Hello, I'm wondering if anyone out there knows whether Valve will allow a commercial company to use the Source Engine for free while in the protoyping stage, obviously with an extremely limited license, under the obvious assumption that when completed and funding secured, the full license will be purchased for the game's proper development.

I am doing a marketing report for University and I believe that Valve's employee's are away for the holidays.

Many thanks,
Mike

p.s. This was posted in "gaming industry" as well, I couldn't see how to cross-post. If this practice is frowned upon then I apologize; this is my first posting at flipcode.

Why don't you prototype it as a mod for HL²?

I do not know what restrictions (in terms of available features or codebase access) are placed upon MODs.

Why don't you just check the Source SDK? I don't think there are many.

Pretty much all the "game" code is exposed for modding. It's very low-level rendering and data processing stuff that you can't get to. And if you really need to mess with that stuff you might as well write your own.

You can do just about anything with the mod SDK - if you have the resources you can write an entire new game. It will probably still be a frist person shooter, but even that can be changed (there were some overhead RTS-style mods done for Quake 2, and it wasn't as mod-able as HL2). I expect to see some racing games done with HL2 because of the vehicles and physics. It's pretty wide open.

Thanks a lot, that was a very helpful reply.