Valve confirms work on 'Source 2' engine(computerandvideogames.com)
computerandvideogames.com
Valve confirms work on 'Source 2' engine
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/377934/valve-confirms-work-on-source-2-engine/
7 comments
A company which actively develops software has the ability to snapshot a stable development tree and call it a "New Engine"? Shock horror.
There does come a point where the architectural decisions made in the past no longer make any sense & core rewrite is in order. Valve are a quality company & know to avoid the second system effect. At some point you may as well label what you've written as a 'new system' even if you can trace its development path in an evolutionary fashion from the old to the new.
There does come a point where the architectural decisions made in the past no longer make any sense & core rewrite is in order. Valve are a quality company & know to avoid the second system effect. At some point you may as well label what you've written as a 'new system' even if you can trace its development path in an evolutionary fashion from the old to the new.
I'd argue that Valve was pushing the limits when Source first came out in 2004 - Half Life 2 still looks good today.
At the time, Valve was pushing the limits of older hardware, that's for sure. The engine used to run perfectly on DirectX 7 cards, which were old even then. It was neat to be able to play a great-looking set of games even on older hardware and get good FPS doing so.
To consider engine generations as separate and discrete entities stems from id software. The engines from Wolfestein, Doom, Quake, Q2 and Q3 were written from scratch each time. Once Carmack abandoned C for C++, throwing everything out stopped.
Give even a cursory review of code for those id Software titles to see that they were not rewrites from scratch (http://fabiensanglard.net/ gives a wonderful overview of each.) Even without any revision history from one to the next, the structure of each code base shows a continuity and evolution of thought and design that disproves the theory. As I understand it, towards the end of the development cycle for each game, once the core tech was in solid and in place, John Carmack would branch off to aggressively pursue research and development on next gen graphics and tech, leading to a lot of new and rewritten and expanded code, yes, but still not starting from scratch each time.
Historically speaking, his act of open sourcing those codebases and the chronicle of cutting edge graphics/gaming development that they represent is a significant record of and insight into one of our generations leading minds. His work ethic and dedication is pretty phenomenal, he is a big personal inspiration.
Historically speaking, his act of open sourcing those codebases and the chronicle of cutting edge graphics/gaming development that they represent is a significant record of and insight into one of our generations leading minds. His work ethic and dedication is pretty phenomenal, he is a big personal inspiration.
Anyone who read their new hire guide could come to the conclusion that there's a "new engine" in development at Valve. If you're working on projects in decentralized cabals and employ engine programmers, one of those cabals is probably working on engine tech.
Blizzard is pushing the limits of GPU? Diablo 3 merely requires a DirectX9 GPU.
He was saying that Valve is like Blizzard, in that they don't try to push the GPU
A game engine is more than its ability to push the GPU, and to be blunt this belief is why the video game industry is so stagnant but for a few innovators.
The Source engine in its time was the gold standard for lip synching and emoting. When the unchallenged status quo at the time was flapping mouths Valve implemented full real-time phoneme lip synching as well as dynamic facial expressions - as well as the framework to do so under contextual cues from the game world.
HL2 was heralded in its time for being able to tell stories at a deeper level because of this technology, and there was a great deal of hubbub around it, even in the mainstream press.
Hell, even if we move away from artsy-fartsy things like emoting in gaming, Valve for a long time was the gold standard for their network engine. Following the basic network model as the original Quake engines Valve was able to achieve incredible reliability in client-side prediction and latency management - something most games in HL2's time were unable to do (remember every Battlefield before Battlefield 3?). There's a reason why major competitive multiplayer games grew out of that engine.
So sure, Valve's engine can't render 1000 animated point light sources all at once, nor do they claim to do pixel-perfect real-time shadowing for an entire forest's worth of trees, but to say that Valve's engines aren't a huge step forward in gaming each time they are released is shortsighted.
The Source engine in its time was the gold standard for lip synching and emoting. When the unchallenged status quo at the time was flapping mouths Valve implemented full real-time phoneme lip synching as well as dynamic facial expressions - as well as the framework to do so under contextual cues from the game world.
HL2 was heralded in its time for being able to tell stories at a deeper level because of this technology, and there was a great deal of hubbub around it, even in the mainstream press.
Hell, even if we move away from artsy-fartsy things like emoting in gaming, Valve for a long time was the gold standard for their network engine. Following the basic network model as the original Quake engines Valve was able to achieve incredible reliability in client-side prediction and latency management - something most games in HL2's time were unable to do (remember every Battlefield before Battlefield 3?). There's a reason why major competitive multiplayer games grew out of that engine.
So sure, Valve's engine can't render 1000 animated point light sources all at once, nor do they claim to do pixel-perfect real-time shadowing for an entire forest's worth of trees, but to say that Valve's engines aren't a huge step forward in gaming each time they are released is shortsighted.
If I recall, HL2 was also something of a milestone for gameplay-integrated physics. I spent many hours marvelling at all the stuff you could play with in the "pool room" in the leaked alpha.
Agreed, Valve has been known to go for the things that add the most value to the experience, whatever that may happen to be. Before it was lip syncing and facial expressions, now it may be game economics or building the best PC gaming distribution service. So long as they have stellar artists, having a slightly inferior engine means very little to me as the end consumer.
I nearly cried of joy when I heard they would do an open world Skyrim like Half Life 3. I would have paid $500 on Kickstarter for that.
Better engine? Nice, but the HL2 engine would be good enough for me. HL is about atmosphere and story, not GFX - for me.
Better engine? Nice, but the HL2 engine would be good enough for me. HL is about atmosphere and story, not GFX - for me.
I don't know if they will be able to replicate the sense of danger that was present in Skyrim with another game engine. In Skyrim, when you would open a door to a new place, there was a real fear: is this going to crash my game? My whole computer?
FYI, Fallout 3, New Vegas and Skyrim have mods that will save every 5 minutes, and this helps with the crash on autosave problem. At the very least you'll never lose hours of playing.
The mods use a rotating save system so you end up with 5 minute intervals of the last 3 hours of gameplay.
Checking the size of your save games get let you know if you're going to hit the problem. At some point your saves jump to 5MB then to 10MB and soon you'll start hitting the crashing on autosave bug.
The mods use a rotating save system so you end up with 5 minute intervals of the last 3 hours of gameplay.
Checking the size of your save games get let you know if you're going to hit the problem. At some point your saves jump to 5MB then to 10MB and soon you'll start hitting the crashing on autosave bug.
Other games have physics and life like face animations because of the standard source set.
"We've been working on new engine stuff for a while, we've just been waiting for a game to roll it out with."
Something something Half Life 3 something something something.
Something something Half Life 3 something something something.
Valve was working on the Half-Life 2 engine as soon as the original was released.
"The Counter-Strike developer has previously bragged its engine is "considered the most flexible, comprehensive". I hope it was a reference to the new engine and not the existing one which is fairly painful to work with. Hello map compilation which takes hours.
"The Counter-Strike developer has previously bragged its engine is "considered the most flexible, comprehensive". I hope it was a reference to the new engine and not the existing one which is fairly painful to work with. Hello map compilation which takes hours.
The current source engine is what they were talking about. It was designed to be module to allow for upgrades to the system, for example, since HL2 was release it's gained some major upgrades such as HDR, Soft particles, hardware accelerated facial animations, multi-core support, xbox360, ps3 and osx support (and currently in the process of adding linux support.) All that with very few and minor backward compatibility breaking instances.
Switch your lightmaps to lower quality (or off) while you're working and building the map, flip them to higher quality right before you release.
It's the lightmaps that take the longest to compile.
It's the lightmaps that take the longest to compile.
Say what you want about 4chan, this is adorable.
So Source 2 Vs Unreal 4 Vs CryEngine 4 And hopefully some MEGA Super Texture All artwork ID Engine 6.
Or more realistically, Unreal 4 vs. CryEngine 4. Source was not widely licensed, and interest in idTech seems to be low - there are currently no high-profile licensees that we know about.
Though now that Bethesda owns id, maybe there will be more "licensing" of the engine. It certainly is a very impressive piece of tech.
Though now that Bethesda owns id, maybe there will be more "licensing" of the engine. It certainly is a very impressive piece of tech.
Bethesda killed their licensing, it's in-house only now.
Episode 3?
Fans of these games blatantly don't know what an engine is; the difference between a graphics library and a suite of tools and code to create a game.
Perhaps they are excited because the Valve developer wiki and Source Filmmaker have been teasing newer versions of the tools like Hammer, built with Qt.
Valve have never been one for pushing the limits of GPU's, like Blizzard, so they don't limit their audience. id tech, unreal, and crydev are the ones showing off what they can do with OpenGL/DirectX, not Valve.