Valve's Source Engine 2 is free too

Remember what I said when UE4 was released? I said they hurry to be on the market before Source 2. Look what happened:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...or_free_in_bid_to_compete_with_Epic_Unity.php

 

I hope this means we finally get HL3...

 

I love Valve, but what is the versatility like? Source is a great engine for its specific use, but what are the major releases using it? HL2, Left 4 Dead series, Portal series, tons of mods etc. Not saying it's useless as a versatile engine, and this is the 2nd iteration, but it's definitely unproven in games that aren't FPS.

 

More importantly, when will it be available?

 

I don't care about Half Life. I want Left for Dead 3!

Regarding Source. Definitely interesting. Let's see what they bring to the table.

 

My biggest concern about Source2 is its scripting language. I'm a C# developer and have been for close to 15 years now, since the language came out. I'm conversant in C++ but I'm far less productive with it. I'd even say most people are less productive in C++ but that's a "religious" discussion for another forum. One thing that I love about Unity is its use of Mono & C# for scripting. It's very familiar and doesn't require me to shift my brain when going from concept to code.

Another concern I have is the tooling. Valve has been very good with capabilities but not very good on ease of development. The best person to judge that comparison in my opinion is Garry Newman, author of Garry's Mod and Rust, the former under Source and the latter under Unity, now Unity 5. He frequently talks about how different things are now to then.

I love Valve but I think they've lost their way. They started as a game company and the last thing they've done is DOTA 2, before that CS:GO, and 8 years since HL2E2, a incomplete series of games. The last few years they've been hyperfocused on platorm stuff such as Big Picture, Steam Controller, etc. Even today, the only software announced from this so-called software company is a gaming engine for which no game has been announced.

I realize this is a lot of conjecture, but I think Valve is not the same company they were just 10 years ago, and not for the better.

What about HL2 Ep 3? That's been 8 years coming. I'm beginning to wonder if Duke Nukem will have a cameo if it's ever released.

 

Of course they aren't the same company, they got 120+million people(with billions invested) looking at them to continue growing the steam platform.

 

Maintaining the list of non-free game engines must be easier than listing all the free ones by now

 

I am waiting for Cry Engine's turn.

 

Is that still relevant to people?

 

Well at least they would try

 

Yes, they can be the last one to respond yet again!

 

I think Cry needs to fix their mess of a user interface above all else. Things like global illumination and a physically based renderer is a given by now.

Also, I'm skeptical about what Source 2 being "Free" means. Or as they put it, "free to content developers", which sounds like a long winded way of saying "modders", which they said a whole lot about and not a lot about indy developers. So...

Yay! Half-Life 3!

 

Dota 2 isn't a fps and is one of the most popular games at the moment.

 

10+ years of goldSource and Source modding exp here ... I'd definitely try out Source2 but I'm way too far with my Unity project to invest serious time into other engines.
Too bad though.. but the general idea of more competition does sound good for the market.

 

Source 2 seems to have nicer Hammer and that is plus in itself (just try out DOTA2's mod tools). As for scripting, it's more of C-esque language rather than actual C/C++ (unless you dabble in engine's code).

 

News sites are using the term "content developer". This may simply imply modding tools or it may be a license very similar to Crytek's.

 

Doesn't matter anyway. With Valve's incredible speed of development, I wouldn't expect it before 2025.

 

Did anyone else catch that the presentation is March 3rd at 3?
Oh, Valve...

 

I was pessimistic about HL3, but that increases my hopes a little.

Edit: Ah Sh#t, we have March 4th already... So no HL3? Otherwise it would be all over the internet already :-(
Edit2: it was a internet rumour, there was no valve conference 3/3 at 3

 

It will be interesting to see what people do when Value and Steam prioritize "Source 2" developed games for publishing over "other" engine created games...

just a thought...

 

I assume if you try to release on Steam it is ok. If they don't want you on Steam they cannot say you did not comply.

 

It's the best option if you want to make a shark survival game in under 5 minutes.

I'm surprised leadwerks never made a move. They were one of the only stable & support editors for Linux for a while.

 

Unlikely. Valve takes 30% off the top for every game launched on Steam, no matter what engine it was made with. They aren't likely to discriminate based on the tech in play. It's all money in their pocket at the end of the day.

The one situation where I could see this happening is simply in the testing process. It is quite likely that Source 2 will be fully optimized to work hand-in-hand with Steam. So developers using Source 2 will probably have a much easier time getting their game Steam-compatible. This might make the testing and certification process smoother and faster for Source 2 developers. But that would likely be a technical issue, and less a matter of Valve favoring one game over another.

 

There's also stingray, formerly bitsquid I guess, shiva 2 (which i think will wont come out) that may be irrelevant, but, well, people still use it.

 

If I'm not mistaken they're a fairly small company. It is likely too risky for them.

 

D'awww

haha. Oh well, I think godot is being worked on more than leadwerks is now anyway, and they're really trying to make it, as they described, 'open source unity'. If UT made the same move UE did, then I think Godot would just implode. Also... If we called Unity the Unity Engine, could Unreal and Unity share the same UE acronym?

 

Is it mean if I state that it will attract all of the single digit open source developers?

Open source will likely keep Godot alive to some degree, but I do feel that UT's decision with pricing the low tier edition is going to be the death of at least one game engine.

 

Yes

Maybe Godot will sit between Unity and Unreal. It's open source with C++ options like Unreal, but it's easier to use and light on system requirements like Unity. They've also got that interesting "everything is a scene" thing going for them. You never know how the future will turn out, Godot could end up on top if their scene architecture proves to be the most efficient model for game engines.

It's gotta be, the way they encourage the use of what is the unity equivalent of calling all of your functions with broadcasting messages between objects lol!

 

Not sure if this will happen. Being fully open-source, it is likely that Godot will never get the kind of support that a company-backed engine gets.

I don't type this to criticize, I'm actually rather fond of Godot. And personally, I hope it sticks around for a good long time and gets a sizable community behind it. I just feel that it is probably going to be more along the lines of Blender, a project with a volunteer community for support as opposed to a major company.

I just checked back in on the latest Godot, and it looks like they've released an improved Blender exporter with proper support for shape keys. I will have to give it another try to see if I can get my shape-key models into Godot. It was a major sticking point for me the last time I gave the engine a spin.

 

While I like Godot's concepts, it has a terrible scripting language. It's a real... snake pit.

 

Do you mean to say... a Python pit? haha

@RichardKain I'm ok with Godot becoming the Blender of game engines... despite blender itself being a game engine lol. Who knows, maybe blender and godot can merge and become... something. BlendGo. GoBlend. Goder. Blendot.

 

Interestingly enough, I thought for sure Torque would be completely dead at this point, and yet both garagegames and Torque still exist (it's open sourced now).

Blender's BGE seems to have changed focus, to more of a system for scriptable logic within blender itself (see this roadmap post from 2013: http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/06/blender-roadmap-2-7-2-8-and-beyond/ and their 2015 projects page: http://www.blender.org/press/18-anticipated-blender-development-projects-of-2015/).

 

Remember though that Blender's alternatives typically cost ~$3,500 whereas Godot's alternatives are free. I do think the situation will be somewhat similar except without those who would have contributed or used the project solely because they couldn't afford the alternatives.

There are some developers still holding on to Torque because they're familiar with it or maintaining existing projects.

 

True, and that is a lot of competition. That level of resistance is going to make it even harder for Godot to establish itself in the current environment. I do still think it has a chance. It was wise of the Godot developers to make it open-source from the get-go. And there is one feature that Godot provides that most of the commercially-backed engines don't. A Linux-native editor. For those who insist on doing their development in a Linux environment, Godot is a very attractive alternative. It's not a very large crowd, to be sure. But it is a passionate crowd, and Godot is catering to them.

 

@RichardKain any thoughts on the scene architecture Godot has?

 

It just mean there will be "Valve's Source Engine 2 ep 1"

 

It's pretty nifty, and an interesting approach to organizing a project. It basically turns absolutely everything into a structured hierarchy, and makes it easier to break down complicated projects into tiny bits. This is a very programmer-mentality way of handling things, but it is often one of the better approaches when dealing with projects as complicated as a full game. It also lends itself fairly well to multi-user projects.

Getting a little bit back on topic, I am very interested to see how Source 2 is going to be structured. They are apparently throwing out a lot of the legacy systems that tied Source 1 down to older/licensed tech. A big part of Source 2 is going to be stripping out all of the external dependencies, so that Valve can release it to be free-to-use without having to pay out licenses to third parties. This is going to seriously effect the original engine, so what we will likely be getting is going to be a considerably different beast from the original Source.

 

Competition is a beautiful thing.