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54-465: GoldSrc (pronounced "gold source"), sometimes called the Half-Life engine , is a proprietary game engine developed by Valve . At its core, GoldSrc is a heavily modified version of id Software 's Quake engine . It made its debut in 1998 with Half-Life and powered future games developed by or with oversight from Valve, including Half-Life 's expansions , Day of Defeat and games in

108-416: A data-driven manner. Game-engine developers often attempt to preempt implementer needs by developing robust software suites which include many elements a game developer may need to build a game. Most game-engine suites provide facilities that ease development, such as graphics, sound, physics and artificial-intelligence (AI) functions. These game engines are sometimes called " middleware " because, as with

162-460: A scene graph —an object-oriented representation of the 3D game-world which often simplifies game design and can be used for more efficient rendering of vast virtual worlds. Most game engines or graphics engines use a Graphics API , which lets you easily communicate with the GPU . But older games did not have hardware acceleration or GPUs and had to build their own software renderer. As technology ages,

216-510: A compiled binary library . Some middleware programs can be licensed either way, usually for a higher fee for full source code. Counter-Strike Neo Counter-Strike ( CS ) is a series of multiplayer tactical first-person shooter video games in which teams of terrorists battle to perpetrate an act of terror (bombing, hostage-taking, assassination) while counter-terrorists try to prevent it (bomb defusal, hostage rescue, escort mission). The series began on Windows in 1999 with

270-577: A game for the Atari 2600 , for example, had to be designed from the bottom up to make optimal use of the display hardware—this core display routine is today called the kernel by developers of games for older systems. Other platforms had more leeway, but even when the display was not a concern, memory constraints usually sabotaged attempts to create the data-heavy design that an engine needs. Even on more accommodating platforms, very little could be reused between games. The rapid advance of arcade hardware —which

324-713: A run, rather than move at a constant speed like in earlier platformers. While third-party game engines were not common up until the rise of 3D computer graphics in the 1990s, there were several 2D game creation systems produced in the 1980s for independent video game development . These include Pinball Construction Set (1983), ASCII 's War Game Construction Kit (1983), Thunder Force Construction (1984), Adventure Construction Set (1984), Garry Kitchen's GameMaker (1985), Wargame Construction Set (1986), Shoot-'Em-Up Construction Kit (1987), Arcade Game Construction Kit (1988), and most popularly ASCII's RPG Maker engines from 1998 onward. Klik & Play (1994)

378-716: A series of loosely connected game middleware components that can be selectively combined to create a custom engine, instead of the more common approach of extending or customizing a flexible integrated product. However achieved, extensibility remains a high priority for game engines due to the wide variety of uses for which they are applied. Despite the specificity of the name "game engine", end-users often re-purpose game engines for other kinds of interactive applications with real-time graphical requirements—such as marketing demos , architectural visualizations , training simulations , and modeling environments. Some game engines only provide real-time 3D rendering capabilities instead of

432-430: A strong separation between rendering, scripting, artwork, and level design . It is now common, for example, for a typical game development team to have several times as many artists as actual programmers. First-person shooter games remain the predominant users of third-party game engines, but they are now also being used in other genres . For example, the role-playing video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and

486-428: Is a Japanese arcade adaptation of Counter-Strike published by Namco for Linux -based machines. The game is set in a futuristic version of Counter-Strike , with characters featuring anime-like designs. A selection of single-player missions, mini-games, and seasonal events were added to prolong the players' interest on the game. Counter-Strike Online is a free-to-play spin-off available in much of eastern Asia. It

540-617: Is a low cost robust audio library and toolset. Havok provides a robust physics simulation system, along with a suite of animation and behavior applications. Scaleform provides GFx for high performance Flash UI and high-quality video playback, and an Input Method Editor (IME) add-on for in-game Asian chat support. Other middleware is used for performance optimisation—for example ' Simplygon ' helps to optimise and generate level of detail meshes, and ' Umbra ' adds occlusion culling optimisations to 3d graphics. Some middleware contains full source code , others just provide an API reference for

594-472: Is a valuable advantage in the competitive video game industry . While there was a strong rivalry between Epic and id around 2000, since then Epic's Unreal Engine has been far more popular than id Tech 4 and its successor id Tech 5 . Modern game engines are some of the most complex applications written, often featuring dozens of finely tuned systems interacting to ensure a precisely controlled user experience. The continued evolution of game engines has created

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648-436: Is another legacy offering that is still available. The term "game engine" arose in the mid-1990s, especially in connection with 3D games such as first-person shooters with a first-person shooter engine . Epic games, founded by developer Tim Sweeney, debuted Unreal Engine in the year 1998. Such was the popularity of Id Software 's Doom and Quake games that, rather than work from scratch, other developers licensed

702-517: Is backwards compatible on the Xbox One console. On March 22, 2023, Valve announced Counter-Strike 2 , which utilizes the Source 2 game engine . It was originally announced as a free upgrade to Global Offensive with a summer 2023 release date. On September 1, 2023, it was released as a limited beta, and the game replaced Global Offensive on September 27. Counter-Strike Neo (stylized NEO)

756-468: The Counter-Strike series . GoldSrc was succeeded by the Source engine with the releases of Half-Life: Source , Half-Life 2 , and Counter-Strike: Source in 2004. The basis of GoldSrc is the engine used in the video game Quake , albeit with heavy modification by Valve. While the engine served as the basis for GoldSrc, Gabe Newell said that a majority of the code used in the engine

810-456: The GoldSrc game engine. On September 23, 2014, an open beta was released on Steam. The game launched on October 7, 2014, featuring 50 maps and 20 game modes. The game features both player versus player modes such as team deathmatch , hostage rescue, and bomb defusal, alongside player versus environment modes such as cooperative campaign missions and base defending. Reception from critics

864-481: The Half-Life GoldSrc engine, similarly to its predecessor. Besides the multiplayer mode, it also included a single-player mode with a "full" campaign and bonus levels. The game received mixed reviews in contrast to its predecessor and was quickly followed with a further entry to the series titled Counter-Strike: Source . Counter-Strike: Source was the first game publicly released by Valve to run on

918-913: The MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot are based on the Gamebryo engine, and the MMORPG Lineage II is based on the Unreal Engine. Game engines are used for games originally developed for home consoles as well; for example, the RenderWare engine is used in the Grand Theft Auto and Burnout franchises. Threading is taking on more importance due to modern multi-core systems (e.g. Cell ) and increased demands in realism. Typical threads involve rendering, streaming, audio, and physics. Racing games have typically been at

972-416: The business sense of the term, they provide a flexible and reusable software platform which provides all the core functionality needed, right out of the box , to develop a game application while reducing costs, complexities, and time-to-market—all critical factors in the highly competitive video-game industry . Like other types of middleware, game engines usually provide platform abstraction , allowing

1026-514: The 1980s that are also considered to be game engines, such as Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI) and SCI systems, LucasArts' SCUMM system and Incentive Software 's Freescape engine (in 1986 ). Unlike most modern game engines, these game engines were never used in any third-party products (except for the SCUMM system which was licensed to and used by Humongous Entertainment ). As game engine technology matures and becomes more user-friendly,

1080-502: The GoldSrc engine. Although Valve's further installments in the series starting with Counter-Strike: Source use the newer Source engine instead, Counter-Strike Online and Counter-Strike Nexon , two spinoff titles released by Nexon in 2008 and 2014 respectively, use GoldSrc as their basis. The GoldSrc engine was also used for a variety of third-party games and modifications not directly developed by Valve. Rewolf Software used

1134-535: The Source engine. Counter-Strike: Source was initially released as a beta to members of the Valve Cyber Café Program on August 11, 2004. On August 18, 2004, the beta was released to owners of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and to those who had bought ATI Radeon video cards bundled with a Half-Life 2 voucher. While the original release only included a version for Microsoft Windows,

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1188-484: The Xbox Live Indie Games channel designed specifically for smaller developers who do not have the extensive resources necessary to box games for sale on retail shelves. It is becoming easier and cheaper than ever to develop game engines for platforms that support managed frameworks. Producers of game engines decide how they allow users to utilize their products. Just as gaming is an industry , so are

1242-834: The application of game engines has broadened in scope. They are now being used for serious games : visualization, training, medical, and military simulation applications, with the CryEngine being one example. To facilitate this accessibility, new hardware platforms are now being targeted by game engines, including mobile phones (e.g. Android phones, iPhone ) and web browsers (e.g. WebGL , Shockwave , Flash , Trinigy 's WebVision, Silverlight , Unity Web Player , O3D and pure DHTML ). Additionally, more game engines are being built upon higher level languages such as Java and C# / .NET (e.g. TorqueX , and Visual3D.NET ), Python ( Panda3D ), or Lua Script (Leadwerks). As most 3D rich games are now mostly GPU -limited (i.e. limited by

1296-438: The components of an engine may become outdated or insufficient for the requirements of a given project . Since the complexity of programming an entirely new engine may result in unwanted delays (or necessitate that a project restart from the beginning), an engine-development team may elect to update their existing engine with newer functionality or components. Before game engines, games were typically written as singular entities:

1350-428: The core portions of the software and designed their own graphics, characters, weapons and levels —the "game content" or "game assets". Separation of game-specific rules and data from basic concepts like collision detection and game entity meant that teams could grow and specialize. Later games, such as id Software 's Quake III Arena and Epic Games 's 1998 Unreal were designed with this approach in mind, with

1404-672: The development software supporting this framework, typically a suite of tools and features for developing games. Developers can use game engines to construct games for video game consoles and other types of computers . The core functionality typically provided by a game engine may include a rendering engine ("renderer") for 2D or 3D graphics , a physics engine or collision detection (and collision response), sound , scripting , animation , artificial intelligence , networking , streaming, memory management , threading , localization support, scene graph , and video support for cinematics . Game engine implementers often economize on

1458-519: The development team was hired by Valve in 2000, when the company acquired the rights to Counter-Strike . The game received a port to Xbox in 2003. It was also ported to OS X and Linux in the form of a beta in January 2013. A full release was published in April 2013. Counter-Strike was followed up with Counter-Strike: Condition Zero , developed by Turtle Rock Studios and released in 2004. It used

1512-404: The end of each round, players are rewarded based on their individual performance with in-game currency to spend on more powerful weapons in subsequent rounds. Winning rounds results in more money than losing and completing objectives such as killing enemy players gives cash bonuses. Uncooperative actions, such as killing teammates , result in a penalty. Originally a modification for Half-Life ,

1566-516: The engine and content developed separately. The practice of licensing such technology has proved to be a useful auxiliary revenue stream for some game developers, as one license for a high-end commercial game engine can range from US$ 10,000 to millions of dollars, and the number of licensees can reach several dozen companies, as seen with the Unreal Engine . At the very least, reusable engines make developing game sequels faster and easier, which

1620-506: The engine for the game Gunman Chronicles in 2000, and the PC version of James Bond 007: Nightfire was developed by Gearbox Software using a modified version of GoldSrc in 2002. Unofficial, community-made modifications of GoldSrc have also been produced. Notable games include Natural Selection , Cry of Fear and Sven Co-op , with Valve's Team Fortress Classic , Counter-Strike , and Day of Defeat all being based on GoldSrc mods of

1674-434: The engines they are built off. The major game engines come at varying prices, whether it be in the form of subscription fees or license payments. Unity and the Unreal Engine are currently the two most popular choices for game developers. Although the differences among the different game engines blur as they build their own tools on top of them, different game developers may be too used to a system to change, or attracted by

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1728-477: The forefront of threading with the physics engine running in a separate thread long before other core subsystems were moved, partly because rendering and related tasks need updating at only 30–60 Hz. For example, on PlayStation 3, physics ran in Need For Speed at 100 Hz versus Forza Motorsport 2 at 360 Hz. Although the term was first used in the 1990s, there are a few earlier systems in

1782-460: The game eventually received a port to OS X on June 23, 2010, with a Linux port afterwards in 2013. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was the fourth release in the main, Valve-developed Counter-Strike series in 2012. Much like Counter-Strike: Source the game runs on the Source engine. It was available for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and Linux, as well as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles, and

1836-456: The game was released by independent developers in 2008. Half-Life: Decay was the final iteration in the Half-Life series to run on GoldSrc, with all future entries in the series using the Source and Source 2 engines. Valve developed several games using the GoldSrc engine, many of which were based on original user-made modifications. Valve's Team Fortress Classic , released in 1999,

1890-704: The huge benefits of such engines regardless of pay-walls. In the broader sense of the term, game engines themselves can be described as middleware. In the context of video games, however, the term "middleware" is often used to refer to subsystems of functionality within a game engine. Some game middleware does only one thing but does it more convincingly or more efficiently than general purpose middleware. The four most widely used middleware packages that provide subsystems of functionality include RAD Game Tools ' Bink, Firelight FMOD , Havok , and Scaleform GFx. RAD Game Tools develops Bink for basic video rendering, along with Miles audio, and Granny 3D rendering. Firelight FMOD

1944-694: The largest tournaments for the Counter-Strike series up to 2007. Since 2013, the Valve-sponsored Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Major Championships have become the most prestigious tournaments in the franchise's history, featuring prize pools of around $ 1,000,000. Counter-Strike is considered one of the most influential first person shooters in history. The series has a large competitive community and has become synonymous with first person shooters. As of August 2011 ,

1998-537: The main series, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive , was released by Valve in 2012 for Windows, OS X , Xbox 360 , and PlayStation 3 . Hidden Path Entertainment , who worked on Counter-Strike: Source post-release, helped to develop the game alongside Valve. Counter-Strike 2 was announced in March 2023 and publicly released on September 27, 2023, as a replacement for Global Offensive . There have been several third-party spin-off titles created for Asian markets over

2052-484: The mid-1980s was the smooth side-scrolling engine developed by Shigeru Miyamoto 's team at Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). The engine they had developed for the side-scrolling racing game Excitebike (1984) was later employed for the scrolling platformer Super Mario Bros. (1985). This had the effect of allowing Mario to smoothly accelerate from a walk to

2106-511: The power of the graphics card), the potential slowdown due to translation overheads of higher level languages becomes negligible, while the productivity gains offered by these languages work to the game engine developers' benefit. These recent trends are being propelled by companies such as Microsoft to support indie game development. Microsoft developed XNA as the SDK of choice for all video games released on Xbox and related products. This includes

2160-423: The process of game development by reusing/adapting, in large part, the same game engine to produce different games or to aid in porting games to multiple platforms. In many cases, game engines provide a suite of visual development tools in addition to reusable software components. These tools are generally provided in an integrated development environment to enable simplified, rapid development of games in

2214-409: The release of the first game, Counter-Strike . It was initially released as a modification ("mod") for Half-Life that was designed by Minh "Gooseman" Le and Jess "Cliffe" Cliffe before the rights to the mod's intellectual property were acquired by Valve , the developers of Half-Life , who then turned Counter-Strike into a retail product released in 2000. The original Counter-Strike

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2268-401: The same game to run on various platforms (including game consoles and personal computers) with few, if any, changes made to the game source-code . Often, programmers design game engines with a component-based architecture that allows specific systems in the engine to be replaced or extended with more specialized (and often more expensive) game-middleware components. Some game engines comprise

2322-570: The same names. Sven Co-op have since been released for free as a standalone game on Steam , which use a licensed derivative of the engine with their own customizations. The Xash3D project and forks use Quake engine source code in part, as well as the Half-Life SDK , to recreate GoldSrc and run its various mods on different platforms. The FreeHL and FreeCS ports also utilize QuakeWorld code as well as clean-room reverse engineering . Game engine Game engine can also refer to

2376-470: The second branch, while the "Src" branch evolved into the Source engine. Valve released versions of the GoldSrc engine for OS X and Linux in 2013, eventually porting all of their first-party games using the engine to the platforms by the end of the year. Half-Life was Valve's debut title and the first to use GoldSrc. It received critical acclaim, winning over fifty PC Game of the Year awards. The game

2430-515: The time of release. The GoldSrc engine initially had no real name and was simply called the Half-Life engine. When the need arose for Valve to work on the engine without risking introducing bugs into Half-Life ' s codebase, Valve forked the code, creating two main engine branches : one gold master branch, "GoldSrc", and the other "Src". Internally, any games using the original branch were referred to as "Goldsource" to differentiate it from

2484-660: The wide range of functionality needed by games. These engines rely upon the game developer to implement the rest of this functionality or to assemble it from other game-middleware components. These types of engines are generally referred to as a "graphics engine", "rendering engine", or "3D engine" instead of the more encompassing term "game engine". This terminology is inconsistently used, as many full-featured 3D game engines are referred to simply as "3D engines". Examples of graphics engines include: Crystal Space , Genesis3D , Irrlicht , OGRE , RealmForge, Truevision3D, and Vision Engine . Modern game- or graphics-engines generally provide

2538-610: The years. These include the Counter-Strike Online series, Counter-Strike Neo , and Counter-Strike Nexon: Studio . Counter-Strike is an objective-based, multiplayer tactical first-person shooter . Two opposing teams—the Terrorists and the Counter Terrorists—compete in game modes to complete objectives, such as securing a location to plant or defuse a bomb and rescuing or guarding hostages. At

2592-630: Was created by Valve. GoldSrc's artificial intelligence systems, for example, were essentially made from scratch. The engine also uses some code from other games in the Quake series , including QuakeWorld and Quake II . In 1997, Valve hired Ben Morris and acquired Worldcraft , a tool for creating custom Quake maps. The tool was renamed Valve Hammer Editor and became the official mapping tool for GoldSrc. The engine supports skeletal animation , which allowed for more realistic body kinematics and facial expression animations than most other engines at

2646-545: Was developed by Nexon , with oversight from Valve . It uses a micropayment model that is managed by a custom version of the Steam back-end . Announced in 2012 and aimed at the Asian gaming market, a sequel titled Counter-Strike Online 2 was developed by Nexon on the Source game engine and released in 2013. In August 2014, Nexon announced Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies , a free-to-play, zombie-themed spin-off, developed on

2700-516: Was developed primarily by two of the developers of the Quake mod Team Fortress . Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat were also originally Half-Life modifications that Valve purchased the rights to and re-released as standalone titles. Counter-Strike evolved into its own series with the debut of the Japanese arcade game Counter-Strike Neo in 2003 and Valve's own follow-up in 2004, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero , both of which run on

2754-468: Was followed by Counter-Strike: Condition Zero , developed by Turtle Rock Studios and released in March 2004. A previous version of Condition Zero that was developed by Ritual Entertainment was released alongside it as Condition Zero: Deleted Scenes . Eight months later, Valve released Counter-Strike: Source , a remake of the original Counter-Strike and the first in the series to run on Valve's then-newly created Source engine . The fourth game in

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2808-449: Was followed up with two expansions, Half-Life: Opposing Force and Half-Life: Blue Shift , both of which ran GoldSrc and were developed by Gearbox Software . Half-Life: Decay , an expansion pack for Half-Life only released on PlayStation 2 , was released in 2001 alongside Half-Life 's debut on the platform. Unlike other games in the series, it never received an official version for Windows , however an unofficial version of

2862-583: Was generally negative, with criticism aimed at the game's poor user interface, microtransactions, and dated graphics. On October 30, 2019, Counter-Strike Nexon: Zombies was renamed to Counter-Strike Nexon: Studio . Counter-Strike has over 20 years of competitive play beginning with the original Counter-Strike . The first major tournament was hosted in 2001 at the Cyberathlete Professional League which, along with World Cyber Games and Electronic Sports World Cup , were among

2916-596: Was the leading edge of the market at the time—meant that most of the code would have to be thrown out afterwards anyway, as later generations of games would use completely different game designs that took advantage of extra resources. Thus most game designs through the 1980s were designed through a hard-coded rule set with a small number of levels and graphics data. Since the golden age of arcade video games , it became common for video game companies to develop in-house game engines for use with first-party software. A notable example of an in-house game engine on home consoles in

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