Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
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Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
1–10 of 129 posts
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#2I'm not familiar, are they still running "Source 1" or have they moved on? If so, I don't see how this is very relevant beyond mildly interesting because it relates to a game many love and still play.
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#3Wasn't CS:GO developed by Hidden Path?
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#4One of the best, and first, things we did when starting our machine learning platform was to design it using a plugin architecture. There's a lot of scar tissue and horrible experience through our previous ML products we built for enterprise.
Namely, it was extremely hard to onboard new developers to work on the product. They had to understand the whole thing in order to contribute.
Changing something was also hard, since it was intertwined. Adding a feature or removing a feature was hard. Especially given the fact we were not designing to spec, and the domain experts we were building for could not give feedback. That was a constraint outside of our control, so we were building for users we never met based on what we thought would make sense.
The first commits on our own platform were to establish a plugin architecture. There's a core, and there are plugins. We could add or remove functionality changing a config file. Applications are plugins and onboarding is easy and smooth, since a junior developer can start working on one plugin and then expand their knowledge.
We're reaping the rewards of that.
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#5I'm not familiar, are they still running "Source 1" or have they moved on? If so, I don't see how this is very relevant beyond mildly interesting because it relates to a game many love and still play.
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Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#6I'm not familiar, are they still running "Source 1" or have they moved on? If so, I don't see how this is very relevant beyond mildly interesting because it relates to a game many love and still play.
They're on Source 2 now, but not all of their games have been ported to it. A former employee said that Source 2 is pretty much just Source 1 with some extra phsyics bolted on, not a completely new engine.
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#7It seems like code quality was a big factor in the delay of Source 2 and future Valve games as well. At what point do you cut and run from legacy?
The end result is pretty fantastic, but it was expected 5 or 6 years ago.
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#8"Also, if you touched the renderer, even in a simple way, and a team later encountered a rendering bug, you would be blamed and have to fix it. Even if the bug had nothing to do with your change. This taught programmers to not change anything unless absolutely necessary."
I've seen this effect in code that wasn't nearly this bad, and I've even felt this way...
But in the end, I've decided to do it anyhow. The end result was that I became the guy that could fix anything (in other people's minds, anyhow) and my job was actually more secure than if I'd followed the path of least resistance.
Had these devs followed the hard path, too, I think it would have helped get things cleaned up, instead of continuing to pollute everything even worse.
Sometimes developing is hard, and you just can't shy away from the hard parts. It just makes everything else harder.
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#9Doesn't suprise me. I was watching a video where they had devs watch a speedrun for HL:2, and they said that there are a ton of hacky fixes that never got properly fixed. They said that same code is now in HL:Alyx, and that it's funny looking through the code for a modern AAA game and seeing comments like "Quick hack to get demo stable for E3 2005. Add permanent fix after show".
Re: Ex Valve dev on CS:GO’s codebase
#10Wasn't CS:GO developed by Hidden Path?
Initially but has been maintained by Valve for some time now.
Having said that, it's built on Valve's Source Engine, so still faced many of the same issues