Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759e2e8e179d5352d81d0d4aaded72c1704b7a9

by davikr • 1 year ago

1863 385 1 year ago

jsheard13• 1 year ago

This is good for modding but don't be misled, this is the TF2-specific code which sits on top of the still-closed-source Source engine. For example you couldn't port TF2 to a new platform with this, at least not without reimplementing Source or wrangling it into working with one of the leaked Source codebases and dealing with the legal fallout of that.

klaussilveira3• 1 year ago

Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way. There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked). Only people that have been involved with Source in the past decades would enjoy working with it.

The community around the engine is vibrant and well-versed in the caveats of the Source workflow. With a GPL release, just like Carmack did with id tech, the amount of creative projects from indies would sky rocket. No longer bound by obscure deals.

SXX6• 1 year ago

I pretty sure you'll soon get reply about how making it open source will increase cheating. So for those people it's important to know that Source engine source code was leaked many many times and anyone who will spend 5 minutes will find sources.

davikr• 1 year ago

Indeed, I wish the first iteration gets released as GPL or something like that eventually. I get not wanting to open-source Source 2, but the original is another thing entirely.

jsheard13• 1 year ago

Most in-house game engines built after a certain point use a non-trivial amount of third party code, including console stuff which is under strict NDA, so it's a huge hassle to open source them. Most iterations of the Source engine use Havok physics for example.

IdTech probably was only open sourced because Carmack pushed for it, but it helps that IdTech of that vintage was all in-house code exclusively targeting the PC. I think the only thing they had to cut out for legal reasons was the patented shadowing algorithm in Doom 3.

0x457• 1 year ago

Probably because for it to be really opensource it has to have a proper documentation and other resources.

if someone just does a `git push` and changes license it won't be much help to anyone until there is a proper documentation.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

It will be easier to understand when you see the hundreds of Jira tickets to wade through to get it released and the fact they have better shit to do that contributes directly to revenue instead of trying to open source an old game engine that only a handful of people will even care about.

kllrnohj2• 1 year ago

Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed. It is not an exciting engine to work with in any way.

Source uses Havok, which is a licensed middleware. Convincing Havok to be also open source is likely a nonstarter. Repeat for any other middlewares they might have used, such as Adobe's ScaleForm used by CSGO, and it quickly is just an endless legal nightmare. idTech handled this by either spending time to rip out those components, allowing for a partial open source release which is what you're ripping on Valve for doing right this moment, or by avoiding using any licensed middlewares at all which is a significant development limitation that not everyone can get away with.

As Source 2 replaces everything with in-house developed alternatives, it's possible we might see that open sourced in the future. Who knows.

keerthiko• 1 year ago

IMO the source engine codebase is probably chock-full of duct tape and cruft, full of undocumented, legacy, bespoke, hacky and deprecated stuff that it's not worth the dev resources for valve to bring it up to an OSS standard worthy of their reputation.

Contributing to this is probably

- custom external hooks (eg: homemade test framework, patchnotes publishing, steamapp backdoor integrations, hardware-specific firmware interfaces, 3rd party closed source SDK hooks)

- assumptions about Valve's server architecture/implementation for most multiplayer stuff used by Valve games, the codebase(s) of which are probably as vast as Source itself and closed-source too

- bespoke engine modifications made for specific games like HL2 or CS1.6 which hasn't been touched for a decade, the authors of which may not be accessible to document them trivially

Adding sufficient documentation to a massive closed-source system meant for internal use, over multiple decades, to bring them up to par for functional OSS publication is a monumental feat that honestly probably isn't worth the risk of bad publicity from the modder community who'd just be mad about how unusable it would be.

thaumasiotes2• 1 year ago

There are at least 3 major open source alternatives today, way more powerful and easier to work with (O3DE, Godot, Wicked).

My general impression from lurking on these kinds of threads (with no relevant personal experience) was that Godot is a good 2D engine but not a good 3D engine. Do you find it comparable to the other two?

rozab• 1 year ago

If those engines are so capable then why do no AAA games use them? Source is still (kinda) used in games like Apex Legends

Nition2• 1 year ago

Valve has given Facepunch the Source 2 license for S&Box[1] which will indirectly allow making games in Source 2. That's as far as they've gone towards releasing it as a game engine so far.

[1]https://sbox.game or https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/

greenchair• 1 year ago

maybe its release could lead to more attacks or cheating?

lawlessone2• 1 year ago

They are probably still working on something with it?

pmarreck2• 1 year ago

I filed a bug based on this:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624

DiggyJohnson• 1 year ago

Is there any relationship between those OS engine and the source model?

lloeki• 1 year ago

Hard to understand their stance on keeping Source closed

Forget Source, what about GoldSrc.

... which was based on Quake which is now GPL.

There's Xash3d which lives in a kind of licensing limbo because it was developed mostly from scratch except for some header files which could now be replaced by GPL QuakeWorld ones yet the current Xash maintainers can't do anything about it because they're tainted by non-clean-roomness.

Even if the above issue was solved, this is about the engine; the HL1 game code (the "SDK") is open but licensed by Valve in a way (MIT-ish permissive with a non-commercial clause) that is incompatible with the GPL.

This makes both legally undistributable as binaries together.

__jonas• 1 year ago

It's a fair question to ask but I wish people wouldn't spam the project with embarrassing LLM slop filled issues like this:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624

I don't think it reflects well on this site either

novabridge• 1 year ago

Ever since I joined the industry, I've heard that many companies are reluctant to open source code because it's so bad that if they did, no one would dare use their products. I guess Source is one of them.

eddieroger• 1 year ago

Aside from the good middleware licensing arguments, if my memory serves me, Valve employees get to shift their work to what interests them at the time, and who knows what tidbits of could-be versions of HL3, Portal 3, or other interesting but unannounced (let alone unreleased) games could be in there.

AlienRobot• 1 year ago

When Winamp published their source code on Github, not only did they breach third party licenses, but they also had to deal with trolls who across the entire Internet that wanted to make a show out of them. It's hard to blame developers for avoiding open sourcing when you may not get anything out of that except for criticism.

xandrius• 1 year ago

I am not sure I'd even remotely compare Source to Godot, never touched the other ones though.

JojoFatsani• 1 year ago

Is there still some structural Source underlying the cash cow of CS2?

thetoon• 1 year ago

Maybe that's where a project like Nuclide could step in? I'm always a bit confused between their projects' names, but I've read somewhere they had progress on the HL2 front.

pityJuke6• 1 year ago

What is Nuclide? I've found https://github.com/VeraVisions/nuclide and https://github.com/eukara/freehl.

johnnyanmac8• 1 year ago

I'm still a bit confused on why Source is close sourced when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago. I suppose it'd becsuse there's some basic overlap, but they still also feel comfortable releasing their gsmes' source?

EMIRELADERO2• 1 year ago

when Valve moved on to Source 2 over a decade ago.

I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be used to justify having Source2 open as well.

After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all? The only things I can think of are a) anticheat, b) NDA'd 3rd party code, and c) protecting important secret sauces made by the company itself

a) and b) are both solved by simply not releasing those portions of the code, while c) is a bit moot. Any competitor can already (legally) RE the binaries and recreate any juicy proprietary algorithms, unless they're patented. But in that case they would be protected even if the source was released so it's still the same situation.

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

There are still games being developed on it: https://vghe.net/source-engine.html

There are maybe four still in development and due hopefully this year, plus Apex Legends is still going strong.

progbits• 1 year ago

Given the leaks, the fact it's been over 10 years since last major game released using Source 1, and the fact most of the rendering code (probably the most valuable bits, aside from physics) in Source2 must have been rewritten given the new developments in game graphics; makes me wonder if there is any reason for them to keep it closed source.

Do you think they will release it at any point? Maybe there are licensing issues where they don't have the rights to all of it and couldn't easily opensource it. Or maybe there is in fact still too much secret sauce left there?

bayindirh3• 1 year ago

There's always "too much secret sauce". I remember a time when CryTek published papers about how they implemented things, now they don't.

There's always in-house ways to deal with graphics drivers and certain effects. Remember how Source 1 was the only engine which was able to render HDR with measly ATI 9600XT, without a performance penalty most of the time?

You carry this know how in evolved form for generations, and it gets buried under as the foundation of the new things you're building on top of it.

This is what I remember from a friend who implemented his own game engine and created a company for it, and half the woes were making the graphics drivers and processors behave as they said in their manuals.

sneak• 1 year ago

IIRC (from memory) it was called Source because it was a derivative of the Quake 2 engine that id gave them a copy of after a meeting (on a cd simply labeled “source”) even before they had a contract in place.

If this apocryphal story is true, they might only have a license to it (making it a derivative work) and depending on the terms of their licensing agreement from id they might not be able to do that without having their legal people talk to ZeniMax’s (they bought out id software and are their parent company now) lawyers, which runs to thousands of dollars in pure costs even if everyone is totally cooperative and on board and wants to make it happen immediately.

beeflet7• 1 year ago

Good news everyone! They've already tried to reverse engineer the source engine for TF2 for some success!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09CvpQrnTEY

chedabob• 1 year ago

Damn, was hoping this would bring TF2 back to Mac. Haven't had a good LAN party in the office since Apple dropped 32-bit support.

andrepd• 1 year ago

Do people even do LAN parties anymore? x)

Maken• 1 year ago

There is still a chance for that. Since the HL2 anniversary update Valve seems to be moving their old titles to the modern 64 bits branch of Source.

Angostura• 1 year ago

Me too. Loved playing it and I'm sad

lnauta• 1 year ago

I'm still not quite sure how to take this, does this mean that:

We can not fix problematic netcode (this is a running joke in the TF2 comminity)

We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)?

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

We can fix game balance issues (that could also be fixed through configs)?

I think some of these fixes were through something a bit more complicated like sourcemod which hooks various methods.

xyst• 1 year ago

Source engine is so outdated at this point anyways. Valve should use the profits from their cash cow, CSGO, and use it to invest in retooling with open source engines such as GoDot or Bevy.

I remember downloading a leaked version of the source code for source engine, and in general it was laughable at how awful it was. I dont know if it was ever discussed mainstream but only based on recollection of IRC chats.

I think it was about 6 months out of date, but even so it would explain why HL sequels would become vaporware despite years of teasing the community by Gabe Newell himself.

somehnguy• 1 year ago

They're already using Source 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_2

celsoazevedo• 1 year ago

In case you're not aware, CSGO was replaced by CS2, which uses Source 2.

daelon• 1 year ago

It's just Godot, fyi.

djmips3• 1 year ago

It's pretty easy to criticize the Source Engine source code but y'know it worked!

shdh• 1 year ago

Source 2 is quite a decent engine. Their level building tools with Hammer are top notch.

Volumetrics, physical sound, pbr, great snapshot based networking.

Godot doesn't really come close.

anacrolix• 1 year ago

oh that's lame :(

chamomeal• 1 year ago

I didn’t realize source wasn’t open source. Aren’t titanfall and apex legends made with a modified source engine? I guess respawn licenses it from valve?

Imustaskforhelp7• 1 year ago

can we not create a legal open source "source emulator".

I am asking this from a total legal standpoint.

ripdog• 1 year ago

"Emulator" is the wrong word, but the answer is yes. The word you actually meant was "re-implementation" - writing a completely new, clean-room program which reads Source data files (levels, assets, scripts) and allows the user to play a Source game is perfectly legal.

It is necessary to avoid distributing any copyrighted material, so the user must provide the game assets from a legitimate copy for using the program to be legal. In addition, the 'clean-room' must be maintained by ensuring that no contributors to the re-implementation have ever seen the source code for Source, or they become tainted with forbidden knowledge.

Indeed, it's quite common for beloved old games to be re-implemented on new codebases to allow easy play on modern OS's and at high resolution, etc.

See https://github.com/Interkarma/daggerfall-unity, https://openrct2.io/, https://github.com/AlisterT/openjazz

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

Eh, I think someone tried to do this with the GoldSource engine a few years ago and got shut down by Valve's lawyers before too long.

LorenDB• 1 year ago

Valve just keeps on winning.

I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose its way after the original generation is gone.

pityJuke6• 1 year ago

Off-topic: this is genuinely cool, along with many things Valve do, but Valve does generate a significant amount from gambling (and underaged gambling) so I won't give a complete pass to being a great company.

doctorpangloss5• 1 year ago

This is a little complicated. There are many companies that sell gambling products. Nothing special about that. The tragedy is when you list your game on Steam and it gets popular, you are paying Valve 30% for the privilege of finding new users for CSGO and DOTA2. That is how they make money.

MonitorBird• 1 year ago

Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it? In that case isn't the entire game industry guilty of trying to rip money from the credit cards of unsuspecting parents? Isn't the entire modern web just a tool to suck cash out of cards, or try and get your card sucked? What are we talking about here. I cut my teeth on CS:S, but haven't played much after that. I know the newer games have lootbox mechanics, but I assumed it was for items you could potentially grind? Just like.. every other modern online multiplayer money sucking game that exists. Warframe, Fortnite, Roblox, I dunno. Everything these days seems to be a bloodsucker. Steam gets a full pass from me, I'm not a prude.

beeflet7• 1 year ago

Having played TF2 and such as a kid, the bottleneck was always asking your parents for their credit card or getting steam cards/vanilla credit cards for your birthday.

I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such).

Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes.

I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.

culi• 1 year ago

Also they still take a huge cut of profits from game sales. That's 30% of each sale going to the platform (compared to 12% by Epic). Indie game devs suffer if people don't opt to buy directly or from platforms like itch.io

But they have a near-monopoly on the pc gaming market so selling on Steam is a must

kibwen• 1 year ago

Especially relevant to this conversation is that TF2 is the game that single-handedly popularized the lootbox model outside of Korea.

thaumasiotes2• 1 year ago

Also, their primary reason for existence is to add DRM to software.

koolala• 1 year ago

A win would be supporting TF2 Source 2.

beeflet7• 1 year ago

Maybe the next step is releasing TF3 or some competitor game to overtake TF2

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

Why? TF2 looks and performs amazing.

sergiotapia• 1 year ago

If his son inherits Valve, it's over. He will probably sell it because why not -- he's not a gamer whatsoever.

nicce• 1 year ago

It is less about gaming but more about understanding what is best for the end users.

MisterTea3• 1 year ago

To me Valve lost its way as a game developer long ago. What have they released recently? CS 2 in 2023? That IP came from a mod they bought 25 years ago just like every other game they released since HL. The only thing "new" have in the pipeline is a MOBA FPS.

I am however eternally grateful Steam allows me to painlessly run Windows games on Linux so I never have to deal with MS in my personal life ever again. As a game distributor they are awesome. And that is what Valve does best, distribute games.

AlphaCerium• 1 year ago

if by "DOTA FPS" you mean their new MOBA Deadlock, AFAIK it's not related to DOTA in any way.

hbn• 1 year ago

Yeah seems to me Valve almost entirely stopped being a game developer in the early 2010s after Dota 2. Which I suppose more or less coincides with when PC gaming became a real mainstream alternative to consoles in the gaming space, and it became beneficial to lock themselves in as the PC gaming platform provider.

pynappo• 1 year ago

Well, they released Artifact in 2018 (to poor reception), DOTA Underlords in 2019 (and stopped updating it after a while), and half life alyx in 2020.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC...

They also likely have another half-life game in the works, as mentions of half-life-esque things have popped up around their codebase (as published through updates of their existing source 2 games):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWlRkzwHLwI

GuB-42• 1 year ago

Not exactly recent but they definitely delivered in VR. The SteamVR demo (a collection of minigames/experiences) is awesome, and so is Half-Life Alyx.

Half-Life Alyx actually took me by surprise. As in: "What? Valve still makes games?". And while it is the Half-Life franchise, it is different enough to stand on its own.

bspammer• 1 year ago

For what it's worth, it is an exceptional MOBA FPS. It's genuinely one of my favourite multiplayer games of all time, and it's not even released yet. I know MOBAs aren't everyone's thing, but Deadlock may be the peak of the genre.

andrewmcwatters2• 1 year ago

I don't know why you think it's Gabe that has the most impact, most of the original team behind Half-Life are gone, and people didn't buy their products for Steam. They bought their games.

EcommerceFlow• 1 year ago

I'd argue the opposite and that Gabe needs to retire (and hopefully have Robin Walker take over).

Valve's release cycle has slowed down to almost nothing, and are just feeding off their cash cows. Gabe is 62 and seems more interested in his Neuralink competitor.

kmeisthax• 1 year ago

I would argue Valve already lost its way, it's just that their enshittification took the form of gambling-adjacent lootboxes. People forget that TF2 was one of the first western games to add lootboxes, way before Overwatch even existed. Even Portal 2 had them crowbarred into the co-op mode for reasons. That's why they stopped[1] shipping single-player experiences.

CS:GO is the worst offender; to the point where there's third-party gambling[0] sites to gamble cosmetic gun skins with, that specifically cater to children. Basically all of CS:GO's pro scene is sponsored by it.

[0] The skin gambling sites are not officially condoned by Valve, but they absolutely do not do shit to try and stop it.

[1] Half-Life: Alyx notwithstanding

foxandmouse2• 1 year ago

The fact that they did this before bothering to recompile it for 64-bit Mac says a lot—Valve clearly doesn’t see Apple as a friendly place to do business. Makes sense, with Apple trying to lock game devs into the App Store.

ender341341• 1 year ago

from various interviews I've seen of folks in the games industry apple has historically been actively hostile to working with game companies, it seems to have softened with the iphone appstore.

People make fun of "devs devs devs" from Balmer but he was heavily right, Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.

foxandmouse2• 1 year ago

Don't think that's the case anymore, "Game Porting Toolkit 2" seemingly opened the floodgates on gaming on a mac.. It's up to the developers if they think it's worth the time/ effort; but with how great apple the hardware is, and how easy it is to port a game, I think we're going to see a huge influx of mac gaming.

imiric2• 1 year ago

Microsoft spent a ton to court developers and they got a monopoly on PC gaming as a result.

I think "courting" is underselling what they actually did.

They invested heavily into building tooling and APIs specifically for games, which eventually powered their own gaming console. They were practically the only company doing this on PCs since the mid '90s, and they became a monopoly because nobody else was focused on this. Developers and consumers jumped aboard because there was nowhere else to go. This is the same reason Steam won. For many years, there were just no alternatives.

Microsoft gets a lot of flack for many things, but they deserve a ton of credit for inventing and supporting the PC gaming landscape as we know it today.

bearjaws• 1 year ago

Mac accounts for 1.4% of users, which is 25% less than Linux...

That is actually more than I thought, but its clear without compatible games there is very little reason to install Steam.

Also, Apple only recently started to be more gaming friendly, so it's really not surprising they would try to port a 20 year old game.

Kovah• 1 year ago

without compatible games

About 30% of the games I own on Steam would run on my Mac. I think that's quite much for a platform that nobody likes to develop for. But to be fair, I have few mainstream games like CoD, LoL or whatever.

isametry• 1 year ago

(This is probably terribly obvious, but should be mentioned anyway: that's 1.4% Mac and 2.06% Linux users of Steam. Not users in general.)

weaksauce• 1 year ago

steamdeck runs on linux so that should eventually make games on linux mostly compatible and maybe even one day make it so that pc gamers don't have to have windows at all... chicken and egg thing though

heliophobicdude• 1 year ago

Do you still also need to compile a mac build on a Mac?

account4221• 1 year ago

You can cross-compile to a mac if that's what you are asking. Not as easily as to Windows/Linux though, but that's just because there is less interest.

RockRobotRock2• 1 year ago

You're over-analyzing it. TF2 is 17 years old, and basically has a skeleton crew keeping it running. They simply decided it's not worth the effort. I'm mad about it too, but hard to blame them.

doublerabbit• 1 year ago

There was a video explaining to why Valve games were never ported to the Macintosh.

I can't find it. But essentially it was Apple not wanting their machines to be used for gaming. And so axed all the work of the port and refused to publish the game.

The best I can find is from 2007 from Gabe:

We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go "wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming". And then we'll say, "OK, here are three things you could do to make that better", and then they say OK, and then we never see them again. The cycle then repeats itself when a new group of people replace the old ones at Apple.

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

All of their games were ported to Mac in 2013 or so but that support has been wound back in the last year or so with Intel Macs dying, 32-bit Mac support dying and presumably no interest from Apple in helping keep the Mac ports alive.

mentos• 1 year ago

I always wonder if Apples disdain for games is a relic from Steve Jobs time at Atari.

jeffhuys• 1 year ago

They don't have a disdain for games... At least not anymore. They're actively pushing it on both mobile and mac, even introducing "Game Mode" and the like. You wouldn't do that if you have a disdain for games.

dundarious• 1 year ago

From TFA:

As [1]announced on the official TF2 website

[1] https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809 states:

We're also doing a big update to all our multiplayer back-catalogue Source engine titles (TF2, DoD:S, HL2:DM, CS:S, and HLDM:S), adding 64-bit binary support, a scalable HUD/UI, prediction fixes, and a lot of other improvements!

So that seems to be coming, at least in the sense of x86-64 which Apple Silicon supports better via Rosetta 2.

Vilian5• 1 year ago

Until they kill Roseta like they did with e very other compatibility layer

Vilian5• 1 year ago

Mac don't support vulkan nor opengl, so it didn't recompiled to mac

pjmlp2• 1 year ago

Technically so doesn't Windows, nor game consoles in spite of urban myths (Switch being the exception).

Windows Vulkan and OpenGL drivers exist, because Microsot still hasn't removed the ICD plugin interface from the OS, which is used by GPU vendors themselves, not Microsoft, to provide drivers on Windows for VUlkan and OpenGL.

Likewise, Valve could have use MoltenVK if they actually wanted to.

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

Writing games for Mac seems like a great challenge. You have a relatively non-standard CPU architecture with a proprietary graphics API for a small set of devices, many of which embed screens with ridiculously high resolutions while coupled to a GPU that's "good enough" at best. Apple proudly announced the mid-tier Tomb Raider 2 graphics, which doesn't promise much for game devs that don't have support from Apple's promotional campaign. All of that, on a platform that's smaller than Linux based on player count.

Unless you know for sure that you're going to get a decent player base, I don't think optimising for Mac makes much business sense for games companies. Users that can afford a Mac can probably also afford a console anyway.

You can trick games into running by using the same wrappers and workarounds that you'd use to game on Linux (except you need to optimise the wrappers yourself because they're less mature) but gaming on Linux already has plenty of DRM/anti-cheat incompatibility issues, and using less mature tools will only make that worse. And, of course, Apple doesn't care much about backwards compatibility; they've killed 32 bit for no apparent reason other than "we don't want to maintain compatibility" and who knows how long they'll maintain the current set of replacement APIs. Linux suffers from similar issues, and that's why the go-to method of playing games on Linux is to run them in an emulated Windows environment.

I think games companies will recompile games for Snapdragon before they'll bother with Mac. By the time they got all their 32 bit x86 libraries to work on ARM without emulation, Apple has probably switched around a couple of APIs and requirements anyways, so why bother.

andai• 1 year ago

Linux suffers from similar issues, and that's why the go-to method of playing games on Linux is to run them in an emulated Windows environment.

See also: Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624

pityJuke6• 1 year ago

The official blog post: https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809

(Also includes links to recent updates for other Source engine titles)

Lammy2• 1 year ago

I hope this is good news for TF2 Classic.

edit: here's the announcement from the TF2C Discord:

==============

@everyone We'll have more to say later, but you might not be able to launch TF2 Classic for a little bit due to the massive SDK update and public release of Team Fortress 2's code.

We're already preparing for the porting efforts and a potential Steam release now that we've been legally enabled to pursue that, but in the meantime, you will have to shift Source SDK Base 2013 Multiplayer to the "previous2021" beta branch that still has the previous revision of the SDK files to continue playing. See the screenshot for an example.

Thank you, and we'll have more news soon!

__turbobrew__• 1 year ago

Given they call out derivative works of the original games being ok, and those works can be released as new games on steam seems to clear the way for TF2 Classic.

jeffybefffy519• 1 year ago

What is tf2 classic?

rrr_oh_man• 1 year ago

https://tf2classic.com/

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Fortress_2

beeflet7• 1 year ago

Woah... woah WOAH I wasn't expecting to see this on HN. I've been expecting this for a long time, and if I was valve I would have done something like this a long time ago: release a "final" celebratory content update, port the game to vulkan, and open source the codebase (keeping the item servers and whatnot tied to valve's servers). I don't know if this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning of TF2. There have been leaks before but this is huge news.

Rooster612• 1 year ago

Woah... woah WOAH

I see what you did there

epaga• 1 year ago

Well...I don't, care to enlighten us non-insiders?

HaZeust2• 1 year ago

Beginning of the end? It's been the end for years - they're passing it off to the community, as they should! The team for TF2 is probably very low double digits now and it's almost 18 years old, it's time to outsource the continuing developments.

Starlevel004• 1 year ago

The team for TF2 is probably very low double digits now

Double digits? That's very very optimistic. It's closer to like two people.

skupig• 1 year ago

The entire TF2 team was famously one guy for years

subjectsigma• 1 year ago

In the 90’s, iD made Doom, made money off of it for a few years, and then released the source code. They then did the same with Quake. This is part of the reason companies like Valve exist today, as their early games used modified engines from Doom and Quake. Valve is now continuing that 25+ year tradition. People are still making new Doom maps and playing the game. If history is anything to go by, people could be playing TF2 in some form in the 2050’s and beyond.

hx8• 1 year ago

Except it only took 3 years for iD to release the Quake code.

guy234• 1 year ago

why wouldn't you expect to see this on HN?

65• 1 year ago

Wondering if this is so Valve doesn't have to keep updating TF2. It's a 17 year old game and the last real update was Jungle Inferno in 2017. I wonder if it's going to turn into more of a community maintained "sandbox" game.

sylware3• 1 year ago

Meanwhile... the "steam client" on elf/linux is still 32bits and hardcoded for x11/GL (nope, no tables of functions with wayland/vulkan/gpu fallbacks...) ... and don't forget about those bash-only scripts carefully using all those (often GNU) niche options of commands...

Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]).

Oh and lately, I had to build the original lsof command to please the steam webhelper... and there is a liblsof library they could have linked statically...

Valve "linux" devs should be worry putting "valve" on their resume, this could backfire... seriously.

Vilian5• 1 year ago

You managed to be wrong in every single point that you're trying to make, that required dedication

sylware3• 1 year ago

AI?

account4221• 1 year ago

Oh... and pressure-vessel which pulls linux expensive "user/mount namespace" in for... a desktop system, only for what seems the "I-don't-why-they-cannot" generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, namely with proper glibc ABI selection (see 2nd part of the binutils ld VERSION documentation page, and the man page of the readelf command for auditing those binaries), dynamic loading of core video game interface shared libs (x11/wayland is statically linked/libasound/libvulkan/legacy libGL/libxkbcommon[-x11]).

Steam launched without any runtime. They added all that because yes, the average game developer cannot manage to build portable libraries.

sylware3• 1 year ago

... and valve is unable to generate clean 64bits ELF binaries, like the "below average game developer" for the blink gogol web engine they use as the steam client ("cef") since it requires pressure-vessel.

pie_flavor• 1 year ago

The game appears to have been renamed "Frog Fortress 2".

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/0759e2...

jsheard13• 1 year ago

I'd guess that's to distinguish it from the official TF2 if you build and install the code without changing the name.

Pannoniae• 1 year ago

It's kind of an inside joke - look at who's the committer ;)

frogs and graphics programming are good friends.

vanderZwan2• 1 year ago

And here I was hoping for a surprise Frog Fractions 3 :)

James_K• 1 year ago

I wonder if they'll start accepting pull requests. There are a lot of bugs I'd like to see fixing in the game. I've been annoyed by the Medigun beam not lining up with the model for about ten years by this point.

RockRobotRock2• 1 year ago

I really really really doubt it. But hopefully someone can champion a community fork of the game which runs on Steam.

jisnsm• 1 year ago

They have been ignoring almost all bugs in the goldsrc tracker for years.

account4221• 1 year ago

This is just how valve works. Someone does a work on one of the games and will look at the bug tracker for a bit before eventually moving on.

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

I think this is just a dump to GitHub and not connected to their internal stuff in any way.

Same with the Half-Life repo - when the 25th anniversary stuff was released it was just pushed as one mega-patch.

SXX6• 1 year ago

I feel like under every news regarding Valve, Steam or their games people tend to find some crazy conspiracies on why Valve did that or didn't do this. When actual truth is that Valve is ~400 people company plus some contractor artists making items for CSGO / Dota / etc.

Valve is not 40,000+ company, not even 4,000+. 400 people. That's it.

IncreasePosts• 1 year ago

Well, now this makes me feel old that I thought TFC was the bee's knees and felt TF2 was too new fangled and fancy so I never got into it.

sophacles2• 1 year ago

There's still people getting into it right now, in 2025. It's not too late (and it's a lot of fun...).

sevenf0ur• 1 year ago

As someone who used mod TF2 on the server side, this is fantastic. I've spent countless hours analyzing the binaries in IDA and now you can just open github. This will definitely accelerate new features and bugfixes from the community.

It's about damn time, really. The TF2 source code has already leaked twice. And a group even made a cloned version of the game in an earlier version of the engine. The community support this game still has is massive.

phendrenad2• 1 year ago

Was this an accident? Why is the link to a github diff? Why is there no announcement?

datenyan2• 1 year ago

Definitely not an accident - the announcement was made on the TF blog [0]

[0] https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809

wiseowise3• 1 year ago

So that’s why they didn’t challenge TF2C this time, it’s all coming together.

njintje• 1 year ago

This is the final nail in the coffin for Team Fortress 2, isn't it?

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

TF3 confirmed jk

koakuma-chan• 1 year ago

Valve be like:

Initial commit

+1153568 -222431 lines changed

Cribbin• 1 year ago

LGTM, ship it

declan_roberts• 1 year ago

This is great. If someone wouldn't mind updating the instructions for a native 2025 ARM64 build of HL2 that would be great.

Existing instructions use the old, leaked source engine. Time to make it official and native.

Jotalea• 1 year ago

A HL2 ARM64 Linux build would eventually lead to a native release for Android, or am I wrong?

pityJuke6• 1 year ago

Believe this already exists for NVIDIA’s Tegra machines, and a cursory Google search reveals people seem to have ripped it and made it playable on generic Android.

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

This is just the game code not the engine code.

dangoodmanUT• 1 year ago

that is very readable cpp

RobRivera• 1 year ago

Yes

jheriko• 1 year ago

this is unexciting.

pavo-etc• 1 year ago

Open PRs from 2013, makes me feel better

Scuds2• 1 year ago

I'm kind of surprised that after all these years TF2 and Source are still separate entities. Like, is there any TF2-only code in Source that only runs if TF2 is the current mod?

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

The Source engine powers more than just Team Fortress 2 so of course they'd be separate.

There might be some Team Fortress 2-specific stuff in the engine (certainly the GoldSource engine tweaks a couple of things based on which game is running) but I doubt it - the Source engine relies a lot more on expecting game code to implement a bunch of interfaces.

nomilk• 1 year ago

Never played the game, don't intend to, but huge respect to Valve for releasing the code! I wish more games studios would do this!

SLWW• 1 year ago

Missed out, when it was at its peak, true kino

teaearlgraycold• 1 year ago

Should I not be surprised that TF2 on its own, without the game engine's source code, is >1,000,000 LOC? That seems crazy to me. The full diff doesn't load on GitHub. Perhaps a lot of this is auto-generated.

parasti• 1 year ago

Ever wonder why TF2 stopped stopped receiving regular updates? My theory was always that the game had turned into a massive ball of code that nobody dares touch anymore.

LauraMedia• 1 year ago

The fact the entire code of the Source engine comes ontop of that...

It makes sense they decided to focus on Source 2 instead...

Imustaskforhelp7• 1 year ago

One of the few posts which had gotten me genuinely interested.

Shame that source itself is proprietory.But still its leaked so its "theoretically" possible to be open source. IDK.

Imustaskforhelp7• 1 year ago

By reading these comments on hackernews , I came across the bug report of asking source's code https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624

it was heavily disliked by people. So I think I have come across the solution of crowdfunding.

I have presented various benefits to the crowdfunding & I am writing this again so that this can be a comment of its own so that it can be much more easier for hackernews people to see I suppose for better discussion purposes I suppose.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/issues/624#...

remram• 1 year ago

Your tone is more likely to get them to never release anything again. Wtf.

Corrado2• 1 year ago

I wonder how this will affect the MegaCheatersDB (https://mcdb.neocities.org/) and the MegaAntiCheat system (https://github.com/oenu/MegaAntiCheat). Those projects are doing what they can to track down and label TF2 cheaters. I hope this helps them out.

On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers? That would be unfortunate indeed.

hofrogs• 1 year ago

It might make cheat creators life a little bit easier, but not by much. Security through obscurity is not a great practice in the first place, I think the benefits of allowing modders to make new games based on TF2 are much much greater than the potential damage from cheaters having to do less reverse engineering.

jamesfinlayson26• 1 year ago

On the flip side, does this SDK actually help bot makers?

I doubt it - there have been at three or four Source engine leaks over the years, as well as the Team Fortress 2 game code. I suspect anything they don't know they reverse engineer from the Linux and Mac builds, and I'm sure anything Windows specific is easy to find as they'd have IDA scripts to automate what they need to find.

WhereIsTheTruth• 1 year ago

github struggling to display that page is sad, github devs should feel embarrassed

jeroenhd2• 1 year ago

Maybe I'm closer to their caching servers but I'm not seeing any performance issues scrolling through this on my phone. That's despite Firefox on Android having a tendency to fall over because of memory leaks in addons.

maltris• 1 year ago

TF2 was a great game and a halloween tradition for me and some friends. Unfortunately it became public-unplayable with all the bots going on and around.

burrish• 1 year ago

This got fixed a while ago

rockbruno• 1 year ago

There's also some small HL3 files in the diff: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/commit/0759...

burgerquizz• 1 year ago

anyone would have recommendations on a lightweight physics engine in javascript? building my own js game now and having a hard time with movements and collisions. i would like to avoid importing a whole game engine library if possible.

nullbyte808• 1 year ago

Now if they just release the code for the Steam Client!

Valve releases Team Fortress 2 code

Related Stories