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Their source code management must be an absolute disaster for these kinds of things to keep happening.
"Accidentally" keep happening. How the hell do you compile and push out code for a game you're not even updating at the time, accidentally?
Because all Valve games are mods all the way down.
When your game is a mod of a mod of a mod, this stuff happens.
I can understand bits and pieces, because that is very true with Valve... But the entire prototype?
for a 20 year old game it's probably only a couple of megabytes
There's actually some truth to this statement in general. Most games, at least the ones deriving from quake engines that i know of, have an engine(e.g. the exe) and a game (a dll/so) plus assets. When modding SDK-s are released, it's essentially the source code of the game section that when compiled needs the same engine to run. New games from a studio using the same engine are usually just forks of the previous game code. It's fair to reason that some code may be shared to get updates on old parts while developing a new game.
So yes, most games are mods of mods.
Because source shares code and assets between projects to cut down on development time
Or their marketing is decent
I'll take the bite for number 2.
I can see compiling happen accidentally, since it's probably just a compile flag and someone forgot to disable it. But pushing is really surprising, sure it can be automated, but usually you have a manual process for such things (e.g. my company's prod deployment is 100% automated, except for a manual approval step once everything is ready).
So the only way for this to happen imo is if they pushed something intentionally and has accidentally disabled/enabled a flag at some point prior.
It may very well have been two or more different people stepping on each other's feet in the dark.
I recall binge-ing Source leak summary videos. Everything that Valve uses that engine for is extremely tightly coupled.
Whenever CS:GO or Dota 2 gets an update, data miners get to work and discover a bunch of assets of unrelated source games.
Sounds like your company is doing things the halal way and using modern standards. At Valve, it's just a clusterfuck dev tool GUI on top of a monolithic codebase where no one can possibly know a fraction of what's going on.
Lol, I've been at places like that. Sounds awful.
Half of the IT industry running the world is probably still running on this.
Ew. Do they have no shame?
“Hey, you know what would be fun? Let’s release really old versions of some of our games - I think fans would get a kick out of seeing them!”
“Ugh, no. Why would we want to spend the money on testing and supporting something that only a small fraction of the player base would even care about?”
“Um, ok. How about if we “accidentally” push it with our next release. We won’t have to do anything to support it - modders willl figure out how to get it going, so we don’t have to do anything, and they get a fun Easter egg. Win win.”
“Accidentally?”
“Yeah. People will backfill some reasoning for how even though we’re a professional software company, we have no idea how source code control systems work. It’ll be fun to see what they come up with.”
Yeah, that's believable, esp given the culture at Valve.
I will never understand why Valve sits on their popular IP like L4D and Half Life instead of creating new content.
As much as everyone lauds valve, and its company structure, they do have problems with actually making things.
There's no real financial push to make things. They'll make the same amount this year if they release a new game or not.
So it's down to if people at the company want to make something. And it seems they choose hardware more often and struggle to get things to the finish line without any real push to make that happen.
Losing people like Chet Faliszek doesn't help much. People who got projects finished.
Tbf an environment where people can work on the things they want seems a pretty good one.
Like sure we aren't getting more games but idk the steam deck has been a wonder creation of theirs, plus feels a bit entitled to expect more sequels or games bc we are just consumers of their creation.
Not to mention the Steam Deck lit the fire under the asses of all the other manufacturers, if they weren't already developing handhelds. Quite a positive price and technology chain reaction.
And pushed Linux gaming into the spotlight once again!
Right. This is as close to a AAA/AA indie studio as we'll ever get. Studios who only make things they want to make on their own timeline not beholden to shareholders.
It's a unicorn that only works because they have a functional monopoly on PC game sales. Valve used to be exciting game developers, is all.
Their funding might have come from that, but in terms of design, the Steam Deck brings together the best parts of the Steam Controller and the Steam Machine, which individually weren't smashing successes, so I see it as iterative.
Great, if you like hardware. I enjoyed valve the game development company. I miss that, and I think that the success of steam and the loss of key personnel is the reason for it. That's all I've been saying this whole time
Totally fair stance to have. I was just responding to your point that the Steam Deck is "a unicorn that only works because they have a functional monopoly on PC game sales".
Tbf they only have a monopoly bc they are the only ones who are providing a good service and there just isn't much of a reason to use anything else. Nor are they hostile to competition
I think it's good, although the situation does seem to be somewhat dysfunctional on the game front. They've made literally dozens of projects, some near completion, all abandoned for one reason or another. I think this video does a good job of demonstrating it. It summaries a digital book called "Half Life Alyx: The final hours" written by a valve employee. Here: https://youtu.be/mHdrosltGJA?si=9TodoaYu95HMtRqf
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/mHdrosltGJA?si=9TodoaYu95HMtRqf
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
they put out Half Life Alyx like 2 years ago
and there's a Left 4 dead sequel
And it still is one of the best VR titles.
Because due to the "flat" corporate structure, it's based on having enough people be "passionate" about it to even get it started.
You might have half the staff "passionate" about Half Life 3, but when it comes to their individual ideas that make them passionate about it, they're actually all on wildly different pages about what they want to do and what technology they want to pursue. This means you'll technically have people on board, but because they're driven by different passions, its harder to get everything and everyone to "line up" so work can be started on such a big project.
It can leave gamers hungry for quality games, but I'm fine with all the work Valve is doing for Linux and Proton/Wine. I think those are important and worthy things to be spending time on, and I'm fine with not getting games from Valve in the meantime.
Because really, I've got Larian for that.
I've got Larian for that
A company that can count to 3. :P
U mean a company that is famous for making tools and hiring devs with their ideas and helping them to make games does what they are actually good at?
Look at it this way:
CS is the mod to Half-life
Portal is the college project or some sort of prototype (I don't remember correctly)
L4d is the mod to cs
Dota is the mod to war3
Dota underlords is same
Their only new in house game in past ten years is actually Artifact and it got bullied by media instead of actually giving a good feedback.
So, they just do what they always did - they support games they currently enjoying playing
Portal is the college project or some sort of prototype
It was a game designed in college but commercially published (by the college digipen) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narbacular_Drop
Also Portal 2 gets its gel mechanics from Tag : the Power of Paint, another Digipen student project.
Steam being a cash cow, a corporate structure that doesn't force some/most people to work on stuff they don't want to and internal politics that disincentivise people to go off on their own.
Not a bad way to generate some publicity...
Using version numbers to name a game that you're still updating is fucking weird. I would've figured valve would have well and abandoned 1.6 by this point.
I think It's just called counter strike officially, I'm not sure it actually says 1.6 anywhere anymore
At this point just release it for free
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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