Ex-Valve Employee Discusses Problems in CSGO’s Source Code

Valve developed the source engine with Half-Life and Half-Life 2 with regular updates in successive years. CS:GO is built on the Source code for Left 4 Dead 2. Recent reports have indicated CS:GO might soon port to the Source 2 engine.

A former Valve developer has recently spoken up about the various problems CS:GO developers faced with the Source 1 engine. Game developers have to deal with lines of unknown code in Source 1. 

The Source Engine: Ancient, Mysterious and Inefficient Code

The Source engine is a 3D game engine developed by Valve in 2004. The engine originates from the original GoldSrc engine, which itself is a modified version of John Carmack’s Quake engine. The earliest versions of the Source engine contained bits of Quake 2 code left over. 

There are still bits of early Quake code in Half Life 2. – John Carmack. 

These problems have continued through the years as former Valve employee, Richard Geldreich said recently. In a series of tweets, Geldreich laments about CS:GO’s spaghetti code which put forth a series of problems for developers working on CS:GO: 

“On Source Engine 1 you would see mountains of ancient code that nobody understood anymore. No one human understood the whole thing. It was impossible. Adding major new graphical features to the engine without breaking the universe became enormously difficult.”

For many years, the CS:GO community has criticized Valve for the lack of updates and graphic improvements to existing maps. One reason for the slow pace of development was significant amounts of old code. These codes were written by previous developers and it was near impossible for new CS:GO developers to pick it up and make changes without understanding. 

While adding new features, you couldn’t just wade in and disable or break code you didn’t understand or think wasn’t actually needed. Odds are that code was used somewhere in a way you couldn’t predict. This happened to me on CS:GO in surprising ways. – Geldreich

Valve employs a unique management structure based on little to no formal hierarchy, emergent order, and peer relations. The lack of hierarchy allows game developers to take on projects that interest them. But developers can also move on to other projects just as quickly, often abandoning existing projects for something new.

This work-format has reaped immense benefits for Valve. But with years of new codes and lines of ancient, often redundant code, new developers found it extremely difficult to make any changes to the game’s code without breaking the code. 

Also, if you touched the renderer, even in a simple way, and a team later encountered a rendering bug, you would be blamed and have to fix it. Even if the bug had nothing to do with your change. This taught programmers to not change anything unless absolutely necessary. Adding cascaded shadow maps to CS:GO (on Source 1) was a multi-month *herculean* effort. The stress on that part was off the charts.

It’s obvious from Geldreich’s comments that working on CS:GO codes in the Source 1 engine was a mammoth task for the developers. The lack of proper structure in the coding was often a major reason for the game’s slow development in its early years. Recently, there have been numerous reports about CS:GO shipping to the Source 2 engine. The Source 2 engine could bring about massive improvements in graphics and the game’s development. 

When will CS:GO Port to Source 2?

The source 2 engine will rearrange CS:GO’s code and bring improvements to the game.

There have been multiple reports of CS:GO moving to the Source 2 engine in recent months. Many of the game’s recent updates point towards potentially a new game or a new game engine for CS:GO. 

Leaks of source 2 code have been found in updates of other games by Valve data miner, Gabe Follower.

Source 2 was supposed to release earlier in the year. But the covid-19 restrictions and the confusion surrounding the CS:GO code has pushed back the release. There are reports of CS:GO source 2 releasing towards the end of 2020 or it could also stretch into 2021.

CS:GO has not received a major game update since last year’s Shattered Web operation. While there is no official release date for Source 2, CS:GO players can look forward to some drastic improvement in gameplay, graphics and faster updates with the Source 2 engine. 

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Source: https://news.unikrn.com/article/csgo-dev-interview-source-code-valve-source2-game-engine-n_rs?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=news