[MisterTea]

I wish Valve would take a cue from id and release the source code to Source and/or at least GoldSrc under an open license. Though I have a hard time imagining them opening up code to more lucrative games like Team Fortress Classic or Counter-Strike classic. Nice dream though...

[lunar_rover]

Source uses licenced middleware such as Havok so SDKs are likely all we're going to get officially. Source 2 might be a different story if HL3 releases one day since Valve replaced audio and physics with in-house technologies.

[kidfiji]

That’s kind of the goal of S&Box, no?

https://sbox.game

[inigyou]

I thought the point of s&box was to make a very profitable micro transaction marketplace.

[throwaway27448]

Is literally invoking the havok api protected by licensing?

[ouchqt]

Yep, IIRC Havok’s licensing explicitly disallows redistribution of their technology, including headers and pre-compiled binaries.

Source 1 is a good example here, where licensees of source need to also obtain a havok license before Valve can give them any code.

[throwaway27448]

Surely this works against Havoc's best interest, right? Unless their actual value is simply decent api design....

[wvbdmp]

Old-ish Source has a pretty generous license, no? https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/master... GoldSrc is there somewhere as well. I’m definitely grateful for it. I’ve read some of it myself and watched a bunch of Youtube about it.

[mepian]

That repository is not the engine, it's just the code for the client.dll/server.dll binaries that contain game-specific logic and some other tools.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/halflife on the other hand is the full Half-Life (GoldSrc) engine, but it's not quite an open license.

[jwitthuhn]

That is just the SDK, but there is an unofficial open source implementation of goldsrc.

https://github.com/fwgs/xash3d-fwgs

[manytimesaway]

Also based on leaks/reverse-engineering.

[mepian]

I'm pretty sure this is just the mod SDK as well.

[mghackerlady]

I always thought it'd be hilarious if they released an engine called "open source" (or, someone made a source replacement called that)

[charcircuit]

Why should Valve give up their leverage. They actively pick and choose who they license the engine to.

[tweetle_beetle]

Realistically there isn't really any commercial value left in it though. While there were some notable unique games made with it (Titanfall 1 & 2, E.Y.E, The Stanley Parable, etc), these were made over a decade ago and the majority of games made with it are reworks/mods/adaptations of Half-Life related material.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/List_of_third-party...

[matheusmoreira]

> there isn't really any commercial value left in it though

I wonder why it never went mainstream. The Unreal engine went on to power a massive number of games. The Half-Life engines birthed a lot of mods, but wasn't used by many full games.

[throwaway27448]

Unreal won because they invested in a whole ecosystem of tools to build interactive media and the community to support it. Only unity really compares (and I'm not sure how true even that is these days).

[inigyou]

The Source engine isn't a blank slate engine like Unity. It's more like having unlimited power and permission to mod HL2. They just give you the HL2 code and say go nuts.