Source Engine SDK Released

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."

Comments

Natural Selection...

[dhakbar]

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.

Learning Curve

[Phatboy]

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

[Propagandhi]

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.

Re:Forget Mods

[Magnakai]

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.

Re:Forget Mods

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Yes, it is.

Quake1 -> Hl1 -> Hl2.

You still see plenty of error references refering to the .qc game(mod) source, which is QuakeC.

HL2 is just a sequential engine update, they didnt rewrite it from the ground up, so it still has its origin in quake.

Re:Semi-Available to the public

[wolrahnaes]

"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.