Source Engine is pretty much the best engine made. It has no bugs and works 100% of the time, not to mention it has a powerful dynamic lighting system and dynamic level loading for seamless transitions. However, let's talk about some of its other, even more impressive features:
-Baked lighting that never screws up: All terrain in the Source Engine is made up of sheets called "displacements," which are simply flat surfaces subdivided into triangles, and then warped to give a more natural and curved appearance. Because of Source's inability to ever screw up, ugly black splotches and rainbows never ever ever randomly appear on displacements for no reason. Totally never happened on any officially released maps either.Oh, and it also has a neat feature where sometimes if you put the origin of an entity inside of a block, the entire map doesn't go pitch black! I betcha Unreal can't do that.-Easy to use model compilers: Compiling models for Source is a painless, one-click process. All you have to do is make a text file that feeds into a command line-based compiler and give it absolute file paths typed manually, and you're good to go! You also never have to use 3rd party tools as the only way to get custom TF2 weapons into the game.-Map compiling tools that works like a charm: Ever feared that your compiling tools would ever stop working randomly and require a full restart of Steam to get working again? Don't worry, Source never does that either!-A powerful map editor: Source's map editor, Hammer, is an incredibly powerful and stable tool. Boasting an impressive crash-prevention system, you'll never have to worry about your tools crashing every time you do anything. It's especially great in mappers don't develop nervous tics and press Ctrl+S every 30 seconds!What's even more impressive is how Hammer handles "invalid solids." An invalid solid is where a solid has a face where all of its points aren't coplanar, meaning the face can't be drawn properly. Hammer handles these in an incredibly graceful manner, in which it doesn't delete every entity in your map when you load a map containing an invalid solid! Impressive work, Valve.-Up to date: Source wasn't created in 2004 at all. It's totally not been improved drastically to keep up with today's standards, and the asset creators totally don't have to compensate for how bad the engine is at all!tl;dr:
C++?
Sarcasm… sensor… overloading…
Can't… compute… anything else…*BSOD*I gotta agree, Source Engine brules!
So much sarcasm….
And he didn't look half-bad in a tutu.
You forgot to elaborate that Source engine is made by Best Company ever, Valve
hardsoftware, who only makes Best Quality Engine for Best Games. Headed by GaBest Newell, the Best CEO, who would never treat customers unfairly or in an unBest manner, the company is literally exempt from doing anything wrong! They made Steam, Best PC Distribution platform! It has no bugs, just like their other software. The updater is seamless and Not Annoying, no, it is the Best Updater that never interrupts you while you were doing something other than playing games. Wait, you're doing something other than playing games? Why? You have STEAM?! BEST GAMES PLATFORM!! IT HAS NO FLAWS IT EVEN LETS YOU PLAY ONE GAME WHILE UPDATING ANOTHER AH AH HA HAHAHA AH HAHA HAHAHAHA HAHA HA… HA… GABENRULESAs of a recent update to TF2, the compiling tools now will randomly decide that they're not good enough anymore, and that restarting Hammer or Source SDK will also result in an error. After restarting Steam for the 5th time today, I needed to vent. What better way to vent than write a scathingly sarcastic blog about why Source Engine is the best?
That being said, I really do love the toolset. I just wish it wasn't so… broken.Uhh, there's lots of different iterations of the Source engine. There's the HL2 iteration that was released in 2004, the Orange Box iteration in 2007, the Portal 2 iteration in 2011, and the Dota 2 iteration in 2012
That said, I spend lots of time recording in TF2 and it's a pain in the ass to do lots of things. Source has awful spectating tools.Also, Gabe has said that Valve is creating a second Source Engine and are essentially waiting for a game to release with it.