OpenSource

A utility for loading and rendering many Source VBSP maps together as a single giant mesh. It can be used to see how big the game world is, just for amusement.

Current status

It is not production quality and is not ready for any professional and/or unsupervised use. It still has a lot of visual and other glitches. See issues. However, it should be generally stable. It does run on Raspberry Pi. The entire Half-Life 2 fits into < 512MiB video memory and renders ~1.5 million triangles at about 10fps.

If you wish, you could check out the old branch for a version from 2012 that was used for this video of entire Half-Life 1 world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SaRdQdW-Ik

What works

• It builds and runs on Windows, Linux/X11 and Raspberry Pi (bare VideoCore libs, w/o X11); No macOS support yet, stay tuned.
• VBSP format version 19 and 20, most of the maps from these games:
  • Half-Life: Source
  • Half-Life 2
  • Half-Life 2: Episode One
  • Half-Life 2: Episode Two
  • Portal
  • Portal 2. Well, somewhat. Its levels are not positioned correctly, requiring a lot of manual config patching, which has not been done.
• Basic support for the following map features:
  • Face geometry
  • Displacements
  • Base[0] textures
  • DXT1/3/5 textures
  • Reading VPK2 files
  • Reading materials from pakfile lumps
  • Packing textures with ETC1 on Raspberry Pi (packer is very naive and probably broken)

Building

Requires CMake. Something like this:

cmake -E make_directory build
cmake . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

Getting binaries

If you don't want to build it yourself, you can find some pre-built Windows binaries in Releases

Running

Basically you point OpenSource binary to a cfg file. It should automatically load game resources from default Steam install directory. There is a couple of pre-made cfg files for a few games. You can find them in pre-built archives, or in misc/ directory of this repo.

Preconfigured games are:

• hl1.cfg: Half-Life 1. For this you need to install "Half-Life: Source" game from Steam. Regular Half-Life won't work.
• hl2.cfg: Half-Life 2.
• hl2eps.cfg: Half-Life 2, including Episode One, and Episode Two. You need them to be installed from Steam.

Additional options:

• -s -- specify Steam install directory if it's different from the default one.
• -m -- add additional map to load at origin
• -p -- add a custom VPK file to load resources from
• -d -- add a custom directory to load resources from
• -n -- specify a limit to number of maps to load

Notes:

• Arguments order matters: options only apply to what follows them. E.g. ./OpenSource hl1.cfg -s <custom_steam_path> will not use <custom_steam_path> for loading resources for hl1.cfg, but ./OpenSource -s <custom_steam_path> hl1.cfg will.
• cfg files are not strictly necessary, it is possible to load maps only using arguments. However, landmark patching functionality is only supported via cfg files.

Streaming (ON HOLD)

Development was done almost entirely live.

Stream links:

• Twitch/ProvodGL
• YouTube

You can also check out previous streams recordings and stuff planned for next streams.