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

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.

Semi-Available to the public

[Propagandhi]

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).

If you've worked with Hammer or Worldcraft before (or any brush based editor before) you should be in familiar territory. The Snark Pit and The VERC 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

[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.

Re:Forget Mods

[Anonymous Coward]

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:...AND VALVE BREATH A SIGH OF RELIEF

[Cassius105]

I disagree

the original Half Life was amazing and would of been remembered as a classic without mods

what mods have done is made it stay popular to this day rather than just being remembered

Re:Forget Mods

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

" 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:Natural Selection...

[Flayra]

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