Boff
03-13-2010, 03:24 PM
It feels like some days, there are only a handfull who champion the source engine, and with the new pictures of Portal2 floating around, it looks like valve have really put time and effort into eye candy and the rendering on the 2010 build of the engine.
But I consider Source, and I'm sure valve consider it, a success.
And this is a little For Your Information, for those who was not with, or just plainly forgotten the concept of Source.
Source : A Strategy and A concept
This is why I think source is a success, because you have to remember how and why the source engine EXISTS.
Valve created the source engine, to make HL2, but also to address and issue it had noticed that plagued the gaming industry.
Much in the same way they had problems with patching GldSRC engine for HL1/CS/TFC->TFC1.5 they envisioned STEAM, where they could distribute Patches, and act as DRM, and it not very popular from the begining, I think we can agree that steam as a strategy for valve, has been a success.
And thusly we come back to Source being a success, as it too was a strategy.
Not only did valve have to build and then patch for the old engine, but they had to develop the next generation engine and hit all the technical milemarks at the release.
And then after that, they had to build the 3rd engine, whilst patching engine number 2, for expansions and what not.
But valve opted NOT to do this traditional engine building.
SOURCE - a Brand name
Source got it's own funky logo, and it was going to take on multiple-personality syndromes with the following concepts, the brand-name would tie it all together so everything would be OKAY, or so valve very simarily thought about about the naming convention of the episodes......
CONCEPT 1a
What IF Valve created an engine, and ALL the games built on that engine would run on the same engine,
so a patch would only have be run out "once" to fix the engine via steam.
CONCEPT 2
IF the engine was built in a modular fashion, and theoretically, the modules would be replaced in time, so the OLD renderer get replaced with a more modern renderer that addresses the hardware at that future. The network code could be replaced, the sound system etc etc, until all the modules have been replaced, and suddenly you have a iterated into a NEW engine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk24RdfXWcg
(oddly enough people still have problems with this concept, and still compare The source engine that powers HL2(2004/5) with games from 2009)
CONCEPT 1b Idealism - concept 1 revisited
Now that the all the source engine games used the same engine and would always be patched then thusly all the engine would always be upgraded, and of cousrse then all your source engine based games would be STATE OF THE ART since they ran of the same build of the engine.
You would also avoid the unpleasant scenario's of these shoe-horning in concepts into a engine that can not or barely can handle them.
If anyone remembers the APC's and other vehicle experiments in the original CounterStrike, as well as the map overlays and gui-systems that eventualy slipped into TFC 1.5.
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
As of 2005 concept 1b failed with The lost Coast.
As valve iterated toward the first major milestone of change, HDR, and then upgraded the Source Engine to the very next version, suddenly Half life 2 broke when it went from SOURCE 2004 to SOURCE 2005.
http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-10-05
Frame-rates dropped, things stoped working for some, stuttering came back. It was just a temporary glitch, but in essence it proved source failed in it's idealism that if you bought a game to work on a current gen system, you couldn't upgrade the games minium requirements past that current gen system.
Hell even the "streamlined" version of the engine from the xbox version was a problem for some.
i.e. the upgrades would in theory made HL2 stop working for those who purchased it in good faith.
Not to mention 3rd Party developers also had problems as they would branch off a certain build of the engine to develop their own engine. Sin Episode 1 is still on the 2004 Source engine where as HL2 is on the 2005 engine. Dark Messiah as well as Xeno clash sit on their own offshoots unable to be updated by the generic source upgrades I believe (oh and how dark messiah would greatly blossom with the ssbumpmapping and dynamic lighting of later builds)
And thus came the episodic builds into existence.
They would deliver the upgrades to the engine, but here is the rub,
Valve now would section off the builds for mod developers and third-party developers.
Whether this was the initial intention of the episodes to all sit on individual builds of the engine or rather a construct after the apparent failure of the HDR uprade in HL2, I can't say, It's purely conjecture from my part.
The result - the good, the bad and the ugly.
Even IF the episodic nature of the Half Life story has failed,
the yearly iteration of the Source engine towards it's long term goal of becomming valves, NEXT ENGINE, incidently called Source due to branding reasons of course, unless they want to break from that tradition, has been successfull.
Without EP1 valve could not have made TF2.
Without the orange box engine, valve could not have leapfrogged into Left 4 Dead.
These "tradionally" would have either have had to wait until 2010 for example, or be shoe-horned into the HL2 2004 original build of the engine, either way, neither are a pleasant prospect to consider.
So now we have circumvented any weird mod expirements like the counter-strike vehicles, as they get created into the engine-proper by valve.
Valve have kept up the technical side, first with the 64 bit build of the engine back in 2005, to the first multi-core version in 2007, to the hetrogenous version in 2008.
Whilst valve have ignored the graphical flourishes that most engines hype up, (such as crysis) to ensure things like physics,animation and AI work flawlessly (and questionably amongst some forum members) seeding the groundwork for believable characters in thier movemnts and logic, before making them look realistic.
This has confused some of the fan-base, believing the engine not to have taken it's innovative leaps that valve promised, because the innovation lies out of sight and aren't graphical in nature, whilst Third-party developers and well as modders curse the game breaking nature of the hops between yearly builds as well as the map compiler/lighting/rendering being a real hinderance to design (Ace-XENO clash whished valve would spend a bit more time on source's lighting and rendering, and Natural Selection 2 built their own engine citing they didn't have to wait 30-60 minutes for a map compile and everything was "dynamic").
This is somewhat a failure of source's idealistic concept of being state of the art, as visually valve have been lax with the art assets updates, and with the eye candy.
Don't get me wrong, it works and looks pretty in my honest opinion and it works for the masses, moving from a crappy old system to a new system, despite the eye candy, when I look back to my old system, I honestly don't feel like I missed out on much as I feared. (great job valve!)
The source engine now has the capacity to move physics calculations OFF the CPU and onto the GPU and move Rendering OFF the GPU and onto multiple CPU's of modern systems, be it 32 or 64 bit.
Ideally, not paying attention to things like physics or AI, Valve has turned your computer into a rendering farm.
And now Valve (in those portal2 pictures) look like they are going for glory with the rendering and eye-candy.
So does this mean that after 6 years source 1.0 has iterated towards the mythical 2.0 version? (based on the eye-candy)
Has this transition been a success? I feel it has.
I think valve's idealism hasn't worked out the way it wanted to (such as keeping HL2 state of the art) but the iterative and modular nature of the engine has kept valve yearly produce of new engine builds and games whilst keeping the technology up to date, has been an utter success.
But I consider Source, and I'm sure valve consider it, a success.
And this is a little For Your Information, for those who was not with, or just plainly forgotten the concept of Source.
Source : A Strategy and A concept
This is why I think source is a success, because you have to remember how and why the source engine EXISTS.
Valve created the source engine, to make HL2, but also to address and issue it had noticed that plagued the gaming industry.
Much in the same way they had problems with patching GldSRC engine for HL1/CS/TFC->TFC1.5 they envisioned STEAM, where they could distribute Patches, and act as DRM, and it not very popular from the begining, I think we can agree that steam as a strategy for valve, has been a success.
And thusly we come back to Source being a success, as it too was a strategy.
Not only did valve have to build and then patch for the old engine, but they had to develop the next generation engine and hit all the technical milemarks at the release.
And then after that, they had to build the 3rd engine, whilst patching engine number 2, for expansions and what not.
But valve opted NOT to do this traditional engine building.
SOURCE - a Brand name
Source got it's own funky logo, and it was going to take on multiple-personality syndromes with the following concepts, the brand-name would tie it all together so everything would be OKAY, or so valve very simarily thought about about the naming convention of the episodes......
CONCEPT 1a
What IF Valve created an engine, and ALL the games built on that engine would run on the same engine,
so a patch would only have be run out "once" to fix the engine via steam.
CONCEPT 2
IF the engine was built in a modular fashion, and theoretically, the modules would be replaced in time, so the OLD renderer get replaced with a more modern renderer that addresses the hardware at that future. The network code could be replaced, the sound system etc etc, until all the modules have been replaced, and suddenly you have a iterated into a NEW engine.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bk24RdfXWcg
(oddly enough people still have problems with this concept, and still compare The source engine that powers HL2(2004/5) with games from 2009)
CONCEPT 1b Idealism - concept 1 revisited
Now that the all the source engine games used the same engine and would always be patched then thusly all the engine would always be upgraded, and of cousrse then all your source engine based games would be STATE OF THE ART since they ran of the same build of the engine.
You would also avoid the unpleasant scenario's of these shoe-horning in concepts into a engine that can not or barely can handle them.
If anyone remembers the APC's and other vehicle experiments in the original CounterStrike, as well as the map overlays and gui-systems that eventualy slipped into TFC 1.5.
SUCCESS AND FAILURE
As of 2005 concept 1b failed with The lost Coast.
As valve iterated toward the first major milestone of change, HDR, and then upgraded the Source Engine to the very next version, suddenly Half life 2 broke when it went from SOURCE 2004 to SOURCE 2005.
http://www.hlcomic.com/index.php?date=2005-10-05
Frame-rates dropped, things stoped working for some, stuttering came back. It was just a temporary glitch, but in essence it proved source failed in it's idealism that if you bought a game to work on a current gen system, you couldn't upgrade the games minium requirements past that current gen system.
Hell even the "streamlined" version of the engine from the xbox version was a problem for some.
i.e. the upgrades would in theory made HL2 stop working for those who purchased it in good faith.
Not to mention 3rd Party developers also had problems as they would branch off a certain build of the engine to develop their own engine. Sin Episode 1 is still on the 2004 Source engine where as HL2 is on the 2005 engine. Dark Messiah as well as Xeno clash sit on their own offshoots unable to be updated by the generic source upgrades I believe (oh and how dark messiah would greatly blossom with the ssbumpmapping and dynamic lighting of later builds)
And thus came the episodic builds into existence.
They would deliver the upgrades to the engine, but here is the rub,
Valve now would section off the builds for mod developers and third-party developers.
Whether this was the initial intention of the episodes to all sit on individual builds of the engine or rather a construct after the apparent failure of the HDR uprade in HL2, I can't say, It's purely conjecture from my part.
The result - the good, the bad and the ugly.
Even IF the episodic nature of the Half Life story has failed,
the yearly iteration of the Source engine towards it's long term goal of becomming valves, NEXT ENGINE, incidently called Source due to branding reasons of course, unless they want to break from that tradition, has been successfull.
Without EP1 valve could not have made TF2.
Without the orange box engine, valve could not have leapfrogged into Left 4 Dead.
These "tradionally" would have either have had to wait until 2010 for example, or be shoe-horned into the HL2 2004 original build of the engine, either way, neither are a pleasant prospect to consider.
So now we have circumvented any weird mod expirements like the counter-strike vehicles, as they get created into the engine-proper by valve.
Valve have kept up the technical side, first with the 64 bit build of the engine back in 2005, to the first multi-core version in 2007, to the hetrogenous version in 2008.
Whilst valve have ignored the graphical flourishes that most engines hype up, (such as crysis) to ensure things like physics,animation and AI work flawlessly (and questionably amongst some forum members) seeding the groundwork for believable characters in thier movemnts and logic, before making them look realistic.
This has confused some of the fan-base, believing the engine not to have taken it's innovative leaps that valve promised, because the innovation lies out of sight and aren't graphical in nature, whilst Third-party developers and well as modders curse the game breaking nature of the hops between yearly builds as well as the map compiler/lighting/rendering being a real hinderance to design (Ace-XENO clash whished valve would spend a bit more time on source's lighting and rendering, and Natural Selection 2 built their own engine citing they didn't have to wait 30-60 minutes for a map compile and everything was "dynamic").
This is somewhat a failure of source's idealistic concept of being state of the art, as visually valve have been lax with the art assets updates, and with the eye candy.
Don't get me wrong, it works and looks pretty in my honest opinion and it works for the masses, moving from a crappy old system to a new system, despite the eye candy, when I look back to my old system, I honestly don't feel like I missed out on much as I feared. (great job valve!)
The source engine now has the capacity to move physics calculations OFF the CPU and onto the GPU and move Rendering OFF the GPU and onto multiple CPU's of modern systems, be it 32 or 64 bit.
Ideally, not paying attention to things like physics or AI, Valve has turned your computer into a rendering farm.
And now Valve (in those portal2 pictures) look like they are going for glory with the rendering and eye-candy.
So does this mean that after 6 years source 1.0 has iterated towards the mythical 2.0 version? (based on the eye-candy)
Has this transition been a success? I feel it has.
I think valve's idealism hasn't worked out the way it wanted to (such as keeping HL2 state of the art) but the iterative and modular nature of the engine has kept valve yearly produce of new engine builds and games whilst keeping the technology up to date, has been an utter success.