Valve apparently released the Source 2 engine without telling anyone

Valve, the company we all love to hate because of Half Life 3, has been talking about a new version of its 3D engine for quite some time. It seems that they finally launched it – but didn’t tell anyone about it.

Polygon reports that the new workshop tools for Dota 2, which was released a while ago, contains a whole new engine, whereas the assets are still the same. Here’s a small part of the article:

Central to the theory is while Dota 2‘s assets remain the same in this update, the code is decidedly different – in particular, all files that would share a name with the Source engine are qualified with the number 2, including engine2.dll, vconsole2.exe, vphysics2.dll.

“Everything in this package is a new game,” wrote RoyAwesome on the Dota 2 subReddit, a user who has been collecting evidence so far. “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.” The general consensus around the Source reverse engineering community is that this is really Source 2. This has since triggered a debate over whether the Workshop is an example of the engine itself, or rather is just related to the tech.

Head over to Polygon to read the rest of the article, and debate away!