Certainly not Source. That thing is a fucking pig to work with since the updates broke everything in sight. Originally it was fine provided you could deal with the occasional steam breakage, but now it's ridiculous. everything is segregated into like 10 different things (Ep1 engine, orange box engine, and each one has settings for each game) which all have to be handled differently, and require subtle differences to get content into, which is a fucking nightmare.
Then on top of all that, after the updates broke everything but the most recent version of the engine (which is useless to you unless you want to mod Ep 2 or Portal) so you have to cut paste DLL,s and EXE files all over the damned place. Then do it all again if steam updates. And on top of that 3DS Max 2009 has almost zero support, making it an absolute slog to get the simplest of models into HL2.
Unreal engine though, boom, 3DS Max, Export as --> .ACE. Open unrealED, import. Done. Same with textures, import, done. no fucking about with steam (unless you were dumb enough to get UE3 through steam) and messing around with about 3 different engines, all of which are broken in a different area.
Not to mention Hammer hasn't been updated since 2005, and it was a temperamental, difficult to work with piece of kit even then. That's the problem when you take iterative design to such an extreme Valve does. Don't get me wrong I love them for it, it makes their games so much better. Unfortunately, when combined with FORCED updating through steam, it makes their engines unusable. The minute someone makes a usefull tool to ease the strain of valves in house tools being friendly only to DOS fiends who live in the command prompt, an update will break it and make it useless.
Outside of steam though, and with proper in house development tools, i'd imagine it would be a dream to work with for those who license it from Valve. But for modders it's become a bit of a pig to work with. It really surprises me people stil mod it so heavily, but hey, you can't deny what good the original did for the modding scene so I guess people are still attached to it. I'd love to be able to do mroe with it, but unfortunately every 5 minutes of progress is surrounded by about 3 hours of problem solving and dumbass errors that are not my fault.
Edit: Not to mention the file structure. Since when did it become a crime to make C:/ your base folder? Working with c:/program files/steam/USER_NAME/steamapps/ as your base folder gets beyond tedius.
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