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Or you can just get GCFScape, open "portal content.gcf" in the SteamApps folder, search for "still_alive", and save the interweb's bandwidths for Comcast. :-)

<bitter>It doesn't say what year these students were, but here is a game I worked on second year at BCIT (a CS course obviously). It was networked with nice graphics, sound, physics, a nice level designer and even pretty fun to play. All I got for it was a good grade.</bitter>

It just makes me feel uneasy not owning a hard copy of a game I legally posess.

In the case of Steam-purchased software, you can make as many backups of the GCF files as you like, however you like. It's even got features for sizing backup files for CDR or DVD.

There is still the slight matter of the online authentication, but I suppose with all the datafiles not being encrypted and not tied to any one machine, there had to be some way to lock things down...

Steam's quite interesting as a working implementation of DRM for software. You get a surprising number of 'fair-use' privileges (you can make backups, you can install on as many machines as you like from just a username and password so long as you only play on one at a time, etc.) but there are some serious failings (it's all tied to Valve's authentication system, the offline system is somewhat lacking, and it's very difficult to lend or sell the purchased software to someone else).

A lot of modders aren't touching HL2 because they don't want to have to deal with the Steam engine. If I were a modder, I am sure I could find a bunch of different engines more suitable.

I'm a modder, and my experiences with Source so far have been great. See my signature - so far I've built the geometry for a large, complex island map in just a few weeks of free time, starting from no knowledge of HL2 mapping whatsoever. I'm currently populating it with gameplay, and the new Hammer is far, far more streamlined than the old one. The new entity inputs/outputs system is brilliant, for a start, and there are loads of other minor improvements and tweaks that are greatly appreciated.

The Source SDK documentation gives a fairly good description of the basics, but it's a bit lacking in stuff like HL2 entity descriptions. Fortunately, though, there are the sources for quite a few of the single-player maps available, as well as map sources and full DLL code for HL2 Deathmatch, so there are plenty of examples to work from. The entity configuration file (FGD) for HL2 has a lot of useful entity-specific help for use in Hammer - as a result, I'm managing to learn how things work rather nicely.

There are also the VERC forums where a fair number of Valve developers actively contribute, answering coding and mapping questions.

It hasn't all been plain sailing, though - Hammer still has serious issues on non-NT-based Windows, and needs a pretty high-spec machine to work well, for instance - and Steam updates have a tendency to temporarily break SDK stuff (usually easily fixed, though). Plus, some key utilities like GCFScape have had to be written by third-parties - but there's just about everything needed already available, and it's only a few months into the lifetime of the game. Plus, Valve has recently provided source code for many of their content production tools as well...

Compared with some of my experiences with other games, things have been blissful. UnrealEd was just plain rank, Halo was an exercise in frustration and disappointment, and Doom 3 is a bit ... dead.

For multiplayer games, Unreal Tournament 2004 is definitely a good base for mods and a worthy contender against Source, but for lone-mapper, single-player projects like my own, I can't really hope for anything better than Half-Life 2 at the moment. I get some brilliant artwork to play with, a pervasive, realistic universe and back-story to work on, and a quirky but undeniably capable engine. I'm happy, anyway. :-)

The Wavelength. Been arround since the beginning of half-life 1 and lead the community in modding! No doubt they will continue the tradition with HL2.

See here and my sig.

Incase anyone is interested (as I am) in "hacking" together mods, heres a great link for everything you could need to get started modding half life.

The Wavelength

They are in the process of reviving the site featuring other games than Half-Life.