Help:Readers

This page lists things readers might want to know, related to the website and how wikis work, etc. Also see this page with important information about games.

Categories
Pages that start with Category: are semi-automatically created. Categories are simply lists of pages that are grouped in some specific way. If a page does not exist yet, it cannot be inside a category, so some categories will have alternative lists that include things without pages.

Code classes vs entities
Every entity (with a few exceptions) has an underlying class which contains the code that defines the entity's unique behaviors. Classes can extend from others, causing them to inherit behaviors and things such as keyvalues, inputs, etc.

A hypothetical projectile entity may have many classes. First, its own class that gives it its own look and properties, which may extend from another class that defines a few behaviors present in every projectile in that game (for instance, ). The class might then extend from, which lets entities display a model, which then extends from , which is Source's base class for every entity and contains the most well-known things, like targetnames, parenting, the kill input and the OnUser outputs. All of the classes an entity inherits from will be listed on its page in a box to the right.

Some entity pages on SE redirect to class pages. All the info is instead documented on a page named after the class if that class has multiple classnames, or any other class inherits from it. If that class has any entities linked directly to it, those will be listed. Other entities and classes which are connected to that one can be found by clicking on the link located at the very start of the page, in the class's name. The decision to do this was made following a very large argument on VDC over the validity of separate pages for each entity that's tied to a class.

Misconceptions
There's a few common misconceptions or obscure things that many people don't know about or have been mislead to believe, due to poor VDC documentation or otherwise. We're going forward assuming you know this stuff.
 * FGDs don't show you everything an entity can do. Many people believe that if something isn't in the FGD, it's impossible. The wild inaccuracies of FGDs are why this wiki documents by code. (At least, as much as we possibly can. Due to many games not having public code, there's some things which simply cannot be seen or determined.)
 * Portal 1 has (nearly) every piece of code that the Half-Life 2 episodes have. It's basically an Episode 2 mod.
 * Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and 2 run on the exact same code. There is absolutely no distinction between them except the assets in each game folder. (The ep2 flashlight can be enabled in ep1, simply by changing a certain .cfg setting.) This codebase is called the Episodic branch.