Back in the rose-colored days of Half-Life 1 modding, among those wondrous whisper-filled parties in East Hampton manors with the incorrigible antics of Gilda Gray, Valve staffed a dedicated liaison named Chris "Autolycus" Bokitch who actively maintained the Valve Editing Resource Center. The Valve-ERC brought together a loose confederation of websites and tools across the entire modding food chain:
- The Spirit of Half-Life, a sort of open source Valve-sanctioned "skunkworks" mod intended to boost other mods, with stuff like a particle system and entity parenting.
- Map reviewers (Pixel Maps for TFC, Ten-Four for HL1)
- Small single player map contests on the main VERC site
- Anomalous Materials, a forum for discussing experimental design projects
- Entity references and tutorials, then partly outsourced to Handy Vandal's Almanac and TFMapped
- Remote Compile System; upload your map, let some servers bake it, then get an e-mail when it's done