GoldSrc

"Powered by the Half-Life engine" logo used on some game boxarts.

GoldSrc (also known as GoldSource) is a 3-D video game engine created by Valve in 1996. It was the driving force behind many famous games of the late 90s, such as Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, and Counter-Strike. GoldSrc is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, and runs on C++ programming code. GoldSource and its level editor, the Hammer World Editor, were released by Valve for public use, making it the source of countless community-made modifications.

GoldSrc was replaced by its sequel engine, Source, in 2004, which currently holds 1st place as the choice for modders. Though GoldSrc is past its prime, many gamers still seek to use it for mods and level design.

Screenshot in-game of Half-Life, using the GoldSrc Engine.

Features

• AI flocking - NPCs can group together, seen with Houndeyes;
• Skeletal animation - allowing for easier animating of models;
• Colored lighting - Quake simply had monotone lighting;
• Scripted sequences - Used extensively to tell Half-Life's story;
• Transparent textures - Glass can now be used in maps;
• Higher poly counts - GoldSrc allows for far more detailed models than Quake.

SDK

Template:ModernTodo The GoldSrc SDK is known as the Half-Life SDK. As of August 2013, it is available on Steam under the "Tools" section. With it comes Hammer 3.4, the 3ds Max sources for many cut and retail NPCs as well as player and weapon models, tools for packing textures into WADs, and detailed documentation on implementing baseline features such as voice chat into a mod.

Note:Hammer 3.5 is the final GoldSrc-only editor released by Valve and can be downloaded separately.

The full source code for the SDK can be found on Valve's Github Page.

Trivia

• The term "GoldSrc" comes from development of the Source engine. A few months before the release of Half-Life, the Half-Life engine's source code was split into two branches: Src and GoldSrc. The GoldSrc branch was the gold master version of the codebase, and would be used for the proper release of the game. The Src branch, comparatively, would be continually iterated upon, adding and changing features for use in the sequel, with the term "Source Engine" eventually being picked up by marketing.^[1]

See also

• For information about converting GoldSrc content to the Source engine, see Porting Goldsource content to Source.
• GoldSrc on Wikipedia
• GoldSource SteamPipe Directories

References

1. User talk:Erik Johnson (Revision as of 12:53, 1 September 2005)