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.

Bugs and Limitations

Bug:The overbright lighting issues from GLQuake, was carried over GoldSrc, due to the latter being based off Quake engine.
Usually it can be fixed by setting gl_overbright to 1 (only available in both GoldSrc and Quake source ports), but this is broken due to multi-texturing, which is used for detail textures.

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

  [todo tested in ?]

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

Workaround:A workaround is to set the game (hl.exe) to "High Priority" in Task Manager.

  [todo tested in ?]

Bug:EAX and A3D Audio are no longer supported since SteamPipe update in 2013. This also removes support for surround sound, and makes the DSP Audio having inferior quality
(such as buzzing noises on DSP's Weirdo 1-3), which can be seen frequently when you go inside the vent in Half-Life.

Workaround:See Audio section in PCGamingWiki's page. Please note that using MetaAudio without -insecure may cause false VAC ban.

  [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 ?]

For more bug reports, visit GitHub in order to prevent duplicate or outdated bug reports at the wiki.

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.

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 or 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)