Valve Have Possibly Just Launched Source 2 Tools with Dota Update

Valve have just released a huge update to their modding tools. The map editor seems to now be using the long awaited source 2 engine.

If you have played any of the valve games over the last ten years, you will have come across the source engine. It was released with Counter-strike:source and Half Life 2. Many other games have used the same engine including Left 4 Dead, Portal and Titanfall. For the last few years their have been rumours floating around that source 2 is being worked on and this is probably the best suggestion that it’s coming soon. The map editor and modding tools for Dota 2 have had a full redesign and seem to have had the editors code moved over to source 2.

Some other changes include more options to save files. Now you can have a “.vmap” file, and a “Source 1.0 Map (.vmf)” file. Any files that were already in the source one engine have now got a 2 next to them in the new update. For example “vconsole.dll” is now “vconsole2.dll” and “engine.dll” is now “engine2.dll”. This suggests that these files could running on a completely different engine.

A new engine will probably bring us some new headline titles too. Left 4 dead 3, another counter-strike, portal 3 and Half-life 3 are all very highly anticipated, so it will be interesting to see if the new engine will allow for these releases.

Thanks to Game Spot for supplying us with this information.

Image courtesy of Nerdacy.