Valve Might Have Just Soft Launched the Source 2 Engine

Yesterday evening, DOTA 2 was updated with literally nothing to the main game. Instead, the Alpha release of the DOTA 2 Workshop Tools was launched which is exciting news to the Source modding community and to lovers of the Warcraft III mod scene from which the original DotA was spawned from. What was unexpected about the new toolkit was caught by keen Source modders who noticed that the files and editor are very different from existing Source dev tools. The finding was broken onto the DOTA 2 subreddit, currently the largest English speaking DOTA 2 community since DOTA 2 doesn’t have a forum dedicated to its name, by u/RoyAwesome who listed out some of the collected findings.

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.

Citing some of the 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.

Gabe Newell already confirmed the development of Source 2 years ago. It is also known based on various screenleaks that Valve is working to release Left 4 Dead 3 on the Source 2 Engine. With the recent findings in the DOTA 2 Workshop Tools pointing to the supposed porting of an existing Source Engine game to a different one, it is assumed that Source 2 is closer to a full launch alongside a new Valve game title. Valve has already announced its presence at Gamescon 2014 which starts next Thursday August 14 though there is only speculation what they could have to show off if anything by then.