In the medium sized category, Valve is the obvious odd child. They have a small number of employees, but they also famously make Steam. This certainly requires a large amount of engineering effort, but also brings in literal billions in cash. They could almost certainly afford to outsource the creation of a custom game engine, since they have the cash flow and it’s probably not as core an activity as maintaining Steam.
But it could also be in house. I don’t have a feel for how many engineers it takes to make a game engine.
A game engine is really a project that scales really well with the size of the team. There are a monumental number of things you could put into one so they will swallow any number of engineers you throw at them.
For comparisons you have PICO-8 which is an intentionally super limited but fully integrated game engine made by one person.
Then you have Unity which is a very featureful engine, ported to every commercial platform with a vast toolset and side offerings which arguably has lost sight of a bunch of the game engine part of things because they have the capability to spin so many plates and a business incentive to drive revenue by getting people to sign up to extra services.
Well, before Steam was the behemoth it is today, all they had was the Source engine. Back when it first came out, everyone I know _hated_ Steam, but you had to install it to play Half Life 2 with it's new graphics, physics and facial animations.
And now with Valve pushing VR strongly, I imagine we're going to see the same thing. You want to play Half-Life Alyx with the all new Source engine built for VR? You gotta buy our headsets and use Steam VR home for the best experience!
For Valve, having the Source engine in-house always gives them that extra bargaining chip when they want to push something new.
GoldSrc actually - the HL1 engine. Which was built off a heavily modified Quake engine.
> Back when it first came out, everyone I know _hated_ Steam
That was 16 years ago and 90 million users ago. Yes it was shaky and had issues back then (I was a very early account signup), but again a long time ago.
> You want to play Half-Life Alyx with the all new Source engine built for VR? You gotta buy our headsets and use Steam VR home for the best experience!
No. You don't need their hardware. I'm using HP WMR without issue and have completed HL: Alyx. Yes, Valve's controllers are top notch, but you don't have to use them. And SteamVR is just part of Steam, and if you want to play any Valve game, you have to use Steam.
Speaking of HP. HP and Valve have been apparently working on some new things together, so I would imagine there are going to be more/better VR options down the line.
Speaking of Valve's source engine, in the recent chat log leaks, the Valve employee says the Source 2 engine is essentially just the Source 1 engine with new physics tacked on.
I don’t know why this would be surprising. They’re not gonna exactly throw everything away and start over, are they? Just like the Source engine is derived from the “GoldSrc” engine, which is the terrible name for the engine that Half Life used, and that engine is derived from the Quake engine.
You only make the changes necessary to update it for new hardware. For example, you throw away the old BSP rendering code, as elegant as it is, because it’s designed to get good performance on a Pentium 90 and modern computers just aren’t like that. It’s the ship of Theseus.
At the very least they added a Vulkan renderer too.
But at the end of the day Source 1 is also just a modified GoldSrc engien which is just a modified Quake engine. Doesn't really mean much when there have been extensive modifications over time.
The renderer and tooling were heavily overhauled, though it's hard to say if that's a "Source 2" thing. Engines are worked on constantly, systems are constantly being modified and features are added. Deciding to add a 2 at the end is mostly a marketing decision, since gamers fall for that hard.
I worked on an engine that, despite multiple huge overhauls and tech improvements motivated by our games, people suggested it was "the same buggy engine" as the first game we released since we didn't change the name for our in house toolset.
I guess in comparison to how far other storied engines such as UE4 have come, Source 2 does feel like its much less of a step forward.
One thing I really like is the level editor tools, with Hammer for source 2 they've re-implemented BSP geometry tools with geometry tools that use static meshes.
A good/modern geometry level editor workflow is sorely lacking on the other available engines.
I really agree here. I've used Hammer since... well since it was Worldcraft and I used it for Quake levels. Maybe it's a VI vs EMACS type thing, but I latched onto it pretty quickly, and have always found it the easiest editor to use.
I'm really curious how they will expand it for VR level editing with the Alyx release. One thing I think you'd need is a way to quickly view the environment in VR while editing. This seems really important if you want to carefully craft some specific visuals for VR, or certain interactions. Can for example the player stand next to a hole in a wall and reach through it to access something.
But it could also be in house. I don’t have a feel for how many engineers it takes to make a game engine.