Valve Release Team Fortress 2 SDK
There might be a lot of jokes in the gaming industry about Valve taking its time with projects, such as the perpetually delayed/in development Half-Life 3, but there’s no denying that the company can still surprise players. That’s what Valve did recently, with the reveal developers can now get hold of the TF2 SDK (Team Fortress 2 Software Development Kit), for free, almost 20 years after the game came out.
Team Fortress 2 is a multiplayer FPS that was released way back in 2007, that includes nine playable classes. Made using Valve’s proprietary Source game engine (which was also used for Half-Life 2 and Left 4 Dead), its popularity has continued to this day with almost 52,300 players online according to SteamDB, around the time of this article.
The Source SDK has been available for free since 2011, with this Team Fortress 2 update allowing “content creators to build completely new games based on TF2,” Valve said on the official Team Fortress website. “This SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible.”
To Mod or Not to Mod?
The modding community for Valve games, including TF2, has always been a vibrant scene filled with creativity. This new update to the Source SDK means that rather than being limited to modifying within an established code framework, though, developers can now cut loose and make, effectively, brand new games based on TF2.
There is an important clause to all of this unbridled creativity, however. The Source SDK is available to download for free from GitHub, but any projects made with it must be non-commercial, i.e. developers can’t make money from it. Any mods must also be distributed with the same license as the Source SDK.
This latter point is pretty common for open source code, whether it’s used to make something like a PS3 emulator or a modified level of an existing game. The idea is that developers can then take your code and add to it, quite often fixing issues that others can’t.
Other Updates
Surprisingly, the TF2 SDK update has also come with news of a bunch of patches for other older Valve games, namely: Team Fortress 2 itself, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life Deathmatch: Source.