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Valve Software Archive

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217 pointsecliptik36 comments

Amazing that they seem to have decided to just put that stuff out. And why not, it's been decades for a sizable portions of those. Whatever "we cannot let pre-release demos of Half Life escape because it might tarnish the brand/release" sentiment there might have been does, long since not apply anymore. But a lot of other companies would not bother to update their policies, or even going as far as actively "release" those artifacts.

Kudos, a good day for preservation.

It's a fan-run archive bit officially endorsed by Valve.

Oh, I see. It even says so on the front page, but I was already clicking through. Well, they do endorse it!

I don't see any comment on their website about this endorsement, could you please point it out?

I really hope this site persists... Valve made many games of my childhood... Portal especially had a large impact on my life.

From the about page:

> The Valve Archive is a fan-run repository...

https://valvearchive.com/about/

Hopefully, it stays, but I wouldn't want to bet on it.

And they have a page detailing how to get a local copy of the site in case it doesn't stick around. Kudos to them for that!

https://valvearchive.com/sync

This reminds me just how much they've made and how incredibly high their batting percentage is

I still remember HL2 running great on good settings on my potato laptop when it came out. They put most other game engine/graphics/optimization programmers to shame. Kings

pours one out for Camp Santo and “Valley of the Gods”, devoured by Valve

Is Valley of the Gods really not going to happen? I loved Firewatch and really enjoyed the Campo Santo Quarterly Review [1], but I guess it's been over 4 years since an update and I guess it's in the ground at this point.

[1] https://quarterly.camposanto.com

It’s officially on hold for an indefinite period. The squad moved to other stuff (H-L Alyx I think), and since then no news.

I think I saw that Chris Remo doesn't even work at Valve anymore

Olly Moss and Jane Ng also left a while ago.

Pretty sure Olly Moss is still at Valve

I have always wondered how they are managing all the complexity in Dota. It just is a humongous amount of complexity around all the items and abilities and how they affect each other.

When I saw there is a directory structure, for a second I thought it might be the source code to these games and I thought I can finally take a look at Dota's source.

I would assume they use lots of unit tests, and testable code (which uses a fast and stable interface through which to test).

Automated testing is probably 99% of the coverage.

With the recent Rubick changes (can steal 2 spells) it really seems like the devs are challenging themselves. Not too few game-(breaking|crashing) bugs have been found as a result of some special interactions.

Most likely they have internal tooling to manage all that.

I am strongly guessing they have a fuckton of Excel spreadsheets

Half-Life, and Valve generally, were such a big part of my life in the late 90s and early 2000s. Exploring this definitely brings back a heap of memories.

Not sure if it is new or not, but really glad this history has been preserved.

Half Life 3 confirmed?

https://valvearchive.com/archive/Half-Life/Half-Life%20Alyx/...

Looks like the ending of Half-Life: Alyx :)

https://valvearchive.com/archive/Team%20Fortress/Team%20Fort...

Pretty sure they keep starting and stopped it.

Crushed under the weight of fan hype and expectations I suppose.

Wasn't the semi-official reason that Valve teams can work on whatever they want, and no one really wanted to work on a Half-Life 3?

As a VR owner I am super grateful for Half Life: Alyx and kind of consider that to be the replacement for HL3 anyways..

My understanding is no one wanted to work on it for precisely that reason.

Enjoying this but the navigation in the “file browser” behaves very strangely on mobile. Seems like I have to tap twice to open anything; first tap marks it with a checkbox and second tap actually activates it.

I tried the old appeture science websites on mobile.

I need a mobile web browser that lets me bring up a keyboard on command…

Some of the old screenshots in half-life and counter-strike really brought back some memories! Especially for CS I haven’t seen some of those maps for maybe 20 years but I still remember them!

No Ricochet?

I really need to see their prototypes for Ricochet 2

For reference https://youtu.be/632kyLysP6c

I still, after 23 years, fell an odd loss due to the fact that weapons don’t stay on the map between rounds playing Counter-Strike.

I'd almost forgotten about Artifact.

Everyone has.

Doesn't have the leaked csgo,tf2 source code. Why even bother...

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