Black Mesa, the fan-made Early Access recreation of the original Half-Life is still progressing towards finishing the final content and it's looking damn good.
In the latest update posted on Steam the team showed off some short clips of what to expect and honestly, it's looking gorgeous. The work they're doing might be some of the most impressive to be done with Valve's Source Engine:
They included a number of other impressive looking gifs but I will spare you including all of them here. The point is, work is progressing and the finishing line is finally actually approaching. They're going through optimizations to the Xen levels, to ensure " the game runs as smooth as possible on the myriad of machines out there". They've also gone through "significant progress with deep engine optimisations" and "several sweeping game-wide asset optimisation passes".
They also put out their plans for the release over the coming months, here's what they said about that:
Technical Beta - This will be a couple of maps to test the latest engine, and test the performance of our maps. This will be public, but more or less of a stealth release for people who are interested in helping us test. This way we can test on a lot of machines quickly, and have time to implement any crucial feedback.
Open Beta - After we have implemented the feedback from the technical test, we will push the entire game to open beta. This will give us testing for the rest of the levels to again make sure the game releases as smooth as possible.
Release - Though we are expecting all the betas to run well, if you have been waiting for the full Black Mesa experience, this is what you want to wait for. Once we know the beta does not set people’s machines on fire, we will switch the full game over to the main Steam branch and announce its full release! After this, we will continue to monitor feedback and ideas from the community for Xen, and release periodic bug fixes and updates.
You can find Black Mesa on Steam.
Quoting: lqe5433That is not open sourced enginewho said it was?
Quoting: lqe5433That is not open sourced engineIsn't Black Mesa supposed to run on Source Engine ? oO
Quoting: lqe5433That is not open sourced engineSource Engine, not open source.
Public Source
Libre Source
AFAIK the source code for the Source Engine is Public Source, of course the license is not Libre, and Documentation and Support are not up to the minimum standard most devs would require to bind themselves to selecting it as a fate.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013
IIRC Unreal 4 Engine is in the same boat, Public Source but not Libre Source
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 3 May 2019 at 6:26 pm UTC
Sorry to have started this discussion. But I still feel like a GPL-ed engine could go places if developers weren't afraid of that license.
Quoting: ElectricPrismIMO "Open Source" should be split into two new definitions:I think the term "Source Available" already exists for this kind of situation.
Public Source
Libre Source
AFAIK the source code for the Source Engine is Public Source, of course the license is not Libre, and Documentation and Support are not up to the minimum standard most devs would require to bind themselves to selecting it as a fate.
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013
IIRC Unreal 4 Engine is in the same boat, Public Source but not Libre Source
Quoting: PatolaQuoting: ElectricPrismIMO "Open Source" should be split into two new definitions:It would not be a "split". It would be something else. Open source was never meant to refer to proprietary code whose source you could read. There were already software with "readable" but not modifiable code decades ago, like the PINE email client. The Open Source definition is a very strict one, with 10 points the license must meet to be considered as such.
Public Source
Libre Source
Now, for Black Mesa... Will it leave Early Access before or after Star Citizen?
I wouldn't be surprised if the term had a loose meaning before the OSI came around and created a official definition for what "Open Source" is.
And if the OSI was there @ the beginning instead of tacking on meaning later, then they sure did a poor job selecting a naming schema that is articulate and accurate.
How much more could you fuck up. You might as well be Verizon + the FCC with the "Freedom Internet Act" which is basically the _ opposite _ of internet freedom for the individual and 100% bullshit.
Seriously I am not in the mood to be fed a line of bullshit about how the term "open source" was created with intentions on a specific meaning which is 100% clearly not in the name and confuses people down to this day in 2019.
Public Source and Libre Source will suffice for naming schemas following syntax that actually fucking makes sense so I am inviting anyone who wants to to use them when describing the nature of the code.
Last edited by ElectricPrism on 4 May 2019 at 5:31 am UTC
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