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 * 2) Outdated underlying structure and standards which were mostly just the whims of a few people 7 to 13 years ago.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.
 * 3) Full of idiots off their rockers:           Admins aren't around and hardly ever did quality control.

Couldn't you have fixed at least some of this stuff over on VDC, rather than make this?
Read #3. They got sick of me. 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. I also did this because I simply couldn't let all the planned work I was going to do go to total waste. I bit off what I could chew, and I intend to swallow.

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. At the same time, the huge, repetitive FGD templates are getting trashed.

We'll also fix the issue of nearly every single entity page having at least one incorrect piece of information on. Look at any VDC 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". Listing OnKilled on pages that don't need it is something that's useless and confusing.

SE will attempt to further abstract the way information is presented, which is easier since it's trying to document many games at once from the start. (VDC opened in 2005 and suffered a slow panic as more Source games released.)

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 page 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.

This site says an entity is available in my game but it's not in the FGD and there's no FGD code posted. What should I do?
That probably means it's in another game's FGD, and Valve didn't include it in your game's because they didn't think it would be useful. Put the name of the entity into the search bar, and click the bottom option that says "containing..." to search for mentions of that entity in the FGDs of other games. You can probably copy and paste that code into your FGD and have it work fine. Also see Non-FGD features.

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!

This wiki overlooked something important!
Again, anyone can edit!

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.

Where do I speak to an admin?
Category:Administration