Why do all Valve games have the 'hl2.exe' process? [closed]

I play many Valve games. Particularly Portal 2, and TF2. However, after playing these games for a while, I have noticed that in the task manager these programs come up under a process hl2.exe - Half Life 2. This seems to be the case for all Valve games.

After further research, I have found that this process is associated with all Source SDK and other assorted games.

So my question is, why do all Valve (and some other) games have the hl2.exe process?

source-engine half-life-2

Best Answer

Because all/most of their games are build on the Source Engine. The Source Engine was originally made for Half-Life 2. Which started the trend of hl2.exe.

So in short: Games made in the Source engine have their executable named hl2.exe

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What is hl2 exe has stopped working?

There can be multiple reasons why the game exe file has stopped working. Depending on the basis, you can try these solutions: run the game incompatibility mode, run the game with administrative rights, download the latest driver update, scan for virus and malware, repair the corrupted system files.

What is hl2 exe?

hl2.exe, standing for Half Life 2 is the HL2 (or Source) engine. This engine is used for many Source games such as Garry's Mod, Counter-Strike: Source and Team Fortress 2. If you have never installed Steam on your computer and this is running, it could be a virus masquerading as a game.

Why does Valve not make 3rd games?

They did make a Portal 2 Soundtrack: Volume Three. The reason Portal specifically didn't get up to 3 is because Valve didn't want posts saying "Valve learns to count to 3" and all the other reasons written here.

What was the last game that Valve made?

Valve's last game, Dota 2, was released in 2013.

Every Valve Game, Worst To Best

More answers regarding why do all Valve games have the 'hl2.exe' process? [closed]

Answer 2

Like all the other answers, this is just going to be a guess, but this one is backed up by actual history.

It's because of how Steam packages files.

Valve's games made prior to Left 4 Dead all include the Half-Life 2 Shared Files.

One of my old answers breaks down how the GCF files were laid out for TF2 specifically.

There are 2,722.83MB taken up by shared files, including the multiplayer ob binaries.gcf file, which would include the version of hl2.exe used by all of Valve's older multiplayer titles.

Note that there was likely also a single player binaries gcf file used by HL2, both of its episodes, and Portal 1.

These GCF files were shared between games.

In 2013, Valve switched over to the VPK system. This renders most of what is listed here as moot as the HL2 "Shared Files" are now distributed as part of the game itself. Valve likely keeps the executable with the old name out of laziness.

Incidentally, in games from 2008 or later, you will likely see the executable named some variation of the game name since they didn't use the shared files.

Answer 3

All those games (Portal, TF, CounterStrike, They Hunger and so on) started long ago as mods for half-life and half-life 2. I guess the name of executable was simply kept from those days because developers got used to it.

Answer 4

They are all built off of one common engine: The Source Engine

The Source Engine was first used to develop "Counter Strike: Source", a remake version of the original Counter Strike that was a mod built off of the original Half-Life-1. This was shortly followed by Valve's own creation, Half-Life-2.

Now, the reason for all games built off of this engine using the same .exe file is the nature of the engine itself. It is made to be Modular, with each game built off of it expanding a general 'package' of the engine.

As such, whenever you are playing a game off of the Source Engine (TF2, Left4Dead, Portal) you are actually playing a highly-customized mod of the original Source engine, and the first 'original' mod for this engine was Half-Life-2.

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