Source Entities:FAQ

This is Q&A with Pinsplash.

=Why did you make this wiki?= Alternatives to the simply are necessary. Valve's wiki has a huge amount of problems.

Just what is so bad about VDC?

 * 1) At the time of writing this, the last time a Valve employee did anything on the wiki was July of 2018. What were they doing? Updating the MediaWiki software from a 5-years-old version. What motivated them to update it? A person from HackerOne who found XSS exploits. They forgot about this for 5 years. Before this incident, the last time a Valve employee was spotted doing anything else was in May 2017. Valve's management of the website is horrible, and I wonder for how much longer the site will even exist.
 * 2) Outdated infrastructure and standards which were mostly just the whims of a few people 7 to 13 years ago. People now are very adamant about keeping some of these odd things that are simply not logical. One example being the "add" templates and how they are thrown around wildly on entity pages, due to them being in other "one size fits all" templates.

Couldn't you have fixed at least some of this stuff over on VDC, rather than make this?
Well, I tried. Eventually people got mad with the massive amount of changes I was making and were apparently planning to mass-revert my edits. They considered it damaging, and stomping over the hard work of others. A fresh start seemed obvious. They can go and have their own documentation now, with however many notes it has that are wildly inaccurate, with virtually 0 fact-checking occurring.

=Why is it called Source Entities?= That's the biggest goal, documenting every entity in a new way. Source Ents will not follow FGDs, and will document things similar to the code inside the games. This necessitates pages for classnames and most code classes. This will prevent repetitive FGD templates taking up huge amounts of space on pages.

We'll also fix the issue of nearly every single entity page having at least one incorrect piece of information on it (except for internal entities). Look at any page for an HL2 entity and you will see there's things that apply only to other games, like the VScript keyvalues for Left 4 Dead 2. Another is Left 4 Dead's OnKilled input, which is in L4D only but is listed on pages for entities in other games. Why didn't anyone fact-check that like, 9 years ago? I'm not sure, I guess everyone assumed the templates would truly be "one size fits all". The information is needless for those pages and blatantly false.

=I'm a reader from VDC, and I have trouble getting used to the format here.= Information that came from templates like these:   will be found on the page for the C++ code class that they originated from. The code class for those three specifically would be. You'll find all of the code classes an entity uses listed in a box on the right. If you see an entity without any keyvalues, inputs, output, or flags on it, that's why. Just check the code class pages and the thing you're looking for will be on one of them.

See Notes for readers for more things.

Can anyone edit this?
Yeah! Look through Help:Editing first so you're familiar with what you have available to you. Even if you're an editor from VDC you might want to look. A lot has changed, especially the templates.

Why are Half-Life 2: Episode 1 and Episode 2 referred to as if they're the same thing?
Aside from the content in them, they basically are. They run on the exact same code (called the Episodic branch).

So if this wiki documents by code instead of FGDs, are you also making new FGDs to follow the code?
Yep. These are still being made though!

=You're just copying VDC!= No.

=Nice ads. Are you doing this for money?= The ad revenue goes to ShoutWiki, the people who run the wiki farm.