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 Episode One 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.
- 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
- Avoids ugly stretching.
- Phongwarp textures
- A warp texture that modifies 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.
