You make me feel old for realising people younger than me have not ever realised this. But it makes sense now I type it… out loud(?)
Back in my day the Steam UI was army green and you’d use it to play all the LAN games your mate had by copying their entire Steam folder over to yours a couple hours before the LAN started. And that was it. That was the “install”. You had Steam and all the HL mods like DoD and CS. Primed and ready to get noise complaints from the neighbours.
Instead the story is that the source engine was located in the “Src” directory in their Visual Source Safe. And the Half Life 1 engine was in a separate branch named GoldSrc because it was about to ship real soon, and they needed to keep changes to a minimum.
That’s not why it’s called that. The real reason is that they didn’t bother ever giving it a name. When they needed a stable fork so they could further develop the engine without interfering with the development of Half-Life, they referred to the two source codes “GoldSrc” and “Src” and the name stuck.
Their engine is called source.
The collection of libraries valve release to use steam (the piping, if you will), is called steamworks.
How is ‘source’ part of the metaphor?
Source and sink (source and drain) are commonly used to describe the movement of fluids / electricity.
It’s where water comes from :)
You make me feel old for realising people younger than me have not ever realised this. But it makes sense now I type it… out loud(?)
Back in my day the Steam UI was army green and you’d use it to play all the LAN games your mate had by copying their entire Steam folder over to yours a couple hours before the LAN started. And that was it. That was the “install”. You had Steam and all the HL mods like DoD and CS. Primed and ready to get noise complaints from the neighbours.
The day I tried installing HL2 is still the worst gaming experience in my life.
Would have been cooler if they named their engine Vapor instead
Yeah but then it would be vaporware
HL3 confirmed.
Thats the joke
it was 3/4 of a joke at best, it was missing that final umph.
⅔ of a joke, if you will
Instead the story is that the source engine was located in the “Src” directory in their Visual Source Safe. And the Half Life 1 engine was in a separate branch named GoldSrc because it was about to ship real soon, and they needed to keep changes to a minimum.
Also Steam Boxes should have been called Boilers. Maybe then they would have succeeded.
The code name of the first Steam Box, before it was released, was Piston, which fits the theme pretty well. e.g. https://www.polygon.com/2013/1/7/3849284/piston-valve-steam-box-xi3
They should make a single home stambox like a console version of the Deck, and call it the Engine
And game saves are saved to steam cloud
Clouds form when there’s vapor 🤷
That’s not why it’s called that. The real reason is that they didn’t bother ever giving it a name. When they needed a stable fork so they could further develop the engine without interfering with the development of Half-Life, they referred to the two source codes “GoldSrc” and “Src” and the name stuck.
boooo
Sure, but the pun still works.