Strata Source
Strata Source Strata Source (more informally known as Strata, and formerly known as the Chaos Engine) is a third-party Source Source engine branch using licensed code. It is a modified version of the latest version of CS:GO engine branch CS:GO engine branch that combines the features of both CS:GO and the Portal 2 engine branch Portal 2 engine branch , along with many improvements that bring Source close to modern standards. This engine branch was first released publicly with the launch of Portal: Revolution Portal: Revolution , and is still in active development.
Features
Feature list from the Strata Source Wiki
New since the CS:GO engine branch:
- Native Direct3D 11 renderer
- Replaces Direct3D 9 renderer, and adds some new features that previous version of Direct3D doesn't have.
- Vulkan renderer on Linux, using DXVK to convert DX11 calls to Vulkan
- 64-bit executable
- Game runs on 64-bit on all platforms; 32-bit and Mac OS support has been dropped. 64-bit allows better performance and allows the game to access more than 4GB of RAM.
- PBR shaders
Introduces a new Shader-ball.png
PBR shader that attempts to create realistic reactions to light
- Ported Portal 2 engine branch features
- Including but not limited to World Portals and Portal gun
- Expanded map limits (128k x 128k x 128k) via BSP v25 and increased entity cap
- Backwards compatibility
- Compatible with BSP v19-21
- Compatible with Source 2013 Source 2013 (and older) branch models
- The model format found in games such as Half-Life 2 Team Fortress 2 Portal Counter-Strike: Source Day of Defeat: Source is now supported.
- Clustered Shading
- A technique which allows multiple dynamic lights to be rendered with little performance hit.
- WEBM video support, replacing older Bink videos
- Increased framerate, lower file sizes, and easier to author
- New v7.6 VTF version
- Adds support for the higher-quality ATI1N, ATI2N, BC6H, and BC7 texture compression formats, as well as lossless Wikipedia icon deflate or Wikipedia icon zstd compression on top of the existing image format, for reduced size.
- Many improvements to Linux support
- Fully cross-platform engine tools and utils
- Improved MP3 support with addition of OGG (Vorbis, Opus, Speex and PCM supported) and FLAC audio formats
- Steam Audio
- Improved HRTF, environmental reflection effects, basic occulsion
- Parallax corrected cubemaps
- Many improvements to the Hammer Hammer level editor, named Strata Hammer Strata Hammer
- Many code quality improvements (Refactors, cleanup, and C++20)
- Sentry crash report integration
- Replaced VPC with CMake.
- Scripting
- Supports Angelscript and VScript
Availability and usage
The following titles run on the Strata Source Strata Source branch:
- Portal 2: Community Edition Portal 2: Community Edition
- Momentum Mod Momentum Mod
- Portal: Revolution Portal: Revolution (Uses older version of P2:CE as a base)
The source code for this branch is not available. However, Authoring Tools exist for each game, located in the 🖿/bin/win64/ folder. Native Linux tools are shipped in the 🖿/bin/linux64/ folder, but the Windows binaries are also shipped on Linux to make it easier to run Windows-only tools with WINE.
See also
- Strata Source's Wiki
- Mapbase Mapbase , a mod for Source 2013 Singleplayer with similar goals
- Alien Swarm Deferred Alien Swarm Deferred
- Strata Hammer Strata Hammer