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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

I wish Valve would take a cue from id and release the source code to Source and/or at least GoldSrc under an open license. Though I have a hard time imagining them opening up code to more lucrative games like Team Fortress Classic or Counter-Strike classic. Nice dream though...

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Source uses licenced middleware such as Havok so SDKs are likely all we're going to get officially. Source 2 might be a different story if HL3 releases one day since Valve replaced audio and physics with in-house technologies.

That’s kind of the goal of S&Box, no?

https://sbox.game

I thought the point of s&box was to make a very profitable micro transaction marketplace.

Is literally invoking the havok api protected by licensing?

Yep, IIRC Havok’s licensing explicitly disallows redistribution of their technology, including headers and pre-compiled binaries.

Source 1 is a good example here, where licensees of source need to also obtain a havok license before Valve can give them any code.

Surely this works against Havoc's best interest, right? Unless their actual value is simply decent api design....

Old-ish Source has a pretty generous license, no? https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/master... GoldSrc is there somewhere as well. I’m definitely grateful for it. I’ve read some of it myself and watched a bunch of Youtube about it.

That repository is not the engine, it's just the code for the client.dll/server.dll binaries that contain game-specific logic and some other tools.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife on the other hand is the full Half-Life (GoldSrc) engine, but it's not quite an open license.

I'm pretty sure this is just the mod SDK as well.

That is just the SDK, but there is an unofficial open source implementation of goldsrc.

https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs

Also based on leaks/reverse-engineering.

I always thought it'd be hilarious if they released an engine called "open source" (or, someone made a source replacement called that)

Why should Valve give up their leverage. They actively pick and choose who they license the engine to.

Realistically there isn't really any commercial value left in it though. While there were some notable unique games made with it (Titanfall 1 & 2, E.Y.E, The Stanley Parable, etc), these were made over a decade ago and the majority of games made with it are reworks/mods/adaptations of Half-Life related material.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/List_of_third-party...

> there isn't really any commercial value left in it though

I wonder why it never went mainstream. The Unreal engine went on to power a massive number of games. The Half-Life engines birthed a lot of mods, but wasn't used by many full games.

Unreal won because they invested in a whole ecosystem of tools to build interactive media and the community to support it. Only unity really compares (and I'm not sure how true even that is these days).

The Source engine isn't a blank slate engine like Unity. It's more like having unlimited power and permission to mod HL2. They just give you the HL2 code and say go nuts.

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