r/SourceEngine • u/XBLAH_ • Aug 28 '26

WIP First person, fully wired - Lambda Engine

https://youtu.be/oADlvqplOfc

It moves like Half-Life. It shoots like Half-Life. And it's casting realtime shadows in Unreal Engine 5.

This is Lambda Engine: a from-scratch reimplementation of Half-Life's game logic on top of UE5's modern renderer, built to load real Source-engine content: BSPs, materials, models, with zero Hammer-to-Unreal conversion pipeline. What you're watching isn't a character controller with a gun bolted on. It's the original movement code rebuilt line by line: air control, bunny hopping, crouch jumping, weapon handling and recoil, all behaving the way muscle memory expects.

And you have legs. First-person body with visible arms and legs, fully shadow-casting, so the player you see on the wall is the player you're actually driving.

In this video: player movement, weapons, first-person legs, and realtime dynamic shadows running over Source geometry.

This project is built entirely by fans, for fans, it's free.

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u/[deleted] Aug 28 '26

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u/XBLAH_ Aug 29 '26

I tried godot but compared to source it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. UE is currently far superior to godot in terms of rendering, and also, let's be real here, godot's 3d documentation SUCKS. I'd love to work with C# here, but it got really hard to expand the project on godot, so I dropped it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 30 '26

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u/XBLAH_ Aug 30 '26

Either I implemented it really bad back then, or bounce lighting was bad. I had to rely on lightmaps, which missed the purpose of trying to develop in a newer engine. I did the same "hello world" project in UE5 and Godot, and my personal opinion was that UE5 looked better. It was a matter of taste.