by MrTwoVideoCards on Mon May 06, 2013 12:11 pm
I agree with the simplicity of some of the tools, but I ain't gonna lie. Some of you guys are delusional. Source is absolutely the most frustrating engine to work with, hands down. It's only made marginally better and tolerable if you move over to the newer engine branches such as Alien Swarm. I've been using it for 7 years now so I am probably insane.
There's no doubt you can still make some sexy stuff with source, but the journey there is going to be far more tedious and complicated. Hopefully Source 2 alleviates these issues going forward, but unless Valve hired an entirely different set of engine programmers I fear it's not going to be up to par with other offerings on the current market.
That being said, I do love source. I think the strongest thing about it is that you have a base to work off of. Valve provides a lot of templates for pretty much all of their work in the source code. Ents, ai, shaders, etc etc.
Cryengine 3 and UDK pretty much have squat in terms of starting content, so it's slow to make content at first. However, in reality if you're using source for a project you're much more likely to ditch valves work anyways.
However that's also the Achilles heel. Going into Portal 2 or ASW source code, you have to rip so much game specific stuff related to those titles it's terrible. It's either stay on source 2007 and get fucked with bad performance, or go to portal 2/asw/l4d and have to deal with ripping out all the split screen and game specific shit. The former takes a while, but eventually you have a skeleton as your base to work off of.