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Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
41–50 of 138 posts
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#42Unreal, Unity and now Source within just a few days from each other... It looks like the game engine market is commoditizing rapidly.
And Autodesk! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9141095
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#43Unreal, Unity and now Source within just a few days from each other... It looks like the game engine market is commoditizing rapidly.
I have a (possibly crazy) theory: Companies like Valve and Epic have already amortized the cost of development of their engines - those are codebases that span 16 years, and both companies had multiple commercial successes. All it took was Unity to give a little nudge. Now, IMO, the reason for giving so much for free is to keep a player out (Unity) and milk the cow one last time with the eventual royalties. I think i…
Real Time Ray tracing is still very far off. Brigade serves as a good proof of concept, but a lot of things are yet to be researched and implemented to make it viable in commercial sphere. Seeing the progress, I do not think commercial real time ray traced game will be a reality any time soon in this decade.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#44The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history. First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine. HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has als…
I'd go much further back. The idea of turning the game engines and tooling into a commodity dates at least as far back as the early 80's, and I'd expect it dates back to before that too.
The first game creation tools I used, were:
The Quill, 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Quill
The Games Creator, 1984: http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/gam...
Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit, 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoot-%27Em-Up_Construction_Ki...
At least SEUCK has been used to make commercial (indie) games, and I think The Quill has too.
While not free, these were cheap. Cheap enough that kids were getting them.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#45How does Source and Steam fit together? Would it make sense to lower a potential fee for Steam exclusive games built on Source? Would it be "risky" trusting the same company with both the game engine and distribution? It's really great seeing Source 2, Unreal Engine and Unity lowering the bar for game developers to deliver their products.
How does Source and Steam fit together? Source is an engine, Steam is a distribution platform. I think the only truly significant interplay is: - Source games will probably behave well with the Steam Overlay and probably work in Big Picture Mode with controllers - Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element, so you only have to download the Source engine once even if you have many games that use that…
> Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element
I don't think that's correct, all Source1 games include their own copy of the engine and aren't automatically updated to newer versions etc. (Valve does update them though). The engine download is only for mods and some 3rd-party games.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#46Half-Life 3 confirmed?
Well, when they announced a press release for 3/3 at 3 PM, I was certain it would be about Half-Life 3.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#47The article attributes all these free engines to Unity but I think they've missed 20+ years of videogame history. First, Valve has always been very open to game mods. Some of their most popular franchises (TF & CS) grew out of the mod community around HL1 and they've always made tooling available for the Source engine. HL1 was based on the Quake engine and id has always embraced the mod community. Id software has als…
Additionally the Python tooling in Civilization.
And the Sony Yaroze (Playstation 1) and PS2Linux (Playstation 2). The PS3 doesn't count as it was a crippled version when compared to the hardware access level offered by Yaroze and PS2Linux.
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does Source and Steam fit together? Source is an engine, Steam is a distribution platform. I think the only truly significant interplay is: - Source games will probably behave well with the Steam Overlay and probably work in Big Picture Mode with controllers - Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element, so you only have to download the Source engine once even if you have many games that use that…
> Steam recognizes the Source libraries as a distinct element I don't think that's correct, all Source1 games include their own copy of the engine and aren't automatically updated to newer versions etc. (Valve does update them though). The engine download is only for mods and some 3rd-party games.
What do you call Source1 games? I'm pretty sure I had a common source download for CS:S, DoD:S and HL:DM
Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a (possibly crazy) theory: Companies like Valve and Epic have already amortized the cost of development of their engines - those are codebases that span 16 years, and both companies had multiple commercial successes. All it took was Unity to give a little nudge. Now, IMO, the reason for giving so much for free is to keep a player out (Unity) and milk the cow one last time with the eventual royalties. I think i…
Real Time Ray tracing is still very far off. Brigade serves as a good proof of concept, but a lot of things are yet to be researched and implemented to make it viable in commercial sphere. Seeing the progress, I do not think commercial real time ray traced game will be a reality any time soon in this decade.
It's been "next gen" for decades. It's just a terribly inefficient brute-force approach to lighting a scene. I don't think it'll ever be viable for real-time graphics.