A Love Letter to The Source Engine

how many times do you think you've seen this screen in your life a hundred a thousand now i'm a particularly big geek and i have a bad habit of leaving games running overnight while i'm asleep but i did a bit of math i added up all my hours and all of my source engine games and landed at about 6874 hours that's a smidge over three quarters of a year and given that i'm 22 with the time of writing that means that my computer has been running the source engine for about 3.5 percent of my entire life and that doesn't even include certain source mods time spent on my dad or my friend's steam accounts or pirated copies from when i was really young with numbers like that i think it's fair to say that the source engine has changed my life half-life 2 is the game that made me buy my first computer that was actually mine there was a time in my life when i was getting into team fortress 2 where on certain nights i couldn't close my eyes without finding myself in a match my mind somehow managing to generate the actions of two whole teams worth of players in real times probably just the pretensions of a spy main a younger me once attempted to make companion cube and portal gun props out of pizza boxes and discarded milk chugs i've had dreams that took place on gm construct i've pushed myself to the absolute limit getting up to the second highest rank in competitive counter-strike supreme master first class hell a video i did on the half-life series essentially jump-started my career here on youtube and all of that's just scratching the surface so what's so special about source engine all of these games and memories could hypothetically have been made on any other engine but well they weren't one of the many ways the source engine has affected me through my life is that it basically inspired me to want to become a game director i'm working on my first proper professional design doc now however making a game takes lots of money to that end i'd like to thank today's sponsor atlas vpn atlas is running a pretty crazy discount right now giving away their three-year plan at just a dollar 39 a month check it out at the link in the description after the tf2 source code leak led to this major aimbotting crisis that the game is going through it seriously pays to have a bit of extra security you never know what these bomb makers are going to do next i mean shortly after the leak everyone was telling you not to play any source engine games online for a little bit but hey if that wasn't enough for you you can also use it to stream region lock content on netflix youtube or whatever else seriously you can watch the shining and full metal jacket just by switching your vpn to australia and of course it can help you get the best prices back in the day you could avoid paying taxes on steam games by just switching your store region with atlas vpn you can do that and more to get the best deals possible on all of your online shopping so again check out atlas's dollar 39 a month three-year deal with the link in the description alright back to the video valve did something special with the release of half-life 2 and counter-strike source these two games coming out within three weeks of each other were the first games released on the source engine and all of the assets were totally free to use by anyone for any purpose this might be outdated information but according to partner.steamgames.com you can sell a game made on the source engine without paying valve a dime the only caveat is that you need to pay a third party havoc a 25 000 licensing fee for their physics engine which source uses this is why something like hunt down the freeman is allowed to be on steam it's valve's policy to knock it all snippy about how the community uses its assets while hunt down the freeman is probably literally the worst game i've ever played this is the same laid-back attitude that allowed the creation of the stanley parable minerva metastasis research and development entropy zero vampire the masquerade bloodlines dark messiah of mayan magic team fortress classic synergy lambda fortress portal prelude portal reloaded portal stories mel double action boogaloo fistful of frags insurgency black mesa mission improbable dear esther the beginner's guide the list goes on and on and on and on and i haven't even mentioned gary's mod yet i've talked before about how a younger me appreciated halo 1 for not really trying to stop me from getting out of bounds and how it expanded my mind and kick-started my understanding that games were indeed made by fallible humans that inspired the hell out of me and made me realize that i could someday make a game if i wanted to source engine doubled down on this so so hard again the community was given the tools and the blessing to do essentially whatever they wanted with half-life 2 and counter-strike in future source games i mean if you want to break half-life 2 all it takes is about 3 seconds in the command console this right here is an amazing scene but all i have to do is type one command in the console to turn this mysterious space god who's the entire crux of half-life's cryptic story into a ragdoll or hey i could turn on noclip and use good old impulse 101 and go shoot dr breen in the head 10 seconds into the game changing the fate of humanity forever these are all just fun shenanigans but imagine what having this power means for a kid who's curious about how video games work if you didn't know anything about this stuff but had access to the command console a list of helpful commands courtesy of good old cheat cc.com and the entirety of half-life 2 you could learn so much about the technology and methods behind games just by screwing around with ai disable you can break a lot of the game's scripted sequences and slowly piece together how exactly a level in a video game works killing jimin in the beginning like that well that'll teach you that something as cool as the first g-man scene is really as simple as spawning a g-man character and telling him to say some words you wrote this stuff was huge to me as a kid those early years screwing around in source engine were quite literally the foundation for my entire understanding of the technical side of games and if that all wasn't enough to get you to install the source sdk and start making your own game or level a few years after half-life 2 came out you got the developer commentaries the area you're currently entering is called the cliffside arena we were particularly happy with the vertical cliffside in half-life 1 and regretted that we didn't iterate further on that concept in half-life 2. vertical space allows us to force the player to deal with threats from above and below we find that players focus their view on the direction they're travelling so by using a cliff side and having the player ascend it we ensure that the player will look up and be prepared for enemies if the player's path was to move past the bottom of the cliffside it would be unlikely he would notice soldiers rappelling down from above and dying from unknown threats never feels fair and certainly isn't fun this blew my mind when i was a kid hell it kind of blows my mind to this day i still very distinctly remember the first time i heard this particular commentary note in half-life 2 lost coast it shook me to the core it's when i realized just how much work thought and technique went into good level design and game design these commentaries are an absolute gold mine years of wisdom being passed down from top of their league game designers straight to anyone who's interested in a fun way that could keep the attention of any kid who liked these games so you've got this engine where the movement and physics feel really good it comes pre-packaged with a whole bunch of awesome weapons enemies models and textures a level editor to do whatever you want with them and a makeshift game design course to boot of course that was going to lead to an amateur gamedev revolution there have been so many incredible experiences made on this foundation each one of them helping to further inspire other creators and at one point amongst it all gary's mod cropped up as far as i'm concerned gary's mod is definitive proof that we're in the good timeline at least for gaming it's a creative utopia you can take every other game in my steam library and maybe you'll start to come close to the amount of unique experiences i've had with this game i've watched massive communities rise and fall i've seen amateur game devs make their dreams come true i've made friends enemies i've laughed i've cried i've created videos and memes and environments and wallpapers i've told stories i've gotten competitive i've been casual i've explored i've learned for god's sakes i've even gotten to play half-life 2 in vr i've done it all right here in this unassuming 10 package you can even mod in microsoft connect compatibility it might be a little janky but you can make anything with this game this game right here has been and is going to continue being responsible for so many people getting into game development because it and the source engine gave us the tools and the assets that are so hard to come by anywhere else and put them in an environment that's actually pretty easy to use when compared to most other game development packages hell even i've made a thing or two on source engine let's start with a fun one that i never thought i'd have any opportunity to talk about here call of herty a month or so ago me and a friend of mine were talking about the source sdk and he showed me some of his old high school projects that he had laying around embarrassingly his were all pretty awesome while my only project was well this a file called hurdy.zip had been sitting around in my google drive for about a decade and i finally had a reason to download it again and uh huh i guess i made it on the 2007 version of source engine weird well i couldn't manage to take down the strider without cheats luckily though i already had the command console enabled because i had to use it just to get into a level now this was a serious trip down memory lane i remember i made a couple other slightly more impressive maps but for some odd reason call of herti is the only one i decided to hold on to moral of the story i'm no game developer yet but i've still had over a decade's worth of fun with the source engine i remember way back in 2013 when gary's mod was first starting to get mainstream me and my friends would get home from school every day and start exploring the game mode list one of my favorites was always flood where everybody would build ships for a couple minutes then the map would flood and you'd try to destroy everyone else's ships then you had trouble in terrorist town still ridiculously fun to this day in fact i'd be playing it with my friends nightly if our server wasn't down right now it feels weird to have to explain what ttt is but well i hate to put it this way but it's basically among us with guns me and my old friends used to go crazy with this game always screaming at each other about who killed who and frankly that's still where i'm at in life after tct really blew up you started to see a bunch of clones each with their own little quirks and twists morbus was a particularly cool one and then there was murder and hide and seek and lots of other cool little games about deception come to think of it ttt kind of kick-started a trend on gmod for asynchronous multiplayer in general like the slender game mode where one person played a slender man while the rest of the server had to find the notes before they were all killed or prop hunt where one team has to disguise as props and try to blend in to slip past the hunters one of my favorite parts of all though is the rp side of gmod now i'm still a newbie to rp only now being caught up in my first real dnd campaign and only having done a little bit of real gmod rp recently unfortunately i'm kind of getting into gmod rp at the tail end of its life i mean 99 of the servers that we're doing actual role play are dead nowadays dark rp has kind of just turned into glorified cookie clicker and half-life 2 rp is basically just one or two good servers that are doing campaigns and whatnot but it wasn't always that way i remember playing tons of dark rp back when roleplay was a bit more of a focus in that game mode serious viewers might remember the cheesy minecraft my old youtube channel and minecraft server from back when i was known as papa cheese and my best friend was accordingly baby cheese one moment that i don't think i'll ever forget is when the cheesy minecraft hit dark rp after a couple hours of building up our drug lab we wound up in a gang war with some other player group we were just dumb kids who didn't really understand strategy and shooter games or anything like that so we had to rely on guerrilla tactics to beat these adults we were at war with i don't remember how exactly we changed our user names without anyone noticing maybe we flooded the chat maybe the server didn't announce name changes i don't know but we joined the enemy gang and over the next hour or so we worked our way up their ranks until we were face to face with their leader and i'll never forget the smirk on my face when i looked at the leader pulled out my gun and sat on the mic say hello to the cheese to then hear a grown man shout from the other side of the computer it's the cheeses before we gunned them down we quickly died and they immediately raided our own base in our absence but that's a moment that stuck with me so hard that maybe three years later i went ahead and made this bumper sticker at a school field day i hope i managed to find it because otherwise you're just looking at a photoshop recreation those were the old days of dark rp and i really feel like a boomer as i say that but anyways it wasn't exactly role play i mean we weren't playing as characters we were just doing some faction war stuff but there was real role play going on in gmod at the time too as i said earlier i'm just catching the tail end of this in 2021 the whole communities basically fell apart after an update to clockwork the mod that serves as a foundation to it all fragmented the gamemode's presence on the list but one of my best friends has been hosting a half-life 2 role-play server for years now running campaigns guiding players and their characters on these long intricate stories in the half-life universe just being part of such a creative community you sit down with anybody who was a part of half-life 2 rp and its best days and i guarantee they'll have a million stories for you that friend though he's been getting me on board the sinking ship that is gmod rp and even as the community is wrecked i've had some genuinely magical moments there over the last few months everything from sad genuinely gut-wrenching funerals for characters that we all loved to conspiracies to kill more problematic people in our group to betrayals from my own friends so many awesome stories have happened there on one server i was playing as penelope smith a spunky energetic survivalist girl turned absolutely pathetic alcoholic lamenting the loss of her mother to the combine after the first night we finally had a place to settle down only penelope didn't feel like settling down she stole some booze from one of the other people on the server and started cooking up some head crab legs she'd found that day before she passed out on the floor the building would have burned down on her watch if it weren't for the only person who was still putting up with her coming to her rescue trying to finish cooking the food before cleaning the bits of vomit off of penelope's unconscious face and turning her on her side so that she didn't drown in her sleep unfortunately penelope never got to have her redemption arc but man it was genuinely amazing role-playing her downward spiral into alcoholism and watching everybody else roleplay their character's reactions to losing a trustworthy friend to it seriously i hope that sandbox revives the role play community a bit because stuff like this is so special and it's all possible because the source engine and gmod gave somebody the tools they needed to make a role-play system that could support all of this and we're still basically at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the world of creativity that source engine has spawned i maybe have explored a 50th of the game modes the small little communities that have existed in gary's mod and that's just one game there are so many little communities that have existed in counter-strike team fortress 2 hl2 deathmatch and left 4 dead surf b-hop jump zombies jailbreak deathrun kz gun game mge trade servers team fortress mario kart volleyball mg that left for dead game mode where it's a huge team of infected against bot controlled survivors so many little game modes and that's all just off the top of my head then you've got the homebrew communities for playing the base games potato tf creators tf to name some of the more recent ones i guess facebook account too tons of others have risen and fallen before i ever heard of them then there are the communities of so many different team fortress or counter-strike youtubers lazy purple uncle dane stabby mr paladin three clicks fill of war owl wow such gaming forgive me if i'm missing some even my community with its love of half-life could count who mobile's weird maps series is a great look at some of these forgotten communities every single one of these and more has years of history in jokes drama high points and low points infamous members good years and bad years and that's not even counting the hammer and source filmmaker communities so much history between all of them and they all share one thing a love of the source engine and the things that's made possible for us the opportunities that it's opened up the friendships it's led to the hours upon hours of memories sure it could technically have happened with any old engine but there was something special about the source engine half-life 2 inspired the creation of the source engine sure but this legacy of nearly 20 years of friendship creativity and community this is what the source engine was really made for [Music] so [Music] [Music] before i close out this week's video and get to writing about the shadow of the colossus i'd just like to go ahead and verbally thank the patrons especially those who are donating 10 or more monthly on patreon such as ada avery almost dead again anatoly volnov andrew melnick antoine degette vinnie big time jim bobby blitz cj keane chompy uwoo christopher pinar colin gajek cosmo boerski darius fazier david kaiser denis voshakimer dominic johann duncan bristow fralem giles backers idubbbz ijk jack eisenberg jano kale graybill crit laffy mellow mixer rules neurofilter pj raptor ryan webster robert scotty for marketing celo tan man vivian cox william t kinvo yemen she zoe nish and zyroblee i'd also like to just thank everyone who's gotten this far for being patient with me over my two week break recently it was a bad time for me to take a break in terms of how the channel was doing but it was just basically necessary for my mental health and uh i'm sorry for the drop off in quality lately i feel a whole lot better about just where i'm at with the channel than i did before my break so hopefully this is a you know a change in the breeze for me i should also point out that i might be switching to doing videos every other week it just sort of depends on how i feel now that i'm back in my workflow but anyways thanks everyone for watching

Channel: Leadhead

Views: 406,942

Keywords: Source Engine, valve, steam, half, life, portal, team, fortress, TF2, l4d, left, dead, Gmod, Garry's, mod

Id: 9ojTBNfDKrw

Length: 18min 32sec (1112 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021