GoldSrc

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

GoldSrc (also known as GoldSource, and formerly just the Half-Life Engine) is a 3D video game engine created by Valve in 1996. It was the driving force behind many famous games of the late 90s and early 00s, such as Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic, Counter-Strike, and Day of Defeat. GoldSrc is a heavily modified version of the Quake engine, and runs on C++ programming code. GoldSrc and its level editor, Valve Hammer 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 first 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

Todo: expand here or add links

• AI flocking - NPCs can group together, seen with Houndeyes
• Skeletal animation - allowing for more stable animation of models, compared to the vertex animation in Quake
• 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

Half-Life SDK

Main article:  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...

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

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

Games using GoldSrc

• See GoldSrc games category for more games, and for articles about the game which uses the GoldSrc engine.

Bugs and Limitations

Use GitHub in order to prevent duplicate or outdated bug reports at the wiki.

Bug:Overbright lighting (gl_overbright 1) is broken due to an OpenGL extension used for multi-texturing, which is required for the detail textures used by Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, Day of Defeat, and some third-party mods.
This make the color less saturated and lighting much less brighter, as well as introduce chromatic aberration on brightly lit lightmaps.
This issue can be also found on GLQuake, but for different reasons.

Workaround:See Overbright lighting section in PCGamingWiki's Half-Life page for more information.

Important:Please note that using DLL-based solutions in VAC-protected multiplayer servers may result in a false positive ban. Use -insecure to disable VAC for local servers. This is not an issue for singleplayer, which is unaffected by VAC. Additionally, GPU driver hacks do not trigger VAC.

  [todo tested in ?]

Bug:On some systems running Windows Vista or later, the engine may suffering from extremely low frame rates during gameplay, especially on Intel iGPUs.

Workaround:

• Set the game (hl.exe) to "High Priority" in Task Manager.
• Disable multitexturing.

  [todo tested in ?]

Bug:Creative EAX and Aureal A3D Audio are no longer supported since SteamPipe update in 2013. This also removes support for surround sound, and drastically impacts how certain DSP effects sound (such as buzzing noises on DSP's Weirdo 1-3). A feature request about restoring EAX/A3D sound can be found at GitHub (issue #38).

Workaround:Use MetaAudio; see the Audio section on PCGamingWiki's Half-Life page for more information.

Important:Please note that using MetaAudio in VAC-protected multiplayer servers may result in a false positive ban. Use -insecure to disable VAC for local servers. This is not an issue for singleplayer, which is unaffected by VAC.

  [todo tested in ?]

Bug:Running any GoldSrc game over around 100-120FPS or higher can cause issues with movable objects (and prior to October 8, 2019 update, NPC turn rate) being slower or faster.  [todo tested in ?]

Important:OpenGL mode is somewhat different from software rendering. See patbytes's "Half-Life - A Look at Water" on YouTube. Issue 2165.

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 GoldSrc content (maps, models, etc.) to Source
• GoldSrc on Wikipedia
• GoldSrc SDK (Half-Life SDK) Documentation
• GoldSrc SteamPipe Directories

References

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