Strata Source

The Strata Source logo

Strata Source (more informally known as Strata, and formerly known as the Chaos Engine) is a third-party Source engine branch using licenced code. It is a modified version of the CS:GO engine branch that combines the features of both CS:GO and the Portal 2 engine branch, along with many improvements that bring Source close to modern standards. This engine branch is still in active development.

Features

Feature list from the Strata Source Wiki
New since the CS:GO engine branch:

Native DirectX 11 renderer

Support for DX11 by default

DXVK support on Linux for both DirectX 9 and 11

64-bit support

Supports 64-bit on all platforms; 32-bit and previous OS support has been dropped

PBR shading

Uses shaders to attempt to more accurately simulate real-world light

Ported Portal 2 engine branch features

Including but not limited to World Portals and Portal gun

Backwards compatibility with BSP v19-20, as well as native BSP v21 support

Backwards compatibility with Source 2013 (and older) branch models

The model format found in games such as is now supported.

WEBM video support, replacing older Bink videos

Increased framerate, lower file sizes, and easier to author

New v7.6 VTF version

Adds support for the higher-quality ATI1N (greyscale), ATI2N (red+green), BC6H (opaque HDR), and BC7 (SDR with or without alpha) texture compression formats, as well as lossless  deflate compression on top of existing image format, for reduced size.

Many improvements to Linux support

Fully cross platform engine tools and utils

Steam Audio

Many improvements to the Hammer level editor

Many code quality improvements (Refactors, cleanup and C++20)

Sentry crash report integration

Availability

The following titles run on the Strata Source branch:

• Portal 2: Community Edition
• Momentum Mod
• Portal: Revolution

Source code for this branch is not available, however authoring tools exist for each game.

See Also

• Strata Source's Wiki
• Mapbase