Thursday, September 01, 2005

Half-Life 2 is one of the most successful video games ever. Valve’s award winning first-person shooter pushes the envelope in graphics, artificial intelligence, immersive surround-sound capabilities, and a riveting storyline. Did we mention you also get to save the world by blowing up aliens and taking out giant robots?

But what interests us most from a Coding4Fun perspective is that Valve makes a Software Developer Kit (or SDK) for their amazing game engine (called “Source”) available for FREE to Half-Life 2 customers! The Source SDK gives us access to a TON of game assets (maps, models, sounds, objects, etc.) and virtually all of the game engine’s C++ source code! By using Visual C++, we can create everything from minor tweaks (called ‘mods’) to completely new games (known as ‘total conversions’). In fact, popular games like Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat are two such ‘total conversions’ which were originally based on the first Half-Life game engine and have been subsequently revved to take advantage of the new Source engine.

This page is designed to help you get started and give you some pointers to the best community sites. This way you can get started coding for fun with the Source SDK!