Orange Box

The Source 2007 engine branch (formerly Orange Box engine branch) was released in 2007 with the Orange Box (Episode Two, Portal, Team Fortress 2). It existed side-by-side with the Left 4 Dead branch until 2011, when it was obsoleted by the release of Portal 2.

The Orange Box builds on the original Half-Life 2 branch, requiring its content installed to work.

Versions

There are actually four Orange Box branches, referred to in the SDK Launcher as Source '2006', '2007', '2009' and 'MP'. The 2009 and MP branches do not have a different feature set, but are incompatible with 2007 due to various under-the-bonnet changes (which include a different SteamID scheme and Mac OS X compatibility).

Features

New since the Source 2006 engine branch is:

2007

Threading

Logic, rendering and audio have been threaded for performance gains in multi-core environments.

Soft particles

An all-new, artist-driven particle system.

Shadow mapping

A modern dynamic lighting and shadowing technology.

Improved High Dynamic Range rendering

Remade HDR tonemapping that better fits outdoor scenes.

Hardware Morph (HWM) flexes and Wrinkle maps

A powerful facial animation system, with textures that add fine wrinkling detail to the face during flex animation.

Alpha to coverage

Vector-like edges to raster images, fast.

Self-shadowing bump maps

For a more realistic illusion of a 3D surface.

Automatic displacement texturing

Mitigates texture stretching across displacement surfaces.

Phongwarp textures and other Phong improvements

New features for Phong such as a texture that warps Phong highlights, used to create the Hunter's iridescence.

Conditional statements

New conditional statements for use in materials to optimize them for lower-end machines.

Visclusters

A new entity to be placed in large open areas with unbroken visiblity, reducing compile times.

Maplist Thumbnails

A console-oriented server browser UI.

Xbox 360 support

Of little use to modders, needless to say!

2009

Mac OS X support

Particle system adjustments

Particles can now render blobs and models.

Disable phys_bone_followers

phys_bone_followers can now be disabled on dynamic props for performance gains and lower entity counts.

Availability

Source 2007

• Source SDK Base 2007 (formerly Source SDK Base - Orange Box)

Gamecode for the 2007 branch is included in the now-deprecated Source SDK app.