The most obvious visual example that comes to mind is the pattern they still use for flickering lights which has been around since the Quake days.
But you wrote “To this day, Valve is using a game engine that is, at its core, the Quake engine from 1996” and that’s just untrue. Just because nobody ever saw the need to change the light flickering pattern for no reason other than to make it new, doesn’t mean that Source2 is “at its core” still Quake1. Even the community-maintained wiki (not a officially sanctioned Valve document, btw) you’ve linked only speaks about “some residual Quake code”.
Semantics.
Another to look at it is that if Valve properly managed their VCS, you could do
git ls-files HEAD^10000and see Quake/goldsrc code building the foundation for everything that came after. Every subsequent rewrite and refactor was shaped and constrained by what came before and what hadn’t been rewritten yet. If they had started with another engine, they wouldn’t have ended up here.Beyond semantics, Source 2’s lineage is still very apparent. While the engine is very good at what it does, it’s without question much better suited to a rather specific class of semi-realistic 3D games. It has a look, a feel, strengths and weaknesses. It can’t be Unity or Unreal Engine, and it would have been a ridiculous mistake to use it as a base for Elite Dangerous or Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Terraria.
Funny that you claim deeper insight into Source2 than Valve.
Source2 was first developed for Dota. It’s way more likely that its limitations are because it was never developed as a complete allrounder, not because some minor bits and pieces like flickering pattern were developed in the 1990s because that’s also where Unreal Engine was first developed.
I’m in awe of how confident you are.
And why wouldn’t I be? The person who claimed that Source2 was basically Quake1 at its core had two bits of “proof”, the Valve wiki that refers to “some residual Quake code” and light flickering pattern. That’s it. Suddenly it’s just “semantics”. Yeah, right. Valve developers referred to CS2 as a completely new engine. That’s not semantics, that’s not splitting hairs, that’s straight of Valve’s mouth.
