Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code

Id were using a 3rd party sound library for Doom to handle the nitty-gritty aspects of DOS sound hardware, so the open source release was based on the linux port of Doom. People had to port it back to DOS.

They couldn't release the windows port of Doom either, as that had been done by Microsoft, and would therefore include Microsoft copyrighted code.

With Quake, Id did their own windows port, so it was possible to release the source code for winquake.

Even the original Doom source code release was the Linux source code because the Dos version of the game uses a 3rd party audio library, DMX.

I recall Ton Roosendaal saying something similar about the origins of Blender: convincing his then-employers to let him open source the original abandoned engine was a huge hassle, but the lack of third party code blocking it helped a lot.

If a team had access to some licensed source code related the third party component (e.g. restrictively licensed/NDA'd sample code), clearing the engine source for release may involve a thorough code audit. Who is going to put in that work to prepare a freebie?

> non-trivial amount of third party code, including console stuff which is under strict NDA

This just seems like a lazy excuse. Ok so some of the code can’t be released. Fine, what stops you from open sourcing the rest of it that isn’t licensed? The OS community will surely fill in The blanks.

Source does, although within the last year they replaced Miles for MP3 and Rad Games Tools for Bink with tinymp3 and free WebM library.

Probably other stuff there but not sure off the top of my head.

Not just that, they had specific renderer backends, one for GeForce, one for GeForce3, one for Radeon 8500 that they had to cut out as they used proprietary information or code perhaps.

> I think the only thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.

I remember that being somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 LOC to fix, and exactly where to change it was “common knowledge” the moment the source came out

>Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed alternatives

Do you have a link for this? I know the sound system is theirs as they open sourced it.[0] What about physics?

Also, I agree that they should open source Source 2 if possible. They gain almost nothing by having it closed source and gain a lot by giving developers a better deal than Unreal because more money saved on the engine means either cheaper or better/long games. (At least assuming both engines are equivalent which they are not, but in theory.) Meanwhile Epic is using Unreal as a carrot for developers to release their games in Epic Store.[1]

[0] https://valvesoftware.github.io/steam-audio/

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/1/24258723/epic-games-store...

Havok also strikes me as a rather difficult piece to replace. A physics engine will often have hardcoded handling of special cases, and things can be sensitive to lots of numerical details.

Haven't played TF2 but at least HL2 relies heavily on physics for gameplay, so while replacing the rendering engine might lead to rendering artifacts which can be annoying but tolerable in many cases, replacing the physics engine will probably lead to game-breaking issues.

One could reverse engineer it, but then you're into copyright territory...

You are right. But I wonder how much of Havok is there, given that Valve had its own thing: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VPhysics

surely the engine links to rather than contains proprietary third-party code. professional software developers wouldn't just copy-paste from another codebase into their project, right? that would be insane.

Supposedly there's a texture of a coconut included in source games, along with either a filename or tagged with a comment to say that if it's removed then the game will break and noone knows why.

Are you implying Valve has a repoutation for high quality code? Because I don't think user of Steam or their games shares that view.

They've given out Source 2 to others AFAIK.

Is sbox closed source ?

UE makes their engine source available even if it’s not under a permissive license.

The guy is saying Godot is comparable to a game engine with hundreds of millions of dollars of product development. I wouldn’t be worrying about what other people might say.

Yes, open-source GoldSource would be wonderful.

I steer clear of Xash3D because of it's legal grey area too.

There's quite a lot of information given out on engine programming and 'tricks' at GDC every year. Some great talks by Unreal, Bungie, Guerrilla Games, etc...

Isn't UE4/5 fully source available?

Close, but it's a little different. When they were making Half-Life their code was in a 'Src' directory. Around the time HL1 released they forked the code into a `GoldSrc` directory so that they could start moving ahead with other projects in Src. Internally they used "source" and "gold source" to refer to the HL2 vs HL1 engines, and it stuck.

The story goes that the name comes from their version control system. When they licensed the Quake engine (the original one, not Quake 2) they started a repository imaginatively called "src" to iterate on it. As Half Life 1 approached completion that was forked into a stable branch called "goldsrc", which became a semi-official nickname for the HL1 engine, while more experimental work continued on the original "src" branch which eventually grew into... Source.

They do, but "LAN" has become a bit of a misnomer since few games actually have real LAN play options anymore. If you're playing modern titles then you end up with a bunch of PCs or consoles in the same room all connecting to a remote server over the internet. Internet connections are a lot better than they were back in the day at least.

A fun weekend playing mostly older games once or twice a year.

We do, sprinkled throughout the year. Or sessions see ~20-24 people and last about 14 hours.

"games" here being mods and indie games. I doubt Valve is making much if anything in engine licensing fees from these.

>I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be used to justify having Source2 open as well.on

I'm not fully up to date but I'm under the impression that Source 2 is currently used by their modern games. I don't think that's the case for Source 1. The same logic wouldn't apply.

>After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all?

Pretty much what you said. It's all down to cost-benefit at the end of the day and of they think there's more cost (perceived or otherwise) to releasing source 2 code they won't bother.

b) can get dicey, depending on how hard the 3rd party in question wants to defend their copyrights. Google v. Oracle was resolved on the basis of being transformative, not on the basis of class and function declarations being too insignificant to copyright. So if you can't even keep the 3rd-party headers, you're left with a bunch of function calls that you have to piece together the meaning of.

Wow! They’re making landing pages like the old TF2 updates and even making shorts. This is obsessive. I love it. Also, check out how big the team is. Holy crud.

They don’t have Valve’s humor but… who does.

Double digits, in binary, at least

Ok, well, the more the reason!

thats more than double digits if you counting the hands at the keyboard

The janitor did the best work they could... it was just too much for any one human.

It's a line from Portal. In the final fight, GLaDOS says it in a panicked, glitchy voice while being dismantled.

probably a reference to Scout or something

As much as I'd like to give Microsoft credit for this, I don't think they deserve it. There's multiple historical writeups documenting how management had written off Windows as a gaming platform and did not support the original DirectX project. If it weren't for the tenacity of the original three DirectX engineers who basically did this as a passionate side project the gaming landscape would look a lot different. Microsoft got this monopoly somewhat in spite of itself.

Exactly. DirectX is what, 25-30 years old?

Isn't the Game Porting Toolkit still under that weird license where developers are only allowed to use the DirectX translation layer for "evaluation purposes"? End-users can use it to run Windows games if they want, but AFAICT developers are categorically not allowed to build their own ports around it, they still have to port their game over to Metal the hard way.

Given developers' experiences with Apple Arcade[1] I'm not holding my breath. Either Apple just doesn't really care about gaming, or they're culturally unable to provide an environment that would attract game developers. No amount of game porting toolkits will help with this. iPhone still gets plenty of (mobile) games simply because the potential audience is too big to ignore. The Mac doesn't have this luxury.

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/01/apple-arcade-frustratio...

It's not going to happen. No one feels that way in the industry.

Are you estimating based on hardware capability? Probably - but even if devs put the work in to port their games to Mac they will all slowly drop out of compatibility. Many games stop being updated after a while and you can't expect everyone to put effort into maintaining compatibility with newer versions of macOS. There are so many games in my Steam library that can't be played on Mac anymore because they were built for 32-bit x86. Eventually Apple will nuke Rosetta and you'll further lose access to even more games.

Not "likewise". MoltenVK is a compatibility shim that wraps Vulkan to Metal, not a true hardware interface. This has impacts on performance and compatibility, some features straight up don't work because Metal doesn't provide an equivalent. Given the apparent legal entanglements between Kronos Group and Apple re: Vulkan, it seems unlikely that true Vulkan support on Apple hardware will ever happen outside of Linux.

Valve didn't bother with Metal because Apple are hostile to their business model, they've given up dedicating serious rescources to the platform and at this point Steam only exists on MacOS out of inertia.

>Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes.

I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex, while people do demonstrate what gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can potentially be disasterous.

That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame on your own biological body and treating parts of it as taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a complicated thing.

30% may be a lot but you get more than a store page;

- anticheat

- voice chat, friend list, ...

- matchmaking

- marketplace for mods, maps, skins, ...

- clips and videos

- forums/ discussion board

- cloud saves

- rankings

An indie would have to implement and host those by itself or rely on third party services.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/

In a sense it's worse than that - when the mega-publishers started leaving Steam in favor of their own stores with better margins, Valve conceded by introducing a tiered system where their cut drops to 25% after $10M in sales and again to 20% after $50M in sales. It's deliberately structured to give a discount to the mega-corps which least need it (EA, Ubisoft, etc) while ensuring that indies with no leverage over Valve mostly remain on the 30% bracket.

Even more ironically those indies typically use negligible amounts of Steams infrastructure, while the AAA games which enjoy the 20% revenue share are the ones regularly pushing 200GB downloads though Steams servers.

At least they're funding a lot of useful open source development with that money pile.

It's okay, if you're a AAA company with something like like 25-50m in sales, y9u get a tax cut to 20%

When you put it that way, the model makes so much more sense to matching how the US operates.

Ye it was unfortunate. I remember at the time I thought it was silly but innocent. I don't think I even knew you could buy loot boxes for money.

> Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it?

Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results in a couple of downstream effects:

1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items have been sold for >$1m [0]).

2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate for money in casinos, or for sports betting.

3. This can even lead to money laundering [1].

As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt to do identity validation.

Some video resources that might be useful:

- Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y

- People Make Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g

[0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o...

[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50262447

You throw a $8-$15 into the case slot machine (by buying a key), it usually gives you a crap prize, sometimes its a decent prize, and once every 100 000 - 1 000 000 times you get something great.

You can wrangle that with words in any way you want, its gambling. Same for Team Fortress 2 and stuff like hats.

I think a few replies have missed a key issue: Valve's CS monetization is the worst in the industry.

Most current monetization for cosmetics allows you to both (1) grind for items without paying anything and (2) if you want to pay, show you exactly what you are paying for.

Even games that still use lootboxes (i.e. don't follow #2) allow you to grind for items.

CS is one of the very few (or only current) game where you can't get a cosmetic without paying (must purchase keys to open lootboxes) and you don't know what you are getting (lootboxes).

It's bad and there is no excuse.

The trading mechanic, which adds a real world value to these cosmetics, and encourages players to pay for lootboxes makes it worse.

People sometimes hate on popular games like Fortnite and COD, but they have way better/more fair monetization practices.

And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on the gambling it will impact their bottom line.

As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team.

Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.

Yeah the 30% cut is insane, and its surprising to me that game publishers tolerate it under steam. But if you look at the PC games market, you can clearly be successful doing the "self publish" route like Minecraft did.

I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item trading and such convenience features. And I say this as someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.

Well, no, Steam provides a bunch of services to gamedevs that might be tied to an account, like matchmaking or mod support. But if the games don't use that they're not encumbered. I've got a bunch of hours in KSP that aren't on my account because I launched the exe through the CKAN mod manager rather than Steam

Is VR a big market? I used a few of the early devices and was impressed but not moved to invest in it (before Alyx was announced I had regular access to a private Vive setup in a dedicated room.) Two friends bought Oculus but lost interest after a while. They haven't touched them in over a year and one friend has kids who don't care about it at all. Gamer people I know either don't care about it or like me think it's cool but not compelled to invest in. They lack compelling titles. For me to play Alyx, I'd have to invest hundreds of dollars on hardware in addition to buying the game. I can play hl2 right now on my existing PC.

Maybe I'm not enough of a hardcore gamer to like DOTA or MOBA style games. I loved TF2 but you can only play for so long.

I would like to see Valve come up with some fresh new imaginative IP that isn't something decades old. Half life was a ground breaking game and to this day I will fire it up and play through about once a year after I get the urge. On a rail was my favorite part. I feel dread when I get to Zen because I know the end of the game is near.

Other than being developed by the same guy, IceFrog, that originally developed (the final versions of) DotA. That's been the community "common knowledge" for a good while at least, I don't know if it was ever officially confirmed.

Thanks. Yes, I mixed up the acronyms.

TF2 definitely looks amazing, but it very much does not perform amazing - at least, not anymore.

Source really wasn't built for the amount of particles present in the cosmetics (especially the "Unusuals")

I assumed this is what they are trying to do with Deadlock [0]?

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/1422450/Deadlock/