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Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

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Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#71
post #39

The 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…

Panda 3D is another free and open source game engine. It has been used in commercial games by Disney and others. http://www.panda3d.org/

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#72

Unreal, 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…

I doubt that raytracing is going to ever jump the gap from 'next gen' to 'actually used'. As others have commented, it's been the mooted 'next big thing' for decades. The problem is that raytracing doesn't bring any great improvements to graphics. Even the Brigade engine demo that you link looks worse than the current engines.

(Although, bonus points to Brigade for not featuring a mirrored sphere in their demo. Every other raytracing demo that I have ever seen adds these in, as if what we've all been missing from our 3d is mirrored spheres! It's a sure sign of desperation and lack of imagination when raytracers resort to those :)

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#75
post #56
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They sold the company, and now Carmack at Oculus. It makes sense that the values of the company have changed.

"...the values of the company have changed..." - a polite way of saying "the founders sold out".

In this case it's more a polite way of saying "the founders got forced out" - or more bluntly: the idiots in charge managed to get rid of id's greatest asset.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#76

Earlier 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…

I doubt that raytracing is going to ever jump the gap from 'next gen' to 'actually used'. As others have commented, it's been the mooted 'next big thing' for decades. The problem is that raytracing doesn't bring any great improvements to graphics. Even the Brigade engine demo that you link looks worse than the current engines. (Although, bonus points to Brigade for not featuring a mirrored sphere in their demo. Every…

The demo looks like the world is amazingly detailed, but like you have crappy eyes.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#77

Earlier 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…

I doubt that raytracing is going to ever jump the gap from 'next gen' to 'actually used'. As others have commented, it's been the mooted 'next big thing' for decades. The problem is that raytracing doesn't bring any great improvements to graphics. Even the Brigade engine demo that you link looks worse than the current engines. (Although, bonus points to Brigade for not featuring a mirrored sphere in their demo. Every…

It will when the resources used to emulate proper lighting gets close to the resources required by a ray tracer. That will happen if we continue to improve graphics.

Maybe we'll stop improving graphics sometime pretty soon and focus on physics, or maybe the game engine vendors will focus on licensing out assets to make game development cheaper instead of the current graphics race. But as long as the best use of GPU power we can come up with is graphics, we will eventually arrive at ray tracing.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#78

Unreal, 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…

> 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.

That doesn't seem to be the case. It seems that UE4 was a pretty major rewrite, and major development is ongoing: https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap . Source 2 looks to have been a big effort for Valve too.

Re: Valve Announces Source 2, and It’ll Be Free

#80
post #13

Based on the context of the "free for content developers," it sounds to me like they mean it will be free for people developing add-on content for existing games, not that it will be free for people making their own games.

Nah, that wouldn't be noteworthy. Valve has always allowed use of GoldSrc and Source for modding at no cost, it's pretty much their thing.
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