What Is Earth's Special Forces (ESF)?

Updated

Earth's Special Forces (ESF) is a Dragon Ball–themed multiplayer mod for Half-Life, developed over many years by a community team and announced through esforces.com. If you are looking for a Dragon Ball fighting game built on Half-Life's engine, ESF is the project that name refers to. The most important thing to know today is that the team has moved development away from the original Half-Life platform to Sven Co-op, after a 2023 Half-Life update broke the memory limits the mod depended on.

The short version

  • Genre: Dragon Ball–inspired multiplayer combat mod.
  • Base game: Originally Half-Life; now being rebuilt on Sven Co-op.
  • Status: Long-running, still in development, with public news updates on esforces.com.
  • Why the platform changed: A November 2023 Half-Life 25th anniversary update altered memory usage and broke many mods.

Why ESF moved to Sven Co-op

According to the project's March 14, 2024 update, Valve's Half-Life anniversary update caused more "out of memory" errors. Half-Life does not have the "LargeAddressAware" (LAA) header flagged, so it can only use about 2GB of total memory. Enabling LAA would have raised that to roughly 4GB and avoided the problem, but it was not enabled.

The ESF team explains the scale of the issue directly: their base Trunks model alone is as large as all of Half-Life's models combined. They hit the memory wall and the game stopped working.

The team considered enabling the flag themselves but worried about shipping a mod that could potentially trigger a VAC ban. Instead, they moved to Sven Co-op, which had been given source code access and could be altered to use 4GB of memory.

What the move fixed and what it didn't

Area Result after moving to Sven Co-op
Memory limits Major memory issues resolved
Characters/models Every model and character is now in the game, mostly animated and working
Map changes No longer need to close and reopen the game to change maps
Sound system Old FMOD version is outdated and still causing problems
Transformations Unique transformation animations and bonus tiers still missing
Clutter system Still needs cleanup so objects like rocks don't spawn in the air

What is still being worked on

The update notes that the remaining gaps are character-specific: unique transformation animations and bonus tiers. A team member, Dalte, is working on bonus tiers and on setting up audio for each character's transformation.

So if you are checking ESF out, expect a project that is playable in parts but not feature-complete. The transformation and bonus-tier content is the current frontier.

Where to follow it

esforces.com is the project's news hub. The site's News section is where the team posts development updates, including the March 2024 post that explains the Half-Life memory problem and the Sven Co-op migration. If you want to know whether a new build or feature has landed, that page is the place to check rather than assuming a fixed release schedule.