Five years to develop a game is a long time. Especially for those who were looking forward to the sequel. And now, finally, it happened! In the glow of spotlights, under the cannonade of a battery of champagne bottles, one of the most anticipated games of the third millennium smoothly and majestically descended from the stocks - Half Life 2. If the first part worked on the engine from ID Software, then now valve provided her new game with her own motor - source engine. It is expected that he will be the Holy Grail, which will give the company immortality, and Half-Life 2 - eternal youth. After all, the engine is a great tool for modders and game developers.
If the game came out as promised on September 30 last year - source engine would really be out of competition ... But today, when it has been sold for a long time Doom 3, the new Source engine will have to prove its superiority in a fierce competition. The final alignment of forces will become clear not earlier than in 3-4 months, when game developers and modders will sort out the new injin, as they say, piece by piece, but some conclusions can be drawn already now. Let's see what's in the asset of the new engine.

Are games and porn the same thing?
Five years for development is really a lot. During this time, it was possible to introduce a lot of the latest technologies into the engine, to invest in it not only time and money, but also soul. Work on HL2 began immediately after the release of the first part. The team had no shortage of ideas. I really wanted to build on the success of the first

games. The first HL was born largely due to the fact that Gabe Newell(Gabe Newell), founding father of Valve, was a big fan doom. If not for this, it is unlikely that a promising employee of the company's operating systems department Microsoft I would have left a well-paid job in 1996 and started my own gaming company.
On this communication with Doom and its creator - John Carmack- not over. For its game, the newly born game company licensed from ID Software engine Quake. However, Gabe could not agree with some of the views of Carmack, who believed that the storyline in an action movie was no more important than the plot in a porn movie. The interaction of the player with the game world should be reduced to the extermination of monsters in colorful scenery. The concept of a virtual shooting gallery. The main thing is that there are a lot of monsters, that they are diverse and the process of killing looks as impressive as possible on the monitor screen. Naturally, these ideas were the basis of the id Software game engine - it allowed you to draw the most beautiful picture on the screen at that time and easily processed a dozen 3D models.
Gabe had slightly different ideas about the role of the plot and the interaction of the gamer with the game world. And to implement them on the id Software engine, his team took 2 years of hard work. But the result was HL, which won more than 50 Game of the Year awards and popular love.
Gabe was right. Therefore, it is not surprising that in HL2 they developed the developments of the first part, made the world even more reliable and interactive. Since id Software has not moved one iota from its former positions, it became obvious that Valve would need its own engine to solve these problems. Source was developed by two teams at once: HL2 and Team Fortress 2. The same goes for the instrumentation. In addition, the Steam team produced the user interface and VGUI 2, built into Half-Life 2.

questions. As Gabe said: This is an area where we plan to invest a lot of time and effort. We can't wait to see what modders do with the engine Source. ”
According to some reports, the documentation will be much more detailed than for the first HL (and at that time it was very good). Valve, inspired by the activity of the modding community in relation to HL, really wants to repeat this with the second part. Especially for this, the game has a lot of opportunities for modification. For example, the interface is easily changeable and has many settings. The game editor has been largely redesigned and improved. In addition to the SDK, many different utilities will be released, including large texture libraries and model blanks. “ We hope that modders, having received this, will be able to focus more on some of the innovations and gameplay than on the mechanics of creating the mod itself.”, says Gabe Newell.

Doctor from the first part of the game
and from the second. Feel
difference.

The capabilities of the Source engine itself allow modders not only to completely remake HL2, but also practically make a new game. Compared to the first HL, map sizes can be freely increased by 10 times! It has become realistic to create huge open spaces and make cities that stretch for many kilometers. In the game editor (this is known to everyone Valve Hammer Editor) there was a system for creating or changing any landscapes on the map. Besides, Source has an excellent physical model and freely operates with a large number of “interactive” objects. That is, items that the player can somehow use during the game. For example, from tires scattered on the street, you can build an obstacle for a chase or a shelter for an ambush. This significantly changes the tactics of passing. So modders will have to think not only about the design of the level itself, but also about the distribution of such objects.
Some features are implemented in the engine, but not included in Half-Life 2, and some are amenable to significant transformation. For example, surface warp can be used in mods, but you won't see it in the game. The same goes for the change of day and night. Weather effects can be completely changed beyond recognition.
beauty saves the world
Valve's new engine takes full advantage DirectX 9- dynamic rendering for rendering open spaces, embossed textures for characters, soft shadows, improved anti-aliasing and more. However, at the moment, since graphics cards with full DX9 support are expensive, the engine created equivalent effects for DX8. Implemented DX8.1 shaders for water surfaces. According to Valve, the next versions of the engine will be based only on the functions of the ninth DirectX.
Before talking about the graphics capabilities of Source, it should be noted that all modern engines must be scalable. That is, it is normal to work on computers with different fillings. And the wider the range - from the minimum to the maximum configuration - the better. More people will be able to buy the game and appreciate the efforts of the developers. Although the capabilities of the latest generations of video cards allow a lot, developers should also think about those who are not so well off to get rid of an outdated graphics adapter. Therefore, the texture budget and the number of polygons per model are often greatly underestimated.
HL2 uses textures of 512x512 pixels in most cases (versus 128x128 in the first part). However, the engine itself is capable of more. According to Gabe, the maximum possible texture size is 2000x2000. A good start for the future. As for models, regular NPCs contain 3000 polygons each. Especially valuable characters such as Alyx or Gman, already have about 7,500 polygons per capita. Less important figures (such as numerous monsters that appear on the screen in batches) were allocated no more than 2000 polygons per piece. Less significant - not "living" objects - manage even with a small number of triangles.
The toolkit includes a utility faceposer, designed to control the facial muscles of models. This will allow computer characters to express human emotions - frown their eyebrows, smile from the top of their mouths, and so on. In addition, FacePoser is able to phonetically correctly adjust the facial expressions of the model to the phrases previously recorded in the audio wav file. Something similar you have already seen in the package impersonator for Unreal Tournament 2004. However, FacePoser has a more friendly graphical interface, and the possibilities of this utility are much wider. It's actually a scene editor. For example, using it, you can create different situations and events, such as moving a character along a given route, and precisely set the moment in time when the NPC should appear in one place or another. if intelligence is extremely rare in the universe, and even if the most intelligent individuals destroy each other without a twinge of conscience, intelligent life still has plenty of time to fill the galaxy, even moving at speeds less than sublight. According to any probabilistic model, we should just be inundated with aliens. So where are these alien civilizations?
I have my own homegrown theory, which I pretentiously call "Gambeboy Really Really Advanced Theory". Once any beings reach the level where they are able to build an interstellar spaceship, they have the ability to build incredibly powerful computers that can play super realistic video games. The aliens have a choice: either go exploring the real universe (lots of boring trips where the most interesting question is "How much space dust will we encounter today?"), or explore the virtual universe created on their super-powerful computers. So the aliens - they are ... Somewhere out there ... They are just too busy playing games and exploring virtual universes much more extensive and exciting than the real one.
This means that we have only scratched the surface of what will be possible in video games. And thanks to Moore's Law doubling and the growing sophistication of game developers - whatever the difference between the level of Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2 - we will see much more significant shifts in the very near future.
* * *
The decision to refuse to license the engine for their game (and Quake 3 was considered), despite all the difficulties, turned out to be the right one. Moreover, Gabe Newell seriously hopes that Source will be of interest to both modders and professional developers. And there are all the prerequisites for this. Licensing has already begun and, according to Gabe, is “aggressive”. Perhaps the very low price compared to the Unreal Engine and the Doom 3 engine also affected this, but ... It's not just about the price. It is quite possible that these titans have a powerful competitor. After all, on Source you can make not only excellent story-based first-person shooters, but even RPGs!
And Carmack from Doom 3 again made (albeit a great) virtual shooting range. Apparently, he continues to believe that games and pornography are one and the same.

Creating a mod (a game or game add-on that relies on the underlying technology and possibly uses the resources of the game it's based on) is often the best way to develop something new. When you rely on proven game technologies like the Source Engine, your team spends time and effort on creative gameplay and creative content rather than technical stuff like rendering technology, netcode, interaction system, or engine building. The Source Engine provides you with an SDK with efficient and powerful development tools across the market. And, if you have already purchased Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, you already have access to the full version of the SDK. That's all you need to create your game.

Why source?

Here are a few reasons why you should develop your game as a mod using the Source Engine:

valve

Valve supports the developer community.
Valve has a history of turning custom mods into full commercial products (Counter-Strike, DotA, etc.).

Source and Steam was developed in the hope of the popularity of mods

The SDK is updated constantly and automatically, adding new features (as it was with HDR).
A powerful (free!) set of development tools is included.
Source is the simplest, most flexible, and most powerful engine on the market.
The Source/Steam platform allows you to have a direct connection with players/customers.

Larger player base than all other action engines combined

Mods come, for the most part, from the most popular platforms.
Access to a huge, self-developing community and audience.
- Steam accounts account for 88% of online action games on PC.
- About 5 billion game minutes every month.
- From 250,000 game servers.
- From 1,250,000 concurrent users at any one time.

Includes: All tools used in the creation of Half-Life 2

HL2 source code included. (At the moment, the sources are in github. Detailed information in the corresponding section)
Softimage XSI|EXP for creating models.
Hammer level editor.
- Full documentation with images and examples.
- Additional detailed tutorials in the community.
faceposer.
Half Life Model Viewer.

All the power of the Source Engine

Rendering.
Material System.
Expanded characters.
Physics.
Advanced artificial intelligence.
Network Code for Multiplayer Games.
Surround Sound System.
User Interface(Vgui).
Programming.
Instruments.

valve logo

Developer: Valve Corporation

Series of engines: source engine

Announcement date: 2004

Written in language: C++

License: Proprietary software (Source Engine is proprietary to Valve)

Latest version: Source Engine 2

The Source engine, emerging from the shadow of a giant like Valve, has far exceeded expectations and carved its own path to glory. Source developed by Valve Software, an engine based on the Qake Engine put an end to old technologies and spurred the community to create a new era of engines. Gabe Newel's first statement after acquiring the engine "When we sat down and saw the engine, we realized that to create a great first-person shooter, you do not need to do innovative development in this area, which is already done by Carmack."

Fortunately, the engine did not fully satisfy all the needs of Valve, the developers were guided by the principle - we want something, we will make it appear in the game. Based on this, Valve heavily shoveled the engine so that the game would look not like Quake, but as the developers themselves want it to.

In the first versions of the engine, support for dynamic lighting was even implemented, but later, due to the insufficient power of computers of that time, it was decided to remove this technology. The graphics engine has been heavily redesigned so that Half-Life does not look like its direct competitor Quake. Half-Life had to not only look better than Quake, but also be technically better than Quake. Because of this problem, the release of Half-Life was delayed by almost a year. Half-Life was the first game in which NPC characters were divided into allies and enemies. Skeletal animation and facial expressions were also added to the engine - this is a truly brilliant innovation, this technology is now used in all physical models.

By giving models a skeleton, programmers can create character animation much easier and better, which also made it possible to create various scenes in games faster and more beautifully. The innovation also affected the facial expressions - if earlier the characters, as a rule, ventriloquized with their voice, now their faces have found their own life. This engine was later regularly reworked and refined, both by Valve and by third parties. Valve themselves updated it using the Steam system. Gearbox released several games on it, of which Half-Life: Blue Shift and Half-Life: Opposing Force are worth noting. Gearbox's modifications added higher resolution textures, anti-aliasing, and improved facial expressions.

For the release of Counter Strike: Condition Zero, a new version of the engine was developed jointly by Valve, Gearbox and TurtleRock, which added the ability to use highly detailed textures. Textures were superimposed on top of others and created a feeling of roughness of the plane, such as cracks, cracks, etc. Alpha textures were also added, such textures could be set to a degree of transparency, which is used in a number of scenes.

History of the Source Engine

A bit of development history: it all started in 1998, when the developers, completing work on their first game in the Half-Life series, realized that during the development process a lot of developments and details appeared that they would like to introduce into the engine, but because the game was already almost ready, they did not dare to introduce new solutions. In subsequent odes, the developers used the terms for the name of the engine directly as "GoldSource" and "Source". GoldSource developed from the source code of the release version of the engine, while Src remained an experimental version and related to a future version of the engine.

Thus, the name Source began to be used to describe the new engine, and GoldSource became the name of the previous generation of technology. It is worth noting that the name in literal translation means "source", but the word source is also used in the phrase source code - source code.

The first game on the Source engine was the multiplayer shooter Counter-Strike: Source, released in October 2004, it became a kind of demonstration of the engine, which is why the name of the technology is inscribed in its name, being a recreated version of the classic Counter-Strike shooter with the latest graphics for that time .

A little later, Half-Life's sequel, Half-Life 2, was released, a story-driven sci-fi shooter that went on to win numerous awards and is noted for having some of the most progressive graphics of its time. Half-Life 2 makes heavy use of a physics engine based on Havok licensed by Valve. Numerous puzzles based on playing with physical laws are built using the Havok Engine. In the future, the theme of puzzles with the laws of physics was interestingly developed in another Valve project - Portal, released in 2007, the main idea of the game is to move using teleports. In addition to the advanced physics model, Half-Life 2 featured some of the most advanced facial animation technology of its time. The graphics engine using DirectX version 9 was also highly optimized and could run on older graphics cards, downgrading its graphics quality and switching to earlier DirectX versions up to version 6.

In the future, Source, whose structure is described by the developers as extremely flexible and modular, has been used in most of the company's games, constantly undergoing improvements and improvements. Many modern effects have been added, as well as various engine features have been expanded, including, for example, working with large locations, new platforms have been added to the list of supported ones. Initially, Source was available on Windows, later Xbox, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 were added, since 2010 - Mac. Since 2012, Linux support has been added, the first game ported by Valve was Team Fortress 2.

Specifications

Source is a game engine, therefore it consists of various components, including: Physics engine, graphics engine, audio engine, etc.

One of the features of the engine is its character animation system, in particular, facial animation, which contains many tools for creating expressive facial expressions and precise synchronization of actors' speech with animation; the engine also features advanced game artificial intelligence that can effectively control the player's opponents or allies; it was one of the first to use complex shader effects; in games on the engine, shader water was actively used, reflecting the world around it.

The physics engine is based on Havok. It allows you to calculate many physical objects, such as rigid bodies, elastic bodies, ropes, surfaces, etc. It is possible to create realistic vehicles, from cars to hovercraft and helicopters. To calculate the behavior of the vehicle on the road or in the air, many parameters are used, for example, the grip of the wheels with the road, the mass of the car. To give realistic movement to the body, ragdoll physics is used; pre-created animation can be mixed with real-time physics.

With the development of Source, it was added: HDR rendering, dynamic lighting and shading with the ability to self-shadow objects, soft shadows from (there is the possibility of using traditional light maps), multi-core rendering for multi-core processors, an advanced particle system.

SDK tools

Source SDK is a set of utilities for creating modifications on the Source engine, available for free through Steam to players. The set includes: a map editor - Valve Hammer Editor, a utility for creating facial animation of models - Faceposer, a model viewer in .MDL format - Model Viewer.

In addition to the three main utilities, the set includes a utility for unpacking the base files when creating a new mod, as well as source code files for the libraries of some Valve games, which allows you to manually create games with modified characteristics without decompiling the engine. However, compiling new files requires knowledge of the C++ language and the compiler.

The following are the various internal versions of the Source engine, with a list of games that used a particular version of the engine:

Early versions (2003) - an early version of the engine was used in the beta version of Half-Life 2 leaked to the Web in 2003, the game was visually similar to Half-Life on GoldSource and did not contain many technologies. On another version of the engine, already close to the one that debuted with Half-Life 2, the game Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines was created.

VTMB

Source Engine 2004 (Source Engine 6) - the first release version of the engine, first used in Half-Life 2. Natively supports scaling, updateability, shader rendering, facial animation, and dynamic lighting. Until 2005 used in: Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Half-Life: Source. Updated to Source Engine 7.

Source Engine 2005 (Source Engine 7) - updated version. Compared to its predecessor, it supports High Dynamic Range Rendering, to demonstrate new lighting technologies, the developers released Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, in essence, this game is a level that did not make it into the final version of Half-Life 2. The engine is considered obsolete, it is used in : Half-Life 2: Lost Coast; used in: Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, Day of Defeat: Source until 2006; until 2010 in Half-Life 2; until 2014 - in Half-Life: Source.

Source Engine 2006 (Source Engine 7: Base Source Engine 2) with Development Kit: Source SDK Base 2006 is the third version of the engine on which several games have been released. It also powered a number of Valve's multiplayer games until 2010. It has been updated to support updated facial animation, multi-core rendering, and updated HDR. A large number of modifications were released for this version of the engine, in addition, the mods released for earlier versions are compatible with this version, which do not work on later versions, so it is still used by mod authors. Used in Half-Life Deathmatch: Source, SiN Episodes: Emergence, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic; used in Day of Defeat: Source until 2009; until 2010 in Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source, Garry's Mod.

Source Engine 2007 (Source Engine 14); with development kit: Source SDK Base 2007 - the fourth version of the engine, heavily modified and updated, used for the first time in the Valve games of The Orange Box collection. Shader rendering has been updated, dynamic lighting and shading have been significantly improved, a soft particle system has also been introduced, and cinematic physics has been added, a feature that greatly expands the use of the physics engine. The engine contains significant changes from Source Engine 7, so game modifications released for earlier versions are not compatible with this and later versions. Used in Black Mesa; until 2010 in Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source.

Source Engine 2008 (Source Engine 14: Base Source 3) - another version of the engine with improved cinematic physics and some visual effects (for example, depth of field); used in Left 4 Dead.

Source Engine 2009 (Source Engine 15) - the sixth, heavily modified version of the engine. All functions have been updated, the particle system, facial animation, scaling and the possibility of updates have been significantly improved. Released with Left 4 Dead 2, earlier Valve games were updated to this version. Used by: Left 4 Dead 2, Zeno Clash, Postal III, since September 2010 games have switched to this series: Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half -Life 2: Episode Two, Portal, Team Fortress 2.

Source Engine 2010 (Source Engine 17) is the seventh version of the engine. Used in: Day of Defeat: Source, Bloody Good Time.

Source Engine 2011 - used in Portal 2, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, The Stanley Parable.

Source Engine Multiplayer (Source Engine 19) - a variant of the engine adapted for the needs of multiplayer games; until 2010 used: Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Garry's Mod.

Source Engine Multiplayer (Source Engine 21) - until 2012 used: Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Garry's Mod.

Source Engine Multiplayer (Source Engine 23) - improved work with Big Picture Mode in Steam; until 2013 used in: Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Garry's Mod.

Source Engine 2013 (Source Engine 24); with the Source SDK Base 2013 is one of the latest versions of the engine that Valve has migrated most of their games to. Among the changes: in order to optimize the use of disk space, it was decided to abandon the use of bulky .GCF files (archives with game resources), in favor of a file system codenamed SteamPipe. Games on the new engine are now installed in the Steam\SteamApps\Common directory, and game files are stored in .VPK files. A convenient system for adding custom content (mods) has been created for Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch: there is a custom folder, in which a folder with an arbitrary name is created, and classic folders of modification materials are already added to it ( materials, models, etc.). Added compatibility with Linux. Since 2013 used in: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Portal, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Garry's Mod, Tactical Intervention, Alien Swarm.

Source 2 Engine

Valve officially announced Source 2 at the GDC 2015 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 3rd. According to Valve, Source 2 will be "available for free to all content developers." A similar statement was made recently by Epic Games, whose Unreal Engine 4 engine no longer requires a monthly subscription to use it.

"With Source 2, we want to increase the productivity of creative people," Valve lead programmer Jay Stelly said in a press release. - With the increasing importance of user-generated content, Source 2 is not just for professional developers. It allows the players themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite projects.

Valve's distribution model looks much more interesting than its competitors, the engine is free for everyone, but if you want to make a game on Source 2, please sell it through our Steam platform. Source 2 is a powerful tool that can satisfy the needs of any developer, detailed specifications of the engine have not yet been announced, as well as the date of the announcement, but versions with support for the Vulkan API are mentioned - a new development from the Khronos Group that will allow game creators to get the most out of the most modern computer hardware. No projects on Source 2 have been announced yet, but a video is circulating on the net in which a Dota 2 game launched using Source 2 was shown to developers at a closed presentation. Now every user with a Steam account has the opportunity to run Dota 2 on Source engine 2.

Valve made great efforts to be different from everyone, as a result they got a unique technology that was ahead of its time. Despite the rather long period of existence of the Source engine, the games do not look pretty bad and did not hamper developers in the implementation of their ideas. All thanks to constant updates not only of games, but also of the engine itself, as evidenced by many Build versions of Source. Games created on Source are not only the legendary series that every Half Life, Portal, Left 4 dead gamer has heard about, but also games that have turned into Counter Strike: Global offensive, Dota 2 esports disciplines. At the moment, Valve are the organizers of the championship with the largest prize fund ($13 000 000) and it is still growing. Now with the announcement of Source 2, the question is whether it will be a breakthrough and a new era for games or another technology, of which there are quite a lot at the moment. At the very least, the monetization of the engine is very impressive, and the Steam Machines console, controller, Steam Link, Steam Lighthouse (a device for a virtual reality helmet) speaks of Valve's intention to penetrate into all areas related to computer games. Well, we can only wait until we can enjoy the results of Valve's work and fully experience the next gene of the computer entertainment industry.

Source is the most popular game engine: at the moment you are reading this article, games written on it can be played by over a million people:

And this is not surprising: the engine was developed by Valve, which owns the largest game store - Steam, and its games are consistently at the top of the gaming top.

But, of course, the path to the top of fame was long: the history of the development of the Source engine began back in 1998, when Valve developers, completing work on Half-Life 1, realized that they had a lot of developments that I would like to use somewhere. And it was then that the division into two engines appeared: GoldSrc, on which the current version of the game worked, and Source, which belonged to the future version of the game and had new, still unfinished, technologies. And so at E3, when Valve showed off the beta version of Half-Life 2, it was said that the game was running on the Source engine. This name stuck, and in the future, GoldSrc completely disappeared.

Source Engine 2004 (Source Engine 6)

The first public version of the engine was released in 2004, along with the much-loved shooter Counter Strike, which was named Source in honor of the engine. There were quite a lot of changes from the original version: sharper textures (512×512 pixels versus 128×128 in the original) and detailed 3D models. The engine features related to specular reflections are widely used - for weapons equipped with an optical sight, you can see the environment (but not models of other players) behind the player on the sight lens when it is not zoomed in.

Sound effects now correspond to acoustic conditions, support for 5.1 and 7.1 speakers has been introduced. New features of the engine helped to make the maps more detailed: there were bottles and packages lying on the ground. The physics engine, based on Havok, improved the physics of grenade flight, explosions, as well as the effects of their destruction towards greater realism.

A little later in the year, Half-Life 2 was released, which added to the above features: shader rendering (Half-Life 2 was one of the first games that used shader water) and facial animation (with support for precise synchronization of actors' speech with animation), and with the help of Havok, a “rag doll” effect was obtained:

This version of the engine was used until 2005, and is currently obsolete - all games written on SE 6 have been transferred to newer engines.

Source Engine 2005 (Source Engine 7)

An updated version of the engine, released in 2005. The main addition is support for High Dynamic Range Rendering, to demonstrate which the developers released Half-Life 2: Lost Coast: in essence, this game is a level that did not make it into the final version of Half-Life 2. HDR Rendering in Lost Coast includes several components :

HDR Skybox is the result of overlaying multiple exposures of the sky to achieve a real-time exposure change effect. Over 16 different HDR Skyboxes have been created for Half-Life 2: Lost Coast.
HDR Refraction Effect - HDR light passes through refractive materials and takes on the properties of these materials (for example, when a light beam passes through the colored stained glass windows in the monastery in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, colored reflections are cast onto the floor).
HDR Light Maps - light maps generated using the radiosity effect (light is not only reflected from objects and enters the observer's eye, but also hits other objects, reflecting from them). You can see, for example, inside the monastery in Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, by the sun spots on the walls opposite the windows.

Like SE 6, version 7 is also outdated at the moment - in 2014, the last game on it, CS: Source, was transferred to Source Engine 24.

Source Engine 2006 (Source Engine 7: Base Source Engine 2)

The first version of the engine to have a developer kit available to everyone - Source SDK Base 2006, which allowed many people to create their own modifications to Valve games. The engine has been improved a bit - it supports updated facial animation, multi-core rendering and updated HDR.

Since the modifications created on the 2006 SDK are not compatible with newer versions of the engine, the authors of some mods still use this version of the engine, and it can be considered up-to-date with a stretch.

Source Engine 2007 (Source Engine 14)

Global release, first used in Valve's collection of games - The Orange Box (it includes: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Portal and Team Fortress 2). In this version, shader rendering was updated, dynamic lighting and shading were significantly improved, a soft particle system appeared (which greatly improved the quality of effects such as rain and fire), cinematic physics was added, as well as new facial animation (its hardware acceleration was supported on graphics cards) and improved support for multi-core processors.

SE 14 was the first version of the engine to support consoles - The Orange Box was released not only for PC, but also for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Exactly like with SE 7, the modifications created in the SDK for the 14th version did not work on newer ones, so this version of the engine is still used.

Source Engine 2008 (Source Engine 14: Base Source 3)

Version of the engine created for the game Left 4 Dead:

It improved cinematic physics by adding:

Dynamic destruction of game geometry - prior to this, destruction lines had to be specified by the map creator.
Deformable Objects - Until now, physical models could not be changed in any way other than based on pre-rendered animation.

Some effects have also been added, such as motion blur and depth of field.

Source Engine 2009 (Source Engine 15)

The version released with Left 4 Dead 2 was later updated to this version by all Valve games of the time. In this version, all functions have been updated, the particle system, facial animation, scaling and the ability to update have been significantly improved.

Source Engine 2010 (Source Engine 17)

The first version of the engine ported to macOS. Initially, The Orange Box game package was ported to the apple OS, and later all new Valve games began to be released for both Mac and Windows.

Source Engine Multiplayer (Source Engine 19, 21 and 23)

Versions of the engine tailored for multiplayer games such as Dota 2 and CS: GO. Also in 2012, support for Linux appeared: Team Fortress 2 was ported under it, and later other Valve games.

Source Engine 2013 (Source Engine 24)

The current version of the engine that Valve has migrated most of their games to. Among the changes: in order to optimize the use of disk space, it was decided to abandon the use of bulky .GCF files (archives with game resources) in favor of the file system codenamed SteamPipe. Games on the new engine are now installed in the Steam\SteamApps\Common directory, and game files are stored in .VPK files. A convenient system for adding custom content (mods) has been created for Counter-Strike: Source, Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch: there is a custom folder, in which a folder with an arbitrary name is created, and classic folders of modification materials are already added to it ( materials, models, etc.).

Linux compatibility was also improved, and in May 2014, Nvidia ported Portal and Half-life 2 to Android for its Nvidia Shield console (however, the craftsmen were able to run these games on other Android devices, but performance was poor ).

Source 2

A fundamentally new version of the engine, released in 2015 by Valve along with the release of the updated game Dota 2 - Reborn. Alas, there was no technical presentation, it is only known that the engine still works on the OpenGL API (perhaps the Vulkan API will be added in the future), and it can also use as many processor cores as it has. Valve also promised that the engine would work better on older computers (reduced RAM consumption), but Dota 2 Reborn turned out to be heavier than Dota 2 on Source Engine 24. Another important addition was VR support, and the first The Lab demo game for HTC Vive:

The future of the engine

Valve is silent about the further development of the engine, and this is not news for gamers (they are still waiting for rumors about Half-Life 3 and Portal 3, right?) So far, the second version of the engine is quite raw and needs to be improved, and, obviously, Valve fix it fixes bugs , and only Gabe Newell knows about future games and versions of the engine.