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CS: SOURCE

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The intense, real-time gameplay of Half-Life 2 is made possible only by Source, Valve's new proprietary engine technology. Source was built from the ground up by Valve and creates the most beautiful and realistic environments ever seen in a video game. In game characters have 40 distinct facial "muscles," and convey the full array of human emotion. The physics are also remarkable as they obey the laws of mass, friction, gravity, and buoyancy. Source contains robust networking code, providing support for 32-player LAN and Internet games, and inclues a complete toolset for level design, character animation, demo creation, and more. Below are the engine's features taken from the Source licensing page. Go here if you would like more information on licensing this amazing technology. Renderer

Version 2.0 (and below) shaders, bump mapping, LOD on models and world
Author shaders with HLSL
Cube and environment mapping
Dynamic lights, vertex lighting and light maps, many light types
High-Dynamic Range lighting
Water with refraction and fresnel effects
Advanced particle system that can emit sprites or models
Projected shadows allow for a large number of characters per scene
Occluder entities for visibility blocking
Indoor/Outdoor environments
- Deformable terrain
- 3D skyboxes extend the horizon and add parallax on distant objects
- Dynamically rendered organics (grass, trees etc)
Subdivision surfaces, diffuse & specular bump maps
Real-time radiosity lighting
Effects include but are not limited to: particles, beams, volumetric smoke, sparks, blood, environmental effects like fog and rain
Scalability
- Dx6-Dx9 hardware supported

Materials System

Instead of traditional textures, Source defines sets of materials that specify what the object is made from and the texture used for that object. A material specifies how an object will fracture when broken, what it will sound like when broken or dragged across another surface, and what that object’s mass and buoyancy are. This system is much more flexible than other texture only based systems.
Materials can interact with objects or NPCs such as mud or ice for vehicles to slide/lose traction on.

Multiplayer Network Code

Time and gamer tested by millions of gamers around the world
Support for both LAN based multiplayer and Internet based multiplayer games
Prediction analysis for interpolating collision/hit detection
Optimizations for high-latency, high-packet loss 56k connections

Advanced Characters

Detailed and believable characters
Realistic eyes
- Focus on player/object, not simply parallel views
- Proper eye “bulge” for realistic eye reflections
Simulated musculature provides emotions, speech and body language
Language independent speech, characters can naturally speak in many languages
Skeletal/bone system for animation
Layered animation system can synthesize complex animations out of several pieces

Physics

More responsive world with realistic interactions
Sounds & graphics follow from physics
AI characters can interact with physically simulated objects
Ropes/cables, machines, constraint systems,
ragdoll physics
Can be controlled by level design
Kinematic animated bone followers
Custom procedural physics controllers
Vehicles
- Wheels slip and skid
- Realistic suspensions with springs on each wheel
- Realistic leaning during acceleration/deceleration and turning
- Individually tunable parameters such as horsepower, gearing, max speed, shift speed, tire material, tire friction, spring tension/dampening etc.
- Multiple players in a vehicle in multiplayer
- Hovercraft support for cheaper simulation

Advanced AI

I/O system allowing level designers to control AI
Sophisticated navigation: characters that run, fly, jump, crouch, climb stairs and ladders, and burrow underground
AI senses things using sight, sound, smell
AI relationships determine friend/foe status of other entities
Battle AI allows squads of AI characters to operate together, know when to advance, retreat, lay cover fire, etc.

Sound

5.1 surround sound, 4 speaker surround
High-quality 3D spatialization
Custom software DSP
Automatic DSP based on environmental geometry
ADPCM decompression
16-bit 44KHz, stereo wave data with all features
MP3 decompression (requires Miles license)
Support for audio streaming on any wave
Real-time wave file stitching
Pre-authored Doppler effect encoded waves
Pre-authored distance variant encoded waves

Server browser - Displays all active game servers and allows a player to choose which one to participate on. Players can filter and sort server lists in order to speed up the display and selection of a server.
Friends instant messenger - Allows players to message each other both in and out of the game as well as join friends in existing games. No more confusion about what server your friends are on, you can easily join with this feature.
VGUI – Valve’s custom GUI interface mimics most of the windows controls but is rendered using the Source engine for both in game and out of game uniform UI display. VGUI is platform independent and is Unicode compliant for ease of localization

Programming

All code written in C/C++ using Visual Studio 6.0. Easily and quickly derive new entities from existing base classes.
Internal context sensitive performance monitoring system
Graphics performance measurement tools built into the engine
Modular code design (via DLL’s) allows swapping out of core components for easy upgrading or code replacement
Dx9 shaders all written in HLSL

Tools

Faceposer
- Facial expression tool used to craft speech and emotions
Valve Hammer Editor
- WYSIWYG World editor
- Create world brushes
- Terrain editor
- Place detailed world models and AI NPCs
- Set navigation points/paths for NPCs
- Place triggers, clip brushes, logic etc.
- Allows level designer to hook up I/O between entities to control AI
Half-Life Model Viewer
- Full model previewer
- Rotate models in any direction
- Setup hit boxes
- View physics hull
- View normals
- Wireframe, shaded or textured view modes
Studiomdl
- Model compiler
Vbsp, Vrad, Vvis, VMPI
- Map compilation tools (bsp, lighting and visibility)
- VMPI – distributed compilation tool allowing level compiles to be spread across many pc’s greatly reducing compile times
Exporters
- XSI, Max and Maya .smd exporters for exporting 3D models

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