Orange Box (engine branch)

The engine branch, also known as or New Engine branch, was released in Oct 10, 2007 with the release of (, , and ), succeeding the engine branch. and were also ported to only on consoles (until 2010 when the PC port of and were later ported to 2009 branch).
It was maintained side-by-side with the , which, around this time, all first-party (except ) and games were upgraded to (for singleplayer games) and (for multiplayer games) throughout until July 2010, when it was obsoleted by the release of the . Despite this, the and branches were released in 2013 as more direct upgrades for these games. 
In an attempt to stop Bunnyhopping, Valve updated the movement system to cap the forward move speed, inadvertently creating Accelerated Back Hopping. This branch also introduced few bugs noticeable in (and it's episodes), such as the Dropship container gun no longer rotates, and thus unable to shoot unless you stand in the front of the gun, which significantly make the battle on the Sandtraps chapter much easier.
In May - June 2010, all first-party and games for (except for , , and ) were upgraded to , which adds support for , aswell introducing achievements for PC/Mac version of and . Optionally, achievements are also supported on third-party mods.
The Orange Box builds on the original Half-Life 2 branch, requiring its content installed to work. 
==Versions==
There are six Orange Box branches. The first three are referred to in the SDK Launcher as , , and . The 2009 and MP branches do not have a different feature set, but they are incompatible with 2007 due to various under-the-hood changes (which include a different SteamID scheme and Mac OS X compatibility). Both Source 2009 and MP branches also lacks the SDK Base. The other three are collectively referred to as , consisting of , , and the . Source 2013 makes several more significant changes, and has its own page.
Engine versions: 
*Source 2007 branch - up to ()
*Source 2009/MP branch - up to ()
==Features==
New since the engine branch are:
=== 2007===
; Threading
: Logic, rendering and audio have been threaded for performance gains in multi-core environments.
; Soft particles
: An all-new, artist-driven particle system, replacing the old hard-coded particle system.
; Shadow mapping
: Special dynamic lights such as the player's flashlight can now cast high-quality dynamic shadows.
; Improved High Dynamic Range rendering
: Remade HDR tonemapping that better fits outdoor scenes.
; Motion blur
: Cheap and simple camera motion blur.
; Hardware Morph (HWM) flexes and Wrinkle maps
: A new, powerful facial animation system, with support for textures that add fine wrinkling detail to the face during flex animation.
; Conditional statements
: New conditional statements for use in materials to optimize them for lower-end machines.
; Phongwarp textures and other Phong improvements
: Source's phong shading, introduced in , has been upgraded with additional features such as reflection tinting, albedo tinting, phongwarp textures, and more.
; Self-shadowing bump maps
: A special, cheaper kind of bump map for brush shaders with baked in ambient occlusion to give the illusion of a self-shadowing surface.
; Automatic displacement texturing
: Mitigates texture stretching across displacement surfaces.
; Alpha to coverage
: Applies anti-aliasing to transparent textures. MSAA must be enabled for this to work.
; Alpha to distance
: Vector-like edges on raster images.
; Flowing emissive textures for models
: Advanced flowing emission for , notably used on the Vortigaunts in 
; Fresnel for specular reflections and self-illumination on models
: On , and have new parameters to enable shading with the Fresnel effect.
; Cinematic Physics
: Baked physics animations that are rendered offline and brought into the engine for playback with minimal performance cost. 
; Improved prop_static lighting
: Static props without normal maps or phong can now be lit by VRAD per-vertex, instead of at runtime based upon their origin or $illumposition.
; Bink video
: A video codec used in game intros, such as the Valve intro during the game startup. It replaces the old video playback system which uses the AVI file format.
; Maplist Thumbnails
: A console-oriented server browser UI.
; Support for and console
: Most of the game files (BSP, VTF, etc.) on both consoles (both have PowerPC architecture) are stored in big-endian.
: The PlayStation 3 version was ported by EA (Electronic Arts) due to the complexity of the hardware at the time. This result in the game running worse than the counterpart.
; Xbox 360 (or XInput-compatible) controller support on PC
: Native support for the (or any XInput-compatible) controller on PC has been added.
Additionally, the tools have been upgraded:
; Visclusters
: A new entity to be placed in large open areas with unbroken visibility, reducing compile times.
; Texture shadows
: Static props can with transparent or translucent textures can now cast shadows based upon their alpha channel.
; DMX model format
: Deprecates SMD
=== 2009/MP===
; support
: Supported since 2010 engine update. The engine can now run on Mac. However, Mac support outside of official games may be spotty. Furthermore, newer version of macOS since 10.15 (Catalina) no longer support all 32-bit apps and games in general (which also includes every single Source engine games that are complied for 32-bit only).
; QuickTime video (MOV) 
: Replaces BINK video and only used on systems. Some games may also support Bink video on .
; Particle system adjustments
: Particles can now render blobs and models.Not available in subsequent branches (removed in , and not ported upstream to ).
; Disable s
: s can now be disabled on dynamic props for performance gains and lower entity counts.
=== 2013===
 (both SP and MP) has its own page.
== Removed features ==
=== 2007 ===
Features that have been removed or deprecated in are:
; DirectX 7.0 () compatibility level
: Support for DirectX 7.x GPUs has been dropped.
;env_terrainmorph 
:env_terrainmorph dynamically morphs displacements by pulling vertices along a normal, similar to the Paint Geometry tool in Hammer.
==Availability==
Most games using this branch (except Console version of those games) were upgraded to the or branches when those released. Nevertheless, gamecode for the 2007 branch is included in the now-deprecated Source SDK app.
===Source 2007===
==== Valve ====
* (formerly Source SDK Base - Orange Box)
* 
** ( only)
==== Third-Party ====
* 
* ( only)
* (ModDB version - Steam version runs on )
* 
* 
* (Mod version only)
===Source 2009===
==== Third-Party ====
* 
* 
** Added PhysX physics engine for certain cloth models. Also contains a modified MDL format, certain features from (VPK v1), unique scripting language (Postal3Script), a system for using env_sprites for trees and hair, as well as a unique implementation of Nextbots. A former developer described it as such:
:: 
===Source MP===
==== Third-Party ====
None.
== System Requirements ==
These system requirements applies to Source SDK Base 2007 (and some Source 2007/2009/MP game) only. Some other games may have their own system requirements.
Windows Minimum Specs :
*OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7 or later
*CPU: 1.7 GHz and/or Dual-core 
*RAM: 1GB RAM
*GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 6xxx series, ATI Radeon X1600, Intel HD Graphics 3000 (with 128MB VRAM)
*Direct3D 9.0 compatible video card (with atleast DirectX 8.0 compatibility level or higher)
Mac OS Minimum Specs:
*OS X 10.5.8, 10.6.3 (up to 10.14.6)
*CPU: 2.0 GHz and/or Dual-core
*RAM: 1 GB
*GPU: NVIDIA GeForce 8xxx series, ATI Radeon X1600, Intel HD Graphics 3000OpenGL 2.1 compatible
*Audio: OpenAL compatible
== References ==
 Valve GDC 2008: Post Processing in The Orange Box
 Interview with a Trashmasters dev who wished to remain anonymous
Category:The Orange BoxCategory:Official Engine Branches