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?

[RoFLKOPTr]

... the Linux gaming community ...

Go on, do it. The money is waiting.

I present Valve Senior Staff Doing Math: "So $15... from a potential customer base of approximately 20 people......."

Re:What about a Linux port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of us do play games, there is more than enough people out there playing the open source ones (mainly because there are hardly any commercial ones, modern games to say the least...).

Another thing to point out is that linux users (on average) were the ones willing to pay a higher price for the games available from the humble indie bundle game packs. Valve should jump the gun and test drive some sales with a game or two, it could really benefit them (aswell as improving the chance of other publishers porting a few games to linux).

http://www.humblebundle.com/
http://www.inatux.com/?r=humble-indie-bundle-shows-gnu-linux-gaming-statistics

Its important to point out that sales for linux customers, surpassed mac osx (both times).

Re:What about a Linux port?

[Ooki]

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. I for one would gladly pitch in making source-games for linux if I had the chance :D (Tux -something something- FPS here I come ! )

Re:What about a Linux port?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any story about a hypothetic Linux release of the SDK on Slashdot would immediately turn into an immature flamewar about it using the wrong license and being proprietary. I can see why any sane company would want to avoid "attracting" such user base.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[cgeys]

They wont. To begin with there are probably hundreds of license issues with it, and Valve of course still wants to be able to sell the engine for commercial usage.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[Gordonjcp]

Where are you getting $15 from? I expect it would cost a bit more to release a Linux port than that, but if that's all it takes they can have the money now. At current exchange rates, that's the price of a bacon roll and a cup of tea from the burger van outside.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[Robert Zenz]

They wont. ...and Valve of course still wants to be able to sell the engine for commercial usage.

That does not exclude each other.

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. =)

Re:What about a Linux port?

[L4t3r4lu5]

They're working on it. It'll be ready in late 2011

Re:What about a Linux port?

[antifoidulus]

I hope they will never release the sourcecode to Linux.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you are a little late on that one :p

Re:What about a Linux port?

[Count Fenring]

Ah, Loki Software. You are missed. I still have that Linux copy of Alpha Centauri, somewhere.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[rl117]

If Steam was available for Linux, and games could run natively or via wine, I'd lose the last major reason I have a copy of Windows. I'm sure I'm not the only one using Windows solely for gaming, and I'd love to be able to ditch it entirely for Linux.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[metalmaster]

you wanna shoot penguins? ... You sir, are an evil bastard.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[inasity_rules]

he is probably the life and sole of the party though....

Re:What about a Linux port?

[protektor]

If you mean Loki Software the problem wasn't that no one bought them. The problems was corporate mismanagement. When you buy 100,000 ( or whatever the insane number reported was) metal tins for Quake 3 for a Linux release when none of your other games have sold anywhere near that amount, you know you have a serious management problem. When you pay way too much for the license and make all kinds of weird and strange deals with the game companies, you are going to have problems. Loki ported 19 games over about 2 years. That is pretty impressive. The problem comes when you sign bad contracts and don't manage your money properly then your company is going to go down in flames and make a really nice explosion when it hits bottom leaving a giant crater.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[lucian1900]

Look at the numbers on all the indie bundles. Think again.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[TypoNAM]

do you remember a company that ported some Windows games into Linux in late '90? Many nerds bought that games (I was one of them) ...

Loki Games, indeed I do remember them, and they ported one of my favorite games of all time Tribes 2 to Linux. Back in 2003 when I was using Redhat 9 majority of the time instead of Windows 2000 I wanted to play that game natively in Linux (WINE wasn't that great back then for games) and couldn't find anybody who sold it, until Tux Games made an announcement they received a limited resupply from a warehouse that wanted to get rid of the existing stock of them.

I think I spent $74 USD total on the game and ~$16 of it was for shipping for a game that was going for just $20 at the local CompUSA (remember them?) that was only the Windows version in a jewel disc. Tribes 2 updater for Linux seemed to work much better than the Windows variant except for the very last update that was done by GarageGames, that required a reinstall and manually applying the final update directly for whatever reason. Ah, those were the good old days. Sadly the Linux port of Tribes 2 of course no longer works since the master servers were shutdown in Nov, 2008 and the game is hard coded to only work with the old WON master servers for authentication purposes, and TribesNext is currently Windows only.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[VGPowerlord]

>>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.

Given that the Orange Box 2009 engine is the basis of most of Valve's current online games, it's doubtful that would happen. The closest you're going to get is the Alien Swarm code.

Even server plugins like MetaMod: Source and Orange Box are reverse engineering the server constructs to do a lot of what they do, as Valve is terrible at keeping the HL2 SDK for VSPs (Valve Server Plugins) up to date.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[Lanteran]

Plenty of decent FPS engines free in linux anyway, darkplaces, whatever powers warsow, etc.

Re:What about a Linux port?

[DaVince21]

That figure is closer to a few thousand people, considering how many and what kind of people use any kind of Linux distro.

Maybe they'd like us to code..

[Spottywot]

Half Life 3.

Re:Maybe they'd like us to code..

[Anonymous Coward]

Slow down, we're still waiting for HL2EP3...

Remember, it's good that Valve opted for the episode releases which allowed them to shorten their development time...

Re:Maybe they'd like us to code..

[katyngate]

The episodes for HL2 are essentially HL3.

Free Source

[Noughmad]

How interesting: It's software, it's free, and it's name Source, but it's not Free Software or Open Source. It's really a shame that with the thousands of words in the English language neither RMS nor Valve could come up with something more identifying.

Re:Free Source

[SJ2000]

Source, the game engine, has been around since 2004. I don't think they envisaged this outcome when they named it.

Re:Free Source

[c0lo]

How interesting: It's software, it's free, and it's name Source, but it's not Free Software or Open Source. It's really a shame that with the thousands of words in the English language neither RMS nor Valve could come up with something more identifying.

After reading ^this, the only thing I think fits and that popped into my mind is: " but... does the Source itself want to be free?"

Re:Free Source

[Machtyn]

It really does make doing google searches difficult when I've encountered a problem. That at C# and .NET. (I know Microsoft did that on purpose, what was Valve's excuse?)

Re:Free Source

[VGPowerlord]

As I understand it, the name was more or less an accident... at the time they first started showing off the engine "Source" was the name of the engine in their version control system. Why they decided to keep with that name instead of coming up with a new one is likely lost to time.

And they rechristened the HL1 engine "GoldSrc" (because that version had gone gold) to differentiate between the two.

Re:Free Source

[wolrahnaes]

You are correct. Quoting Erik Johnson at Valve:

When we were getting very close to releasing Half-Life 1 (less than a week or so), we found there were already some projects that we needed to start working on, but we couldn't risk checking in code to the shipping version of the game. At that point we forked off the code in VSS to be both $/Goldsrc and /$Src. Over the next few years, we used these terms internally as "Goldsource" and "Source". At least initially, the Goldsrc branch of code referred to the codebase that was currently released, and Src referred to the next set of more risky technology that we were working on. When it came down to show Half-Life 2 for the first time at E3, it was part of our internal communication to refer to the "Source" engine vs. the "Goldsource" engine, and the name stuck.

What does this mean?

[Aggrajag]

Are Valve preparing to release something?

Re:What does this mean?

[RoFLKOPTr]

It looks like they're preparing to release the Source SDK for free. What makes you think this is tied to something else?

Re:What does this mean?

[Aggrajag]

False hope to see Half-life episode 3 or Half-life 3 one day?

Re:What does this mean?

[The O Rly Factor]

Probably not. They're probably just trying to kick some dirt into EA's eyes in order to add insult to injury over the fact that Origin doesn't even work.

Re:put it on github

[Verunks]

yes, valve, please go ahead, and put it on github.com - I "smell" a big chain of forks/contributers already :)

they are just releasing the sdk for free not the sourcecode, unreal has done this for some time with udk, and crytek will do the same next month with cryengine 3

Re:Big deal

[Canazza]

they've had the Source SDK out since the release of Half-life 2. You just had to buy the game first to get it. Now you can get a version of the engine for nothing (TF2) the SDK is free too.

As a consequence : free mods

[Trigger31415]

The Source SDK being now free, everyone has now access to the mods in this list, most of them being free (Zombie Panic! Source, Age of Chivalry, Insurgency ...) or not costing much (Garry's Mod). I guess they are planning to get more well-know given their projects (DOTA 2 especially)

Re:free stuff

[Elbart]

What?

Re:free stuff

[flimflammer]

You could try using an OS that isn't virtually insignificant in the user desktop market. A market that developers look at and fear virtually no returns on their invesetment. A few potentially loyal sales doesn't really make a sound investment. Almost posted this AC but I'll take the karma hit if it comes. I shouldn't need to hide to post the truth.

Re:free stuff

[xkuehn]

Lucky I'm fluent in AC. ;)

Despite it now being free, I will neither play Team fortress nor use the SDK. I would do so, even at twice the old price, if I could run it natively on Linux.

To Valve, and all the other game developers: if you deprive us of your games, you deprive yourselves of our money.

Re:Big deal

[sourcerror]

You can get the Unreal Developer Kit free as well, and there's Unity etc. so it's not a really big deal.

Re:free stuff

[Elbart]

Ah, thank you very much.

Steam makes it rain (cash)

[Weezul]

Valve has discovered that they're making more money from their cut of the thousands of non-Valve games on Steam than from the few dozen Valve games. It's why they can so frequently give away their games for free. It's why they can dump a fortune into developing Portal, which while clearly the worlds best puzzle game, offers little replayability.

I'd expect the Source SDK licenses will require that games are sold only on Steam.

Re:Steam makes it rain (cash)

[Nick0000000]

Only other one I know of is when they gave away Portal 1 for free, around the time they added steam on OSX I think.

Re:Steam makes it rain (cash)

[Elbart]

Alien Swarm.

Re:Steam makes it rain (cash)

[Machtyn]

They recently announced that Portal 2 hit sales of 3 million units. At $49.99 a pop, that only gives them $150 million in just a few months time. I think that'll float their boat for awhile.

I wonder if they're sort of feeling sorry for selling a 10 hour game for such a high price. (Mind you, it is a very worthy game and fairly evenly paced - once you start thinking, what?! another test room? they move you out of it.)

Re:Steam makes it rain (cash)

[Weezul]

Portal and Portal 2 are truly exceptional games however. There are many people intentionally waiting until Portal 2 drops in price though.

As I understand it, they had serious difficulties working more than two portal pairs into the physics engine. I'd imagine that'll get fixed eventually, paving the way for competitive portal games. Imagine Atlas and P-body in cowboy hats trying to round up escaping armed humans.

Re:Steam makes it rain (cash)

[nschubach]

Red Dead Robotion?

Re:Big deal

[petermgreen]

Now you can get a version of the engine for nothing

Alien swaem has been free for a while and if you own any ATI or nvidia card you've been able to get half life 2 deathmatch and half life 2 lost cost free (the nvidia version of the offer also includes a demo of portal and another game i've never heard of) too though this isn't widely advertised (I found the page below while reading up on half life modding). There was also a free portal offer a while back.

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Half-Life_2:_Deathmatch

but these freebies and other promotional offers did not include the SDK, to get that you have to actually buy a game.

Now you can get a version of the engine for nothing (TF2) the SDK is free too.

If you read TFA this was prompted by someone asking if a purchase from the mann co store (which according to the previous /. article is how you get an uncrippled copy of TF2 now a crippled copy is free) would enable the SDK. It would appear that while they answered yes to his question they also decided to make it free for everyone (though they haven't actually done so yet).

Infamous Hammer editor

[Machtyn]

I can see how the Hammer editor is cumbersome or missing a feature or two in places, but I seem to do pretty well building my future "dream" houses and walking around in it. Are there other, better solutions to use than the Hammer editor for Source games? (I am curious as to what they may update with this release.)

Re:put it on github

[AndrewNeo]

Since they're removing the "must have a copy of a Source game" requirement from the SDK license, it could very well mean that we can finally redistribute the code. Because of that requirement, mods couldn't even be "visible source", but now that they can (presumably), there's no reason it can't be put on GitHub. Someone putting the code on there would be a big help to developers, actually, to already have a starting point in a code repository.

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?

Re:Big deal

[Hsien-Ko]

Alien Swarm which you mentioned, also got you the SDK, so a free Source SDK is old news. Not that it's any good being a terrible engine, terrible pipelines, no elegance, still using .qc files to compile assets, etc...

Re:free stuff

[hairyfeet]

I'll take the hit, I got more karma than God and therefor don't give a crap. unless you are a programmer Linux is COMPLETELY pointless. Its driver model is more than a decade behind everyone else which causes drivers to shit themselves with regularity, Hardware support for cutting edge? Fugetaboutit and for everything less than 3 years old spotty at best, Low resource? not since Ubuntu came along and frankly if you really cared about that TinyXP runs great on a 400MHz and uses just 64Mb of RAM for a full desktop.

The ONLY place Linux makes sense is to programmers. programmers can automate the entire process with scripting (to be fair Windows has gotten much better at this with Powershell) there are plenty of IDEs as well as OSes designed for HPC and scientific programming. So yes for programmers Linux makes sense. For the other 99.9995% of the planet that is NOT programmers? Honestly the driver situation alone makes it suck the big wet titty.

Finally most gamers actually care about performance and Linux GPU drivers are just...well they are shit. The FOSS ones are miles behind on features and rarely work with decent games, the proprietary ones drop support for older hardware while being seriously behind on the latest and greatest. maybe when the ATI FOSS drivers get up to snuff things will be different but for a game company to target Linux as a platform now would have to be insane. DirectX ties everything up all nice and neat whereas OpenGL is a bunch of GPU specific shims and is frankly a mess.

So I'm sorry but unless you are a programmer Linux just doesn't make sense ATM. Maybe when old Torlvalds retires you will quietly get an ABI and then drivers won't be such a clusterfuck but expecting users to keep up with every make/model/rev of hardware so they can go with their hat in their hand to some forum and ask "please sir, can I has sound?" only to be told "RTFM or go back to Winblowz noob!" simply doesn't cut it. Windows is only $100 and well worth that not to deal with the bullshit.

Re:free stuff

[Alex Belits]

Hi hairyfeet.

HEY, LOOK GUYS, THAT'S hairyfeet, A KNOWN MICROSOFT SHILL.

OS X

[Travelsonic]

Please, for the love of god, port Hammer Editor to OS X - it sucks that the only stable computer I have [as in, won't crash in the middle of rendering the map] doesn't have a port of this tool.

Re:free stuff

[hairyfeet]

Hey look everybody it is Alex a KNOWN DOUCHEBAG! See how easy that is to make insults, especially when one has NO DEFENSE to what is being written? I love how the average Linux users acts like a 8 year old going "Nigger faggot" to everyone that doesn't kiss his ass, only instead of nigger and faggot it is shill and astroturfer.

For your info Mr Douche, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...I'm a retailer. I actually have REAL WORLD CUSTOMERS not some kids in their basements trying to stick it to "teh man". I have people that COUNT on their machines to...oh what is the word?....oh yeah ACTUALLY WORK not shit themselves and die because torvalds decided to Goatse the kernel again.

So you go wrap yourself in your little Tux blankie and pretend it is all just a conspiracy, Pretend that all those retailers in the entire USA don't avoid your crap because...well its driver model is crap...no it must be a secret cabal involving Bill Gates and the Illuminati. oh and don't forget to write M$ so you can be just like this guy which is who you sound like.

Run along pup, the grown ups have real work to do. Hey why don't you go compile something or send your pics of your "leet Linux desktop yo!" to KDELook and let the real men talk, okay junior?

Re:free stuff

[t1ch]

Are you nagging about "hardware support for cutting edge"? No, really? You do realize that this all depends on the manufacturers being retards and not releasing specifications, right? When the BIOS is based on hacks to make Wind-Blows work, and when manufacturers prefer to keep their specifications to themselves, or only share it with microsoft retards, we can't do shit. Do you think programmers shit out specifications for a new hardware that they just bought? Do you realize how hard it is to reverse-engineer a complete blob of compiled drivers for windows? So again, wind-blows users don't have a problem there since everything is MADE to work with their retarded shit. Apple sticks to a very limited set of hardware in order to avoid that specific issue. No wonder they also use EFI instead of the backward BIOS. I really don't see why Linux users have to take the flak for all that retarded shit going on. We might as well start manufacturing our own open hardware..

Re:free stuff

[hairyfeet]

Riiight. Hey douchey, citation please? Someone must have forgotten to tell me where Ballmer parked the money truck. Hell I don't even get discount licensing I buy OEM boxes off Newegg like every other system builder.

Isn't it sad, how like a frightened child afraid to look under the bed, you cower at the truth? if your driver model isn't shit then why does Dell have to run their own repos even though we are talking a teeny tiny subset of hardware? Oh right because Linus shits itself and dies if you use the default repos! Man that is some excellent product you got there! you think I can get better QA than the third largest OEM on the planet? What, you expect me to tell paying customers "Go to the forum, kiss some loser ass, and maybe, just maybe, in a few days someone will have mercy and give you a big pile of bullshit that may or may not make your sound work again"?

Bleeding yet douchey? want some more? nice thing about having the truth on your side, you can keep throwing punches all day! How about how a decade old Windows beat the shit out of Linux on netbooks or how ASUS has given up on your bullshit or how about Walamart running away from linux as fast as it can? You got the crazy koolaid drunk enough to say they ALL are paid shills because they won't do your forum dance or CLI horseshit? Meanwhile your "hero" Torvalds the great says Plans? We don't need no steenkin plans!. Why don't you tell them that at work next week, see how quick you get a pink slip? More? How about you actually have the balls to celebrate getting a whole 1% market share while you are actually lower than JavaME and there is a whole website dedicated To your bullshit and excuses .

You see you whiny little delusional mama's boy, I'm your worst fucking nightmare...a retailer that still believes. I believe that the community doesn't have to take Torvalds shit sandwiches, I believe that things can be made better, I believe Linux can be something for more than douchebags like you that will happily take a cock slapping from linus as long as you can say you are sticking to "teh man". I believe that there can be Linux boxes on actual shelves and penguins on boxes.

So you go hide now mama's boy, you hide with your Tux blankie and keep saying your magical nigger nigger faggot, or should I say shill shill astroturfer, like it is a magical word that will make all the bad go away. But it won't change reality and the reality is your driver model is shit and more than 15 years behind everyone else and that is why retailers like me wouldn't piss on it, not some mythical money truck that sneaks up to my door in the middle of the night. So go compile something and leave the men to talk about the real world, okay little girl?

Re:free stuff

[hairyfeet]

See? Thanks for proving you are a coward as I conclusively proved, with link after link no less, that your driver model is shit, retailers consider your product about as useful as an STD, and your ONLY answer? The ONLY thing you can come up with? Waaaah, he won't suck Linus' cock so he must work for M$! Wahhh!

Hell I even provided a link showing from the mouth of Linus himself that his "big plan" for the kernel is THERE IS NO PLAN just whatever itch he and his douchey kernel buds feel like, like it is 1993 and they are passing the kernel around on IRC. No care what pain he is causing the users, no giving a shit he is running off the OEMs, nope just Linus and his pals going Goatse on the kernel, not a care in the world.

So do us all a favor...kill yourself. If you are such a sheep that even when shown link after link, proof after proof that you are being fucked the ONLY answer you can come up with is "Waaah he doesn't like being fucked raw like me so he is a poopy head!" then please, make the world a better place...kill yourself. Suck on a tailpipe, eat a bullet, go play in traffic. this world is too full of cowering sycophants kissing the ass of anyone in power to ever miss you.

Re:Big deal

[DaVince21]

The BUILD editor wasn't free in 1996. You had to buy a BUILD-based game (ie. DN3D or Shadow Warrior) in order to use it. Which is more or less exactly the same thing Valve did, in their release time (since there was no HL2 in 1996).

Re:free stuff

[Alex Belits]

And here is what happens when Microsoft marketing people are out of their talking points -- their monkeys are allowed to build the "arguments" themselves. This is how hairyfeet sounds when he doesn't have any copy to paste.