Is it legal to use hl2 resources in a paid mod?

[Joe Biden]

I was wondering if it was ok to use the default textures in a mod a plan to make and sell, when I pay the licensing fee.

[Please]

I believe you cannot use any Half-life 2 (Or any other game) assets on your mod, and then sell it. This means you also will not be allowed to use any of the Valve's universes in your game. That would be making money for someone elses work. Even if you got a source engine and havok liscense.

[CS_]

Not sure on the asset issue, but I remember reading somewhere that use is only applicable for free mods, a google should yield good results.

What is the license fee you mention?

[Joe Biden]

Originally posted by CS_:

What is the license fee you mention?

for the engine itself.

Originally posted by Vault Meat:

I believe you cannot use any Half-life 2 (Or any other game) assets on your mod, and then sell it. This means you also will not be allowed to use any of the Valve's universes in your game. That would be making money for someone elses work. Even if you got a source engine and havok liscense.

I see. thanks. Do you know anyone who could make good textures similer to the HL2 ones?

[CS_]

Originally posted by CrazyGingerJJ:

for the engine itself.

A full source engine licence can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars. A havok physics licence is $25,000.

Might be a better idea to start off as a free mod, see what traction it gets and then work out from there whether it's viable to commercialise it. That way you can use the Valve assets to get up and running quickly.

[Wazanator]

It depends on your license arrangement.

Having been a part of a paid license team and knowing others that were in similar projects I can tell you first hand it is not worth it. There are not only better engines out there now (UE4 for instance) but they are much cheaper and in most cases free. Unless you want to put yourself in a $25,000+ hole from the start just for the Havok physics license (not to mention the RAD tool licensing) I do not recommend it at all.

On top of that unless it has changed Valve will not talk to you about a license unless you can show them some work of what you have done already towards your project (levels, maps, textures, models, etc). Now then that barrier is obviously pretty low considering Revelations 2012.

In short there is a real valid reason why no one uses Source a whole lot professionally in the industry.

[Dmitriy]

There are paid Portal 2 mods which use Valve's textures and models. So you probably can use those too. But you'll have to talk with Valve about it. What they say "if you plan to use Source Engine for commercial game contact Valve".

Wazanator, there is at least Titanfall which uses Source Engine, Insurgency.
I agree that the 25k is a huge limitation for an indie developer.
But it depends on what kind of game is needed to be done. If it's similar to HL2 you go with Source, if it's similar to Crysis you go with CryEngine 3 rawly speaking ^^
UE4 or Unity3D doesn't give you a game to start from afaik. They only offer some templates. UE3 offered Unreal Tournament game template.

Source Engine uses old Quake Engine physics for movement afaik, and Havok is used for collision detection and rigid body simulation.
All other engines use PhysX for everything afaik. PhysX give more clunky and less responsive movement, that's what I've noticed from my experience :)

[Entity 351]

Originally posted by DIMEDROLL:

Wazanator, there is at least Titanfall which uses Source Engine, Insurgency.
I agree that the 25k is a huge limitation for an indie developer.
But it depends on what kind of game is needed to be done. If it's similar to HL2 you go with Source, if it's similar to Crysis you go with CryEngine 3 rawly speaking ^^
UE4 or Unity3D doesn't give you a game to start from afaik. They only offer some templates. UE3 offered Unreal Tournament game template.

Source Engine uses old Quake Engine physics for movement afaik, and Havok is used for collision detection and rigid body simulation.
All other engines use PhysX for everything afaik. PhysX give more clunky and less responsive movement, that's what I've noticed from my experience :)

How does the game you choose to design dictate what engine you use that closely? If I wanted to make an open world first person shooter, why would I choose Cryengine 3 over Unreal 4?

Unreal 4 is free and looks a hell of a lot better, and has much better support. Same goes for makeing a game like Half life 2. You can just as easily develop a single player story driven shooter with a silent protagonist with Unreal 4 as you can for Source.

The factors of what engine you choose should be based on what exactly you want out of the engine, and how much it costs both upfront and through royalties.

You can make a shooter in any engine. I've never had any sort of problems with movement in first person unreal games. Although fine tuning movement is a small price to pay if you're thinking of jumping into the antiquated Source engine just for that.

[Joe Biden]

Originally posted by Entity 351:

How does the game you choose to design dictate what engine you use that closely? If I wanted to make an open world first person shooter, why would I choose Cryengine 3 over Unreal 4?

Unreal 4 is free and looks a hell of a lot better, and has much better support. Same goes for makeing a game like Half life 2. You can just as easily develop a single player story driven shooter with a silent protagonist with Unreal 4 as you can for Source.

Yeah, I did some reading up on source, it seems like a big hassle as of now. But, when Source2 is out for real... well, I think that it will blow all the others out of the water.

[Joe Biden]

I just thought of something... If you cant have HL2 resources in a paid mod, how does Garry's Mod have everything from HL2?

[Wazanator]

Originally posted by CrazyGingerJJ:

I just thought of something... If you cant have HL2 resources in a paid mod, how does Garry's Mod have everything from HL2?

Facepunch has a special deal worked out with Valve. Valve puts everyone under an NDA when discussing their engine licensing so that's something you would work out with them at the time.

[Joe Biden]

Originally posted by Wazanator:

Originally posted by CrazyGingerJJ:

I just thought of something... If you cant have HL2 resources in a paid mod, how does Garry's Mod have everything from HL2?

Facepunch has a special deal worked out with Valve. Valve puts everyone under an NDA when discussing their engine licensing so that's something you would work out with them at the time.

I see. Thanks for the info!