Well some very interesting news has popped up early this morning concerning Valve and the possible soft launch of something major. Late last night, we told you about the Alpha release of DOTA 2 Workshop Tools, but following that release someone on Reddit looked further into it and discovered there might be much more than meets the eye.
Not only is this just the Workshop Tools as thought, but it appears that it may have completely launched the Source 2 engine. The following is the full post on Reddit concerning this by RoyAwesome.
- Everything in this package is a new game. It’s all the Dota assets and code ported over to Source 2. That’s why Hammer is different. That’s why the console is different.
- Guys. Valve just soft launched the entire Source 2 engine.
- EDIT: Because people are asking for proof
- Everything that would share a name with Source is named ‘…2’. That’s ‘engine2.dll’, ‘vconsole2.exe’, ‘vphysics2.dll’.
- When you go to open a map in Hammer, it asks for .vmap files. One of the other options is ‘.vmf (Source 1.0)’ files.
- The f***ing console is redone.
- There is a new Key-Value like format (that i’m gonna call KV2). It is type safe. It looks like this: http://pastebin.com/RVQtkv1j
- EDIT2 (Probably the strongest evidence): That script also allows for different dlls to load and render different assets (vmaps are rendered by worldrenderer.dll, etc). This is a completely new architecture from Valves previous system. This bit alone would indicate a significant amount of engine work has been done to split these bits out of the engine and into their own libraries. That means the engine is also completely plug-and-play with new engine level components if valve creates them for different games. This is pretty freaking huge.
- EDIT3: lol, source2 apparently support fax machines.
- EDIT4: from /u/nellody: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/…w_outliner.png notice the ‘source2’ in the path.
- EDIT: the general consensus around the source reverse engineering community is that this is really source 2.
This may not make a lot of sense to the typical gamer, but this is certainly a lot of evidence to back up this claim of it being the Source 2 engine. Could this mean we may finally see Half Life 3 in our lifetime? Possibly, but the most interesting thing is that Valve seemingly launched this as a complete surprise to basically everyone and still hasn’t announced anything. They will almost have to respond sooner rather than later, so stay tuned for any further details.
