Game Engine Showdown!

Engine developer: Valve
Summary: Old reliable
First game: Counter-Strike: Source
Release date: October 2004
Platform: PC

Four years is a long time in the games industry – even longer for an engine. Yet, here we are in 2008, and Valve continues to fight the good fight with Source.

Yes, the technology could be considered a relic if you were to place it against the fast pace of graphics accelerators. Considering this, Source might as well be an M1 Garand compared to the sophisticated mechanics of Epic’s F88 Austeyr-like UE3.

Of course, when Valve licensed the Quake-based Quake 2 engine from id, it made numerous upgrades including skeletal animation and 32-bit colour, for GoldSrc, which eventually became Half-Life. Half-Life was again vamped with Havok physics, shader support and advanced facial animation, which gave us Source and Half-Life 2. Half-Life 2: Episode One brought normal maps and high-dynamic range lighting and, according to Valve, Half-Life 2: Episode Two will deliver multi-threading, dynamic lighting, full-motion blur and a soft particle engine. It is testament to Source’s modularity that, despite its age, it’s managed to keep up with the best from Epic, and even Crytek.

One upcoming title that will use the latest Source is Dark Messiah of Might & Magic: Elements, an Xbox 360-only game being developed by Ubisoft Annecy. Coming from the Unreal Engine - having worked on Splinter Cell - the Annecy team found Source’s flexibility both a blessing and a curse.

‘Compared to Unreal, it is definitely a very permissive and very powerful engine that enables you to prototype very quickly,’ producer Daniel Palix explains. ‘This permissiveness has some drawbacks, however, as you can generate tricky bugs as well.’

The Xbox 360 is a new frontier for Source, which has been most dominate on PC. This fact has not phased Annecy however.

‘[The] Xbox 360 is definitely a viable platform for Source,’ he says. ‘We managed to compress all the data to fit in memory. With the help of Valve, we managed to optimise the engine, include multi-core and reach a good frame rate.’

Palix admits that achieving this result took more time than the team anticipated. He also revealed that the version of Source provided by Valve did not include the dynamic lighting that will be present in HL2: E2, and Annecy had to add in its own implementation.

By coincidence, the now-defunct Troika also had to make do with a less-capable version of Source – specifically its lack of dynamic lighting. With its FPS/RPG Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, Troika not only went to the effort of writing its own lighting code, but added a better particle system and cloth simulation, according to our interview with former CEO Leonard Boyarsky back in issue 48. At the time of the interview however - and to be expected - we didn’t get the entire story.

In a 2006 interview with online mag The Escapist on the downfall of Troika, Boyarksy revealed that the developer had to work with a prototype version of Source that lacked AI code, forcing the developer to make its own from scratch.


Strengths: Modularity in spades. What Source may lack in visual power, it makes up for by being extremely flexible to the demands of the developer.

Source also sports an OpenGL renderer, an option sorely lacking in almost every other commercial engine available, and makes the potential for porting to the Direct3D-less PS3 less of a hassle.

In addition, having been built with Direct3D 6 as the baseline, the engine can potentially scale as far back as the original GeForce, if not further.

And who could forget that facial animation. Source’s implementation has yet to be bettered, and it was one of the big selling points for Troika with Bloodlines.

Weaknesses: Most of Source’s weaknesses stem from its strengths. Backwards compatibility somewhat limits how crazy Valve can go embracing the top-end. Keeping both a D3D and OGL renderer up to scratch is likely a burden as well.

And it’s hard to sell yourself as the cutting edge when you’re using the same BSP format for maps that id used in Quake. In fact, it’s possible to load maps from Half-Life into the original Quake, without modification.