (which were simpler than many of Doom 3's single player maps). The lighting is also more traditional in HL 2 (it's not all real time) so mappers don't have anything new to get used to there.

      The prop system is much more powerful than the old pre-fab way of doing things, and not having to make any kind of serious detail with Hammer will speed things up, IMO. Instead of carefully modeling your APC out of brushes, you just import an APC model that (hopefully) someone else has already made. There's a lot of prop's included already, too, and when HL 2 is actually released it's assumed that all the models used in game will be released to the community. That's a lot of content (not just models, textures too) to sort through, though, and can definately impeed someone trying to find what they need.

      The texture browser included with Hammer is pretty decent, though. It allows users to search for textures by keyword and Valve did a good job of appropriately naming each one.

      Ultimately, noone can deny that creating more geometry takes more time, but the workflow of the mod tools themselves is increasing, as is the experience level of the user base. It takes more time to create a modern, good looking map, but not THAT much more...

      I kind of rambled there, hopfully it all makes sense.

  • Forget Mods (Score:4, Insightful)

    by superpulpsicle ( 533373 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @08:14PM (#10744234)
    The reason why original HalfLife was such a success is because it ran fluidly on every video card. HalfLife 2 with or without mods have quite a steep requirement to climb. If it's anything like Doom III, I'll wait for double-digit patches.

    • Like any quake based engine, HL2 will scale down pretty well if you know your way around the console.

      Its still far more of a memory whore than its worth, though. By that I mean the ratio of resources required to the ratio of fun just makes it not worth the $50-$80 + cost of hardware if you dont want to run the game in a mode so ugly most will consider you cheating.

      Personally, I say long live QuakeWorld [quakeworld.nu]
      Anything faster than a P1 can run it (and I'm not just talking x86), and its been upgraded far beyond HL

      • Re:Forget Mods (Score:2, Informative)

        by Edgewize ( 262271 )
        Um ... HL2 is not quake-based. It's based on "Source", a homebrew engine that has separate rendering paths for DX7, DX8.0, DX8.1, and DX9.

        That means that the game is enjoyable on anything as low as a Radeon 7500 or Geforce2 MX. Low-end systems still get all the main content, while skipping the eye candy (like refractive water) that they can't draw.

        And FYI, the new netcode in the Source engine (as seen in CS: Source) feels much more robust than what we previously had with CS 1.6.

        • Re:Forget Mods (Score:5, Informative)

          by irc.goatse.cx troll ( 593289 ) on Sunday November 07, 2004 @12:33AM (#10745086) Journal
          " Um ... HL2 is not quake-based. It's based on "Source", a homebrew engine that has separate rendering paths for DX7, DX8.0, DX8.1, and DX9."

          Source is just the working name for the engine. Its not written from scratch, its based on HL1. If it wernt for the legalitys, you could easil run jwz's code comparison on the hl2 source leak and the quake1 source dir and find a ton of similarities.

          I've played with the engine for a while now, and even with a DX9 card (fx5600), you're still better off using the dx7 renderer just for the fps boost, but the visual difference is huge.

          As for the netcode, CS1.6 was(and is) horrible. Even on a large lan the netcode screwups were apparnt, I saw plenty of people teleporting and shots not registering at CPL Summer 04.

          Then CS:S came out, and its even worse because noone has the cpu required to update with the server at a timely frequency. Its like playing against people on dialup, even when theyre only 20ms away from the server.

          • Re:Forget Mods (Score:2, Informative)

            by Taulin ( 569009 )
            Actaully, it was stated that Source is built from scratch [ign.com].
            • Which, according to those who saw the sourcecode, is a blatant lie.
              • Those who develop engines know that reuse is common in large systems, especially when material that manipulates values. Crap, even I am still using some of my matrix and object management functions from the software rendering days. They are highly optimized and there is no reason to throw them away. Networking is pretty much the same no matter how you look at it. All that is different from game to game is optimization of what is sent over the wire which is dependent on the game. While the core networki
          • Wonderful for the moderators to mod him "informative" even though everything he's saying is garbage.
        • If (hypothetically) one were to (accidentally) look through the stolen source code, they might notice many comments mentioning Quake.

    • Re:Forget Mods (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Magnakai ( 772137 )
      I disagree. When Half Life was released, it ran poorly on my fairly recent machine. Remember, this was back before everyone had solid graphics cards and surplus memory. I'm sure that if you're playing HL2 on a contemporaray machine in 2009, it'll run like a dream.
      • D3D and OpenGL video modes reduced your framerate to sub-30. I had p233's at work in 1998 (and I remember the day Halflife came out) with VooDoo 1 cards. The machines with 128M RAM performed at 45 fps in software mode.

    • Re:Forget Mods (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:58PM (#10744605)
      The reason why original HalfLife was such a success is because it ran fluidly on every video card. HalfLife 2 with or without mods have quite a steep requirement to climb. If it's anything like Doom III, I'll wait for double-digit patches.

      Half-life was released in November of 1998, and it did not run well on the typical gamer system then. I had a P2 400 and 128MB RAM with a TNT2 graphics card and got about 25 FPS in 640x480 after much tweaking. There were also many serious problems with the engine. For instance, in the original netcode, your ping and framerate were directly tied to each other. Also, WON was so broken it was turned off "quietly" for a while.

      Once mods like Counter-Strike came around, you really needed a GF3 class graphics card to get a proper FPS experience. This was due to the DX8 code it used and higher polygon counts for the models.

      When I say "proper FPS experience", I mean the right framerate for a first person shooter. I play my best if I'm getting 60-70+ frames/sec. Sure, your eyes can't put that rate together any different, but it is a whole world of difference when "the world" is in 70 fps as opposed to 20-30 fps.

      • Re:Forget Mods (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Bollie ( 152363 )


        Half-life was released in November of 1998, and it did not run well on the typical gamer system then. I had a P2 400 and 128MB RAM with a TNT2 graphics card and got about 25 FPS in 640x480 after much tweaking.

        I'm sorry, I had a P2 266 with a Permedia 2 chipset graphics card (Creative Labs Graphics Blaster Exxtreme if I recall correctly). 640x480 netted me 25 fps and when I upgraded to a TNT (NOT TNT2) I had 1024x768 at a very decent framerate (probably more than 30, it never jerked). BTW, both were at

      • I had a p2 400 with 320 megs of ram and a Voodoo2 paired with a Riva 128 (I think).

        After an insane amount of tweaking, I ended up getting an average of 50-60 fps at 800x600 without any serious loss of visual quality in CS1.3. Thats better fps average than I got when I upgraded to a p4 1.8 with a gf3ti500 (in the beginning, fixed it eventually).

    • Re:Forget Mods (Score:1, Insightful)

      by space_jake ( 687452 )
      I dont know half-life 1 ran pretty well on a 166 Mhz AMD K6, with 64 mb ram and a voodoo2 upon release.
    • Are you kidding? You obviously didn't play Half Life at launch. It had a steep requirement at the time. I spent about $1600 to get a computer and it could barely run it. I also have to chuckle at your "fluidly" comment. Getting the video to work was frustating as all hell since you had to wait for a driver/patch release from both the game and the card manufacture before the game would even run in the various graphics modes. There where no plug in play drivers at the time so if you didn't have an IT/c
    • When did you start playing HL? Obviously it wasn't at launch in 1998.

      The game was an absolute pain in the ass. It took a beast of a computer to run it. My $1600 computer at the time couldn't run it very well. P2 233 32mb ram, no 3d card, you get the idea. After upgrading to 64mb of ram a 333mhz and a vodoo 1 card did I finally enjoy the HL gaming experience.

      No plug and play drivers existed and you had to wait for a patch from both the video card manufacture and valve before it would support the vari

    • It's not like D3. On the CS:S video stress test, I get near 80fps on my 2500+ ATI 9800 (128MB) 1GB RAM system. In D3 timedemo, I can barely squeak out 40. I know the D3 timedemo is more complex, but still, CS:Source is as smooth as a baby's bottom, but D3 is rough like my own ass.

  • Semi-Available to the public (Score:5, Informative)

    by Propagandhi ( 570791 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @08:16PM (#10744243) Journal
    You need to have pre-order HL 2 on Steam to have access to the SDK, right now.

    Also, it isn't the "full" SDK. You cannot compile new binaries (IE, new mods) but you can start creating maps (Hammer is included, along with a model viewer) and I'm fairly certain you can compile models (made with XSI, a light version of which can be downloaded for free here [softimage.com]).

    If you've worked with Hammer or Worldcraft before (or any brush based editor before) you should be in familiar territory. The Snark Pit [snarkpit.com] and The VERC [chatbear.com] boards can provide some resources for newbies (as well as other sites, I'm sure). The included documentation is actually quite good, though.

    Some content of note: There are some models in a directory labeled "C17" (which I assume is City 17) that can be viewed in the model viewer/placed into maps with hammer. Interesting content, though I haven't seen any huge spoilers yet (just things like stoves and cupboards in the directory).

    • Re:Semi-Available to the public (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wolrahnaes ( 632574 ) <sean AT seanharlow DOT info> on Sunday November 07, 2004 @01:05AM (#10745181) Homepage Journal
      "You need to have pre-order HL 2 on Steam to have access to the SDK, right now.

      Well that makes sense, because it's kinda hard to test your levels without having the game. Those who preordered have CS:S to test with. Those who haven't preordered either don't have the game, and thus have no reason to make a map for it, or they have a pirated copy of CS:S and Valve shouldn't give a shit about them anyways.
    • Some content of note: There are some models in a directory labeled "C17" (which I assume is City 17) that can be viewed in the model viewer/placed into maps with hammer. Interesting content, though I haven't seen any huge spoilers yet (just things like stoves and cupboards in the directory).

      Argh! Everyone knows that last missing piece of the previously leaked HL2 stories - the last detail before we uncover the true ending - was the matter of the cupboard and the stove! Now it's obvious that Gorden choses
  • It says the SDK is out on steam but I can't seem to find it anywhere on steam. Does anyone know how to get to it?
  • Having installed steam, how do I get the SDK?

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