Source Engine
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| Developer(s) | Valve Corporation |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
Build 5595 / 2014
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| Development status | Active |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, Android |
| Type | Game engine |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | www |
Source is a 3D video game engine developed by Valve Corporation as the successor of GoldSrc. It debuted with Counter-Strike: Source in June 2004, followed shortly by Half-Life 2, and has been in active development since. Source does not have a concise version numbering scheme; instead, it is designed in constant incremental updates. The successor, Source 2, was officially announced in March 2015, with the first game to use it being Dota 2, which was ported over from Source later that year.
Source distantly originates from the GoldSrc engine, itself a heavily modified version of John Carmack's Quake engine. Carmack commented on his blog in 2004 that "there are still bits of early Quake code in Half-Life 2". Valve employee Erik Johnson explained the engine's nomenclature on the Valve Developer Community:
Source was developed part-by-part from this fork onwards, slowly replacing GoldSrc in Valve's internal projects and, in part, explaining the reasons behind its unusually modular nature. Valve's development of Source since has been a mixture of licensed middleware and in-house-developed code. Among others, Source uses Ipion technology bought out by Havok to drive its internal physics engine, and Miles Sound System and Bink Video respectively for music and video playback.
Source was created to evolve incrementally with new technology, as opposed to the backward compatibility-breaking "version jumps" of its competitors. Different systems within Source are represented by separate modules which can be updated independently. With Steam, Valve can distribute these updates automatically among its many users. In practice, however, there have been occasional breaks in this chain of compatibility. The release of Half-Life 2: Episode One and The Orange Box both introduced new versions of the engine that could not be used to run older games or mods without the developers performing upgrades to code and, in some cases, content. Both cases required markedly less work to update its version than competing engines. This was demonstrated in 2010, when Valve updated all of their core Source games to the latest engine build.
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