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 successor, Source, in 2004, which currently holds first place as the choice engine for Valve modders. Though GoldSrc is past its prime, many gamers and some third-party developers still seek to use it for mods and level design.

The engine is actively being updated and maintained by Valve as of 2023, recently with the Half-Life's 25th anniversary updates which increased the engine limits and fixed many bugs.

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

Screenshot in-game of Cry of Fear, which runs on a heavily modified version of GoldSrc.

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

Since 2013

• MSAA anti-aliasing - GoldSrc now natively support anti-aliasing, specifically, MSAA 4X, which is enabled by default on most modern hardwares. This will reduce the amount of jagged edges/staircases effect on the geometry.

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.

Products using GoldSrc

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

Specifications

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GoldSource Limits	Pre-25th	Post-25th
Maximum number of dynamic sound channels	8	32
Maximum number of server entities (MAX_EDICTS)	900	1200
Maximum number of temporary entities (MAX_TEMPENTS)	500	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum number of particles (MAX_PARTICLES)	4096	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum number of beams (MAX_BEAMS)	64	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum number of visible entities in the package (MAX_VISIBLE_PACKET)	256	1024
Maximum number of pre-cacheable models (+sprites)(MAX_MODELS)	512	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum number of pre-cached sounds (MAX_SOUNDS)	512	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum number of entries to read sentences made up of sentences (MAX_SENTENCES)	1536	2048
Maximum number of user messages (MAX_USER_MESSAGES)	128	Unchanged[confirm]
Max number of loaded textures (MAX_TEXTURES)	2048	Unchanged[confirm]
Max number of GL textures (MAX_GLTEXTURES)	4800	10000
Number of messages titles.txt (MAX_MESSAGES)	1024	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum size of indexed textures	512х512	Unknown
Maximum size of full color textures	-	-
Maximum number of models on the map (MAX_MAP_MODELS)	256	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum number of map leafs (MAX_MAP_LEAFS)	8192	Unchanged[confirm]
Maximum number of ?????????? (MAX_PACKET_ENTITIES)	256	1024
Maximum number of spans (software renderer geometry limit)	3000	6000
Maximum number of surfaces (software renderer geometry limit)	2000	4000
Maximum number of edges (software renderer geometry limit)	7200	14400

25th Anniversary Additions

• Cycler and func_button entities can now be the entity target for scripted_sentence entities, and are allowed to speak in multiplayer.
• Incorporated func_vehicle entity support from Counter-Strike, for mod-makers to use.

Bugs and Limitations

This article or section needs to be updated to include current information regarding the subject because:

Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update fixes a lot and breaks other stuff.

Remember to check for any notes left by the tagger at this article's talk page.

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

Bug:Various GoldSrc non-standalone mods and other Valve games (such as Counter-Strike) has been broken with the recent Half-Life update, as part of its 25th anniversary. These games would crash on startup with Visual C++ error.
Other games like Team Fortress Classic was also affected, but appears to work almost perfectly fine aside from HUD scaling fixes were non-functional.

Workaround:To temporarily fix this, select the beta branch steam_legacy on Half-Life by going to Half-Life > Properties... > Betas > select steam_legacy. Once those games has been fixed, you can opt out by set the beta branch to "None".

  [todo tested in ?]

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. The issue was fixed in the 25th anniversary update, which deprecated the gl_overbright 1 in favor of gl_use_shaders 1, but appears to be breaking the underwater fog effect after an hotfix was released to fix the brightness issues with the new overbright lighting (gl_use_shaders 1). See this GitHub page for more information.
This issue can be also found on GLQuake, but for different reasons.

Workaround:To fix this for the older version of Half-Life (steam_legacy branch) and most standalone mods, 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.

Note:Even though the overbright was properly fixed with the 25th anniversary update and with the November 19 hotfix patch, which fixes the brightness issues after enabling overbright, this ended up breaking the underwater fog.

  [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 other than Half-Life 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. Player movements in Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero and Condition Zero Deleted Scenes, after jumping, will be much slower than normal for few seconds.

Note:NPC turn rate bug will remains existed on most older, non-standalone mods (which was made on a older version of GoldSrc/HL SDK) when loaded on current version of HL1 (or other GoldSrc games) that have this bug fixed unless the dlls file (hl.dll and client.dll) on the mod folder itself was renamed. But keep in mind that this method may breaks some mods and cause it to crash, or made several new additions such as new weapons, new NPCs, etc... from the mod stops working.

  [todo tested in ?]

Important:OpenGL mode is somewhat different from software rendering. Furthermore, the wave effect on water does not work with software renderer. 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)
2. Half-Life 25th Anniversary Update