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A company which actively develops software has the ability to snapshot a stable development tree and call it a "New Engine"? Shock horror. Fans of these games

A company which actively develops software has the ability to snapshot a stable development tree and call it a "New Engine"? Shock horror. Fans of these games blatantly don't know what an engine is; the difference between a graphics library and a suite of tools and code to create a game. Perhaps they are excited because the Valve developer wiki and Source Filmmaker have been teasing newer versions of the tools like Hammer, built with Qt. Valve have never been one for pushing the limits of GPU's, like Blizzard, so they don't limit their audience. id tech, unreal, and crydev are the ones showing off what they can do with OpenGL/DirectX, not Valve.

pja 14y ago
A company which actively develops software has the ability to snapshot a stable development tree and call it a "New Engine"? Shock horror. There does come a point where the architectural decisions made in the past no longer make any sense & core rewrite is in order. Valve are a quality company & know to avoid the second system effect. At some point you may as well label what you've written as a 'new system' even if you can trace its development path in an evolutionary fashion from the old to the new.
jordanthoms 14y ago
I'd argue that Valve was pushing the limits when Source first came out in 2004 - Half Life 2 still looks good today.
- rocky1138 14y ago
  At the time, Valve was pushing the limits of older hardware, that's for sure. The engine used to run perfectly on DirectX 7 cards, which were old even then. It was neat to be able to play a great-looking set of games even on older hardware and get good FPS doing so.
bonzoesc 14y ago
Anyone who read their new hire guide could come to the conclusion that there's a "new engine" in development at Valve. If you're working on projects in decentralized cabals and employ engine programmers, one of those cabals is probably working on engine tech.
mtgx 14y ago
Blizzard is pushing the limits of GPU? Diablo 3 merely requires a DirectX9 GPU.
- MrUnknown 14y ago
  He was saying that Valve is like Blizzard, in that they don't try to push the GPU
  - potatolicious 14y ago
    A game engine is more than its ability to push the GPU, and to be blunt this belief is why the video game industry is so stagnant but for a few innovators. The Source engine in its time was the gold standard for lip synching and emoting. When the unchallenged status quo at the time was flapping mouths Valve implemented full real-time phoneme lip synching as well as dynamic facial expressions - as well as the framework to do so under contextual cues from the game world. HL2 was heralded in its time for being able to tell stories at a deeper level because of this technology, and there was a great deal of hubbub around it, even in the mainstream press. Hell, even if we move away from artsy-fartsy things like emoting in gaming, Valve for a long time was the gold standard for their network engine. Following the basic network model as the original Quake engines Valve was able to achieve incredible reliability in client-side prediction and latency management - something most games in HL2's time were unable to do (remember every Battlefield before Battlefield 3?). There's a reason why major competitive multiplayer games grew out of that engine. So sure, Valve's engine can't render 1000 animated point light sources all at once, nor do they claim to do pixel-perfect real-time shadowing for an entire forest's worth of trees, but to say that Valve's engines aren't a huge step forward in gaming each time they are released is shortsighted.
    - frou_dh 14y ago
      If I recall, HL2 was also something of a milestone for gameplay-integrated physics. I spent many hours marvelling at all the stuff you could play with in the "pool room" in the leaked alpha.
    - 14y ago
br1 14y ago
To consider engine generations as separate and discrete entities stems from id software. The engines from Wolfestein, Doom, Quake, Q2 and Q3 were written from scratch each time. Once Carmack abandoned C for C++, throwing everything out stopped.
- pdmccormick 14y ago
  Give even a cursory review of code for those id Software titles to see that they were not rewrites from scratch (http://fabiensanglard.net/ http://fabiensanglard.net/ gives a wonderful overview of each.) Even without any revision history from one to the next, the structure of each code base shows a continuity and evolution of thought and design that disproves the theory. As I understand it, towards the end of the development cycle for each game, once the core tech was in solid and in place, John Carmack would branch off to aggressively pursue research and development on next gen graphics and tech, leading to a lot of new and rewritten and expanded code, yes, but still not starting from scratch each time. Historically speaking, his act of open sourcing those codebases and the chronicle of cutting edge graphics/gaming development that they represent is a significant record of and insight into one of our generations leading minds. His work ethic and dedication is pretty phenomenal, he is a big personal inspiration.

pja 14y ago

A company which actively develops software has the ability to snapshot a stable development tree and call it a "New Engine"? Shock horror. There does come a point where the architectural decisions made in the past no longer make any sense & core rewrite is in order. Valve are a quality company & know to avoid the second system effect. At some point you may as well label what you've written as a 'new system' even if you can trace its development path in an evolutionary fashion from the old to the new.

jordanthoms 14y ago

I'd argue that Valve was pushing the limits when Source first came out in 2004 - Half Life 2 still looks good today.

rocky1138 14y ago
At the time, Valve was pushing the limits of older hardware, that's for sure. The engine used to run perfectly on DirectX 7 cards, which were old even then. It was neat to be able to play a great-looking set of games even on older hardware and get good FPS doing so.

bonzoesc 14y ago

Anyone who read their new hire guide could come to the conclusion that there's a "new engine" in development at Valve. If you're working on projects in decentralized cabals and employ engine programmers, one of those cabals is probably working on engine tech.

mtgx 14y ago

Blizzard is pushing the limits of GPU? Diablo 3 merely requires a DirectX9 GPU.

MrUnknown 14y ago
He was saying that Valve is like Blizzard, in that they don't try to push the GPU
- potatolicious 14y ago
  A game engine is more than its ability to push the GPU, and to be blunt this belief is why the video game industry is so stagnant but for a few innovators. The Source engine in its time was the gold standard for lip synching and emoting. When the unchallenged status quo at the time was flapping mouths Valve implemented full real-time phoneme lip synching as well as dynamic facial expressions - as well as the framework to do so under contextual cues from the game world. HL2 was heralded in its time for being able to tell stories at a deeper level because of this technology, and there was a great deal of hubbub around it, even in the mainstream press. Hell, even if we move away from artsy-fartsy things like emoting in gaming, Valve for a long time was the gold standard for their network engine. Following the basic network model as the original Quake engines Valve was able to achieve incredible reliability in client-side prediction and latency management - something most games in HL2's time were unable to do (remember every Battlefield before Battlefield 3?). There's a reason why major competitive multiplayer games grew out of that engine. So sure, Valve's engine can't render 1000 animated point light sources all at once, nor do they claim to do pixel-perfect real-time shadowing for an entire forest's worth of trees, but to say that Valve's engines aren't a huge step forward in gaming each time they are released is shortsighted.
  - frou_dh 14y ago
    If I recall, HL2 was also something of a milestone for gameplay-integrated physics. I spent many hours marvelling at all the stuff you could play with in the "pool room" in the leaked alpha.
  - 14y ago

br1 14y ago

To consider engine generations as separate and discrete entities stems from id software. The engines from Wolfestein, Doom, Quake, Q2 and Q3 were written from scratch each time. Once Carmack abandoned C for C++, throwing everything out stopped.

pdmccormick 14y ago
Give even a cursory review of code for those id Software titles to see that they were not rewrites from scratch (http://fabiensanglard.net/ http://fabiensanglard.net/ gives a wonderful overview of each.) Even without any revision history from one to the next, the structure of each code base shows a continuity and evolution of thought and design that disproves the theory. As I understand it, towards the end of the development cycle for each game, once the core tech was in solid and in place, John Carmack would branch off to aggressively pursue research and development on next gen graphics and tech, leading to a lot of new and rewritten and expanded code, yes, but still not starting from scratch each time. Historically speaking, his act of open sourcing those codebases and the chronicle of cutting edge graphics/gaming development that they represent is a significant record of and insight into one of our generations leading minds. His work ethic and dedication is pretty phenomenal, he is a big personal inspiration.