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10 Years of Half-Life
intenscia writes "After 10 years of Half-Life and dealing with its silent protagonist Gordon Freeman, ModDB looks back at everything that Valve made possible with the release of its first game. The freedom and flexibility the Gldsource platform gave modders resulted in a plethora of user-generated content such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. In this article they take a brief look at the mods that made the jump to retail as well as the top non-commercial mods that have become perennial classics."
Planet Half-Life used the occasion to look back at the history of Valve. Valve is celebrating by offering the original Half-Life for less than a dollar on Steam.
User-generated? I don't think so. The original TF mod for Quake was made by TFS, which was just a group of players at the outset, but they were hired by Valve. Team Fortress Classic was a Valve product.
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
The Quake engine was the basis for both the Half-Life engine and the Quake2 engine, so they are related but there was no 'hybrid' per se. The Quake and Quake2 engines were released under the GPL. If the Half-Life engine source isn't available, it's likely due to it being a pre-GPL fork of the Quake engine (or something like that).
Uncle AC wonders if releasing code will expose vulnerabilities. Since so much of the engine has been available for years (since 1999, IIRC), there is relatively little risk. There was when the source for Quake was released. All kinds of hacks and cheats flooded around (for all Quake-engine games).. But that was long ago; perhaps people have forgotten.
Wait a minute. You buy a game through Steam...an on-line marketplace...then bitch about having to connect to it every now and then? Seriously?
There is an off-line mode for playing Steam games for those times when your Internet connection is down/missing-in-action.
If you install a Valve game from a CD it does not download the game. It will download updates, but those are a good thing.
Other PC games require you to insert the disc every time you boot the game. This could be considered equally atrocious as what Steam does. If you don't have a network connection no game for you versus no disc no game for you.
Steam only delivers ads for other Steam games. Not for Coca Cola or some crap. While it may install a startup agent(I don't remember honestly) it can easily be turned off. No steam code on startup on my system.
I hate DRM as much as the next guy, but Steam doesn't piss me off. It's acceptable to me. My biggest problem is that the Steam client itself performs like it was written in QuickBASIC.