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 3-D 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, 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 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

SDK

The GoldSrc mod development tools are 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.

Bugs/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 (detailed textures) and the built-in MSAA. A workaround for overbright lighting can be found in PCGamingWiki page about Half-Life.  [todo tested in ?]

Bug:On some systems running Windows Vista/7 or later, the engine may suffering from extremely low frame rates during gameplay. A workaround is to set the game (hl.exe) to "High Priority" in Task Manager.  [todo tested in ?]

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
• GoldSrc SDK (Half-Life SDK) Documentation
• GoldSource SteamPipe Directories

References

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