Read over in the Steam forums... SOOOOOO WELL SAID!
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Well, this threads gotten about as far as it's going to, in terms of useful information, so I suppose I'll write up a Donner manifesto...
I am one of those mod authors, and I'm responsible for maintaining several Goldsrc mods.
Lemme 'splain something to you. It is nearly *impossible* to maintain working mods of any complexity with this tiny department at Valve constantly making random changes to the engine and surrounding libraries that you have no access to. We're blind as to what's actually going on in that code. We're constantly having to come up with crazy hacks to maintain our mods - sometimes resorting to bizarre AMX plugins to maintain older mods for which there is no longer a source. Quite often, if not most of the time, however, there's nothing you can do to save a mod so slain.
I can probably count the people who still code for Goldsrc, and don't work for Valve, on one hand - and I can probably count the people at Valve who do on the other. ...But I'd need a hundred hands to count the number of mods for Half-Life - and probably another thousand hands, to count the number of mods Valve has killed over the last decade. There's just not enough coding manpower to keep up with the destruction these few gods can cause.
...and it's really sad, as some of these were real gems. Truly original gaming ideas with tight nit, family like communities built up around them, some with the potential to introduce radical new concepts into the gaming industry. All crushed to death by Valve's steam-roller.
Nearly every major franchise Valve current has, if not, indeed, entire genres of the gaming industry, have their roots in Half-Life mods. Natural Selection 2, Portal, TF2, Counter-strike, DOD, all grew up out of Half-Life mods or people who made their name working on said mods. So it's not simply a travesty and the murder of a creative resource, but a betrayal to boot.
The introduction of Steam itself killed maybe 75% of all existing Half-Life mods, a few of which were restored to functionality years afterwards, but then the protocol 48 change, amongst other random and needless changes, took out at least half of those mods for good... And now this fiasco, which shows no signs of being rolled back (a phrase apparently not in Valve's vocabulary these days), threatens more than half of the remainder... Several people no longer being able to even play the core retail game as a result.
...and what have we gotten for it?
New shaders? Nope. Multi-threading? Nope. Fixing the various stringent resource limitations? Nope. Optimization of the client or server side? Nope. An open source of the code that dates back to 1998? Nope. An open source for the map editor that dates back nearly as far? Nope.
In over a decade of this on going assault on the modder community, we've gotten some HD Half-Life models for the core game - which no one actually buys Half-Life for - and, back in 2003, a new VGUI interface... Which we can't use anymore, because now it locks your damn mouse to the ceiling!
(Oh, yeah, and a new voice codex that we coulda added ourselves - as many of us already had.)
What we have gotten, is an HLDS that uses 27 times the resource load that the same program did a decade ago, despite the fact it isn't actually doing anything new - to the point where it exceeds the resource use of many modern games, to such a degree, that some server hosts will refuse to take on certain Half-Life mods... An increasingly buggy client, that struggles with rendering scenes that were designed to run on hardware over a decade less advanced (I shudder to think how actual 1998 hardware would run today's Half-Life)... And a frustrated set of developers, and clientele, that feel so betrayed that they want nothing to do with Gldsrc or Source, and beg people to move to the Unreal engine.
And if they were trying to push us to migrate to Source, that'd be another thing - but Source is even *worse* in this regards. There are mods with less than six months of life in them before they are wiped out by some random Source update. There are whole schools of gaming that develop on the Source engine, and many of those wonderful little creations, that come out of those classes, are dead in the water before the students involved have even been given their certification, because Valve made yet another change to the engine with no regards to its impact outside of their own products. They've even killed a number of projects they themselves "green lighted" this way.
At least you can license Source though - and keep a stable build, independent of Valve's whims, that way. You can't license Goldsrc.
It's bad enough we have to constantly contend with Microsoft's changes, which are specifically designed to make you buy new software and hardware - but when combined Valve's maliciousness - developing on Goldsrc or Source is just an endless nightmare of whack-a-mole.
*sigh*
Now, if it isn't a conscious effort to put an end to old mods that they believe are cutting into their profit margins - which I suppose would be more effectively achieved by simply disallowing mods (which would be kinda better, as then we could all move onto working on Xash or some such)... If it's just a matter of this tiny department at Valve having to do something dramatic to justify its existence... Do what Unreal did, all those years ago, and let us keep separate builds of the engine in each Mod folder - so a random update doesn't kill half the damn mods. Open source the HLDS and the HL.exe and related DLL's, and Hammer... You can keep the damn Steam authentication security in a separate DLL, if that's your great fear... But if Valve keeps on this path, there's going to be less and less creativity in the gaming industry under its auspex, as well as fewer and fewer experienced coders, and finally, less and less customers. Take a look at how badly your current client base is aging. How few of the younger generation you've brought in lately. It's not simply a matter of the prevalence of smart phones - it's because no one wants to invest time in something they know isn't going to be around in a few months due to some random and unexamined change.
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