Valve confirms work on 'Source 2' engine
computerandvideogames.com
computerandvideogames.com
Fans of these games blatantly don't know what an engine is; the difference between a graphics library and a suite of tools and code to create a game.
Perhaps they are excited because the Valve developer wiki and Source Filmmaker have been teasing newer versions of the tools like Hammer, built with Qt.
Valve have never been one for pushing the limits of GPU's, like Blizzard, so they don't limit their audience. id tech, unreal, and crydev are the ones showing off what they can do with OpenGL/DirectX, not Valve.
There does come a point where the architectural decisions made in the past no longer make any sense & core rewrite is in order. Valve are a quality company & know to avoid the second system effect. At some point you may as well label what you've written as a 'new system' even if you can trace its development path in an evolutionary fashion from the old to the new.
The Source engine in its time was the gold standard for lip synching and emoting. When the unchallenged status quo at the time was flapping mouths Valve implemented full real-time phoneme lip synching as well as dynamic facial expressions - as well as the framework to do so under contextual cues from the game world.
HL2 was heralded in its time for being able to tell stories at a deeper level because of this technology, and there was a great deal of hubbub around it, even in the mainstream press.
Hell, even if we move away from artsy-fartsy things like emoting in gaming, Valve for a long time was the gold standard for their network engine. Following the basic network model as the original Quake engines Valve was able to achieve incredible reliability in client-side prediction and latency management - something most games in HL2's time were unable to do (remember every Battlefield before Battlefield 3?). There's a reason why major competitive multiplayer games grew out of that engine.
So sure, Valve's engine can't render 1000 animated point light sources all at once, nor do they claim to do pixel-perfect real-time shadowing for an entire forest's worth of trees, but to say that Valve's engines aren't a huge step forward in gaming each time they are released is shortsighted.
Historically speaking, his act of open sourcing those codebases and the chronicle of cutting edge graphics/gaming development that they represent is a significant record of and insight into one of our generations leading minds. His work ethic and dedication is pretty phenomenal, he is a big personal inspiration.
Better engine? Nice, but the HL2 engine would be good enough for me. HL is about atmosphere and story, not GFX - for me.
The mods use a rotating save system so you end up with 5 minute intervals of the last 3 hours of gameplay.
Checking the size of your save games get let you know if you're going to hit the problem. At some point your saves jump to 5MB then to 10MB and soon you'll start hitting the crashing on autosave bug.
Something something Half Life 3 something something something.
"The Counter-Strike developer has previously bragged its engine is "considered the most flexible, comprehensive". I hope it was a reference to the new engine and not the existing one which is fairly painful to work with. Hello map compilation which takes hours.
It's the lightmaps that take the longest to compile.
Though now that Bethesda owns id, maybe there will be more "licensing" of the engine. It certainly is a very impressive piece of tech.