as unity slowly vanishes, and unreal continues to breed unease in pursuit of the least sound impulses of tim sweeney, i sort of think valve could nigh-effortlessly clean up here and make the world a somewhat better place.
just shit out source 2 with source code access and an extremely permissive license and forget about it. approach support the way valve always has: mostly don’t do any. this is perfectly competitive with every engine besides unreal. nobody trusts a big company, but everyone trusts valve not to make any sudden movements. and there should be more than one viable general option for game dev.
in reply to @joewintergreen’s post:
I don’t think trust in Valve is necessarily good considering their unique position of power, but yeah they’re kinda the closest proxy to id circa the late 90s, except their tools situation is worlds better. Regardless yeah they absolutely need to release that shit. People would add Linux editor support in like a weekend.
Yeah, “trust” as it applies to Valve imo means trust in what other companies would regard as incompetence – you can count on them to just sit there doing nothing for decades at a time, and that’s kinda what you want at this point
yeah in this landscape, stability is a viable alternative to trust
Seriously. The things I value most out of id Tech 4 are A) source code access and B) the fact that shit doesn’t arbitrarily change. A stable version of Source 2 that satisfied those conditions would rocket to the top of my priorities to learn.
as opposed to…what
Just naming the variable for what it does?
Do we need to prepend every bool with a b and every integer with i, every float with an f and every class with C, or a T if it’s a template? It’s 2024, we’ve had tools to give us inlay hints for half a decade, and mouse over hints for 20. It’s not 1994 anymore. We can have nice variable names. The future is now
Oh, I thought you meant you didn’t want vars named after their purpose or some shit. I dunno, I work in unreal and don’t name my vars like that but can’t imagine minding either way really. Imagine you are a loose lily floating down an amber river
The thing that drives me nuts about Hungarian notation is that it was a good idea that was then broadly implemented with casual disregard to the original purpose and motivation. It was supposed to encode information that wasn’t present in the type system. If your language knows that a variable is an integer then you don’t need that i…but you might want a f or something to identify that it’s a set of flags, and this continues to be an idea worth considering in most common strongly-typed languages!
I don’t care if someone does or doesn’t use Hungarian notation. I mostly don’t. But the common pattern of “interesting idea applied too broadly without understanding the intent” drives me bonkers (and I’m not implying you’re doing this; you just accidentally activated this rant, I’ll leave now 😄)
Haha, agreed!
I’d been saying this for years, ever since getting my hands on Source 2’s level design kit with Half Life Alyx. It’s amazing, it feels amazing. I just want Source 2 to be released.
Sadly, I think the closest we’ll get is S&Box, which (unless Garry and co pivots to making it a full Source 2 SDK instead of a content platform), will be more akin to Gmod, Roblox, and Fortnite.
Tho tbf, we do need something to knock down Roblox (and Fortnite’s money pit).
I’ve lived the comfortable life of exporting old Hammer .vmfs to Godot.
I’ll have to switch to Hammer 2 eventually, but I’m too lazy to finish the exporter.
I have been there too in Unreal. It’s a simple life
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