Source (game engine)

Source is a 3D game engine developed by Valve. It debuted as the successor to GoldSrc in 2004 with the releases of Half-Life: Source, Counter-Strike: Source, and Half-Life 2. Updates to Source were released in incremental versions, with the engine being succeeded by Source 2 by the late 2010s. Source distantly originates from the GoldSrc engine, itself a heavily modified version of John Carmack's Quake engine with some code from the Quake II 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 Bink Video for 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. The Source 2006 branch was the term used for Valve's games using technology that culminated with the release of Half-Life 2: Episode One. HDR rendering and color correction were first implemented in 2005 using Day of Defeat: Source, which required the engine's shaders to be rewritten.

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Day of Defeat

Day of Defeat is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter video game set in the European theatre of World War II on the Western front. Originally a modification of the 1998 game Half-Life, the rights of the modification were purchased by Valve and released as a full retail title in 2003. Set in the midst of World War II, Day of Defeat includes no single-player campaign, with focus left only on the game's multiplayer aspects. The game favors teamwork and features objective-based gameplay in combination with its system of classes.

Steam (service)

Steam is a video game digital distribution service and storefront from Valve. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide game updates automatically for Valve's games, and expanded to distributing third-party titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, like digital rights management (DRM), game server matchmaking with Valve Anti-Cheat measures, social networking, and game streaming services.

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter (FPS) game developed by Valve. It was first published by Valve for Windows through its distribution service Steam. Like the original Half-Life (1998), Half-Life 2 combines shooting, puzzles, and storytelling, and adds features such as vehicles and physics-based gameplay. Players control Gordon Freeman as he joins a resistance movement to liberate the Earth from the control of a multidimensional alien empire, the Combine. Half-Life 2 was created using Valve's Source engine, which was developed at the same time.

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