RIGHT: Squint, and
you can kinda see
Apex Legends’
Source engine roots.ANOMALOUS MATERIALS Fancy making your own maps?
2
SCRIPT IT
Need a loud bang to
accompany your jump
scare? Setting up a
brain-teasing puzzle?
Most actions can be easily
plugged in using in-editor
logic – no code required.3
LIGHT IT
Now, the fussy part.
Every light needs to be
hand-placed. Annoyingly
you’ll have to get your
map in-game before
previewing the scene,
which brings us to...4
BUILD IT, AGAIN
Go make yourself a
cuppa, because now
you’ve got to compile your
map. Give it a few
minutes, and before you
know it you’re walking
around your own creation.T
here’s a dead end
junction, late in
Half-Life 2’s airboat
segment, that’s fairly
easy to miss. It’s
nothing special to look at. A
concrete run-off with a few shanty
houses and a handful of zombies.
But this corner, with its distant
chirping of crickets and the sunset
baking the panelled walls in just the
right way, is special enough that I
always stop by for a visit when
returning to the game. It’s a corner
that perfectly captures the fleeting,
uniquely melancholy beauty of
Valve’s Source Engine.
The Source Engine, the software that
drove all of Valve’s games from
Half-Life 2 through Counter-Strike:
Global Offensive, came at a uniquely
transitory moment in game
development. It was the mid-2000s,
and 3D games were starting to look
pretty damn good. Ten years earlier,
and games were merely suggesting
spaces through blocky corridors. A
decade later, and we’re looking at
games that are near photorealistic.
Source bridged that gap. It’s at
once the last gasp of things like
bsp-based terrain, baked lighting, and
the entire field of level design, and a
peek at the lush, living words of
games to come. Over the past ten
years, developers have gotten really,
bloody good at wringing spectacular
landscapes out of the engine – but
they’re doing so with a level editor
built in 1997, using limitations laid
down in 2004.
It’s a bizarre tension, but one that
gives Source maps a strange, almost
haunted feeling. There’s an intangible
quality to the way Source levels are
lit. Sounds all echo just a little more
than you think they should. Hop into
an empty Garry’s Mod map, and the
sense of isolation is overbearing.
LEVEL WITH ME
It helps that, by a rough estimate,
there are probably 11 thousand billion
Source maps floating around the
internet right now. If Source is the
last gasp of ’90s design philosophies,
then it’s equally the last home for
community mapmaking.
Remember mapmaking? Out of
the current lineup of competitive
shooters, Counter-Strike: Global
Offensive is the only one that still
sports robust level-creation tools.
There’s a common sentiment among
the indie level design community that
the field is sort of dead, with modern
toolsets ditching efficient design tools
in favour of creating more complex,
jaw-dropping environments that are
harder to tweak on the fly.
Where Unreal and idTech used to
sport similar features, the kind of
tools that made constructing and
reworking arenas frictionless
disappeared with Source, and have
only really started to make a
comeback with... well, Source 2.
Source made it really easy to create
mods that looked ‘professional’,
without really having to get knee-
deep in learning game development.RESONANCE CASCADE
The Source Engine feels like a
snapshot of a singular moment in so
many ways. As mentioned, it’s a
transition between old and new
design sensibilities. For the cynical,
it’s a reminder of the time Valve
actually made games. Its modding
scene is a throwback to an internet
that hadn’t yet been consolidated
around a handful of websites, a
thousand pre-Twitter forums
gravitating around their own mods
and servers, creating worlds based ontheir own sensibilities. Source let
modders become developers, with
the folks behind the biggest mods
now among the more beloved indie
darlings. Through machinima and
Source Filmmaker, Source let
amateurs become animators.
Valve has moved on, and is fully
invested in Source 2. The engine
behind Half-Life: Alyx and Artifact is
every bit as capable as its predecessor.
Maybe even more so. But the internet
has moved on, and Source 2 has yet
to see the explosion of creativity thatdefined its predecessor. Maybe it’ll
get there in time.
The Source Engine lives on with
Respawn Entertainment. The tech
behind Half-Life 2 is the same tech
that powers Apex Legends. Sure,
Respawn has gutted the thing beyond
recognition, crafting worlds the
ageing engine could only have dreamt
of. But that’s only fitting for an engine
that itself is duct-taped together from
the scraps of Quake.
And sometimes, when the low
sunlight hits King’s Canyon’s walls
just right, I see the same warm,
intangible glow I fell in love with
back in City 17’s filthiest canal runoff.
I see Source, and I know I’m home.SOURCE MADE IT REALLY EASY
TO CREATE MODS THAT
LOOKED ‘PROFESSIONAL’1
BUILD IT
Source (and other
engines) use BSP terrain,
which basically means
dragging out boxes and
slapping textures on ’em.
Quicker than building
bespoke 3D models.EXTRA LIFE
DIARY I MOD SPOTLIGHT I REINSTALL I WHY I LOVE