Source Engine SDK To Be Free

Following up on news from earlier this week that Valve made Team Fortress 2 free-to-play, we now get word that the Source engine SDK will be free to all as well. Quoting Rock, Paper, Shotgun: "The Source Software Development Kit, for those of you who've never clicked the Tools tab in Steam, contains everything you'd need to make a mod, except for personal ambition. It has everything from the infamous Valve Hammer Editor to Face Posers and Model Viewers. At the moment, to gain access to the Source SDK you have to purchase a Source based game such as Half Life 2, or as the official website states, Team Fortress 2. Which is of course now free. [Valve's Robin Walker said], 'We are in the process of getting it all done. It’s a bit messy because we have multiple versions of the SDK, and there’s some dependencies we need to shake out. But yes, the gist of it is that we’re just going to go ahead and make the Source SDK freely available.'"

Comments

What about a Linux port?

[Gordonjcp]

How much would it cost to release a port of Source to Linux? Come up with a figure, and we - the Linux gaming community, who bought every iD game ever written simply because it had Linux support straight away - will come up with the cash.

Go on, do it. The money is waiting.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[ShakaUVM]

>>If we are lucky they will release the entire source code, so that the open source community can work its magic and port it them selfs

Well... the entire HL2 source code was leaked back in the day... =)

But I'd love to see the *TF2* source code released. Robin (back when he was just a uni student in Australia) released the source code to TF1 (up to a certain version), which enabled me to write CustomTF (I guess some people call it Shaka's Mod) which allows you to build your own class using a cash-based system. Hell of a lot of fun to write and play, and it turned into an open source project in its own right, with various people from around the world taking over leadership of the project at one point or another in the last 14 years.

People still play it, which is really neat. The Facebook group for it is here:
http://www.facebook.com/groups/178060565542861

But I'd love to be able to bring it to an engine written within the current millennium. =)

SDK For Free? 2009 version or what?

[VGPowerlord]

For those of you who don't keep track, the "Source 2009" version of the game engine used by Valve's multiplayer games has had a number of updates in the past year.

The problem is, the SDK hasn't reflected these changes.

So, right now, the final game itself has interesting C++ classes like CVoteController that don't exist in the SDK.

Does Valve plan on releasing an updated SDK along with making it free?