ValveTime

In the fourth episode of ValveTime TalkTime, Glenn, Nick, James and John discuss what they would like to see Valve do for the next Half-Life game, and argue about what does or does not need to be done for the game to be considered a success. Don't forget to leave your questions in the comments below as TalkTime Episode 5 will be a question/answer session where the ValveTime staff will talk about what you submit!


Feel free to leave your feedback regarding what you think of this series! If you would like to see more, let us know! If not, tell us! Our series can only improve with your help.

You'll remember that in December 2011, the owner of Uber Entertainment posted this picture taken at the Westside Game Industry Night in Seattle, claiming that a Valve employee was caught wearing a HL3 t-shirt. But that t-shirt was wrong; the lambda and "3" were reversed. And no one's really confirmed who exactly was wearing the shirt.

Anyways, this newly discovered picture of Jeremy was taken in August 2011, before the dubious twitter pic, so now Half-Life fans have even better evidence that Half-Life 3 has probably been well in development for at least a year.

Recently Valve has been more vocal about their next plans for Half-Life and the future. Instead of just telling fans to "hang in there", Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson have both gone on record this year and said that "Ricochet 2 started development". Gabe also confirmed that they were working on a next generation gaming engine and looking for some software to ship it on. More ambiguously, developers at Valve have also left subtle Easter eggs all over the place, like on the Dota 2 blog or 2011 Steam winter sale art.

Full source image

Well, I think this just about confirms that the files that we found, and the code inside them, were part of a secret build of Valve's next-generation engine.

A few days after we found the files, Valve has removed the entire /vproj/ directory from everybody's hard drive. But the new Hammer icons are still there, and so is valve.py - the file that briefly mentions Ep3 and Alyx.

Here's a recap of what the code in the files told us about Source 2 so far...

• Source 2 is in the making, and it's next-gen.
• Hammer is getting a big update (will include a scale tool, paint tool, several new terrain editing tools, and more).
• Source 2 may have full support for 64-bit systems.
• The content pipeline is getting an overhaul (new file format for world models, new standard file paths)

These are exciting times for a Valve fan!

Updates 1 & 2: [check bottom of post]

Our resident investigator Barnz has done some more digging in the Source Filmmaker script files, and he's uncovered probably some of the biggest news we've ever reported on our site.


He's found many more references to a "Source 2", but not just one vague line like our previous entry. We're only one file deep, and already it's clear that the references to "Source 2" are indeed referring to a next-gen engine that Valve is currently developing. I'm only going to show one line in this post, but there are about 60+ references here, and this one line is probably the most telling.

Here's the code paste at Pastebin.com, and this is the file path on the harddrive:

".../SourceFilmmaker/game/sdktools/python/global/lib/site-packages/vproj/vproj.py"


Line 1387:


There are references to Source, Hybrid, and Source 2 in this file. We speculate that Hybrid is the base for which Source 2 is sitting on. Barnz also says it looks like Source 2 is using the same pipeline as Source, meaning that it will probably be keeping its .BSP level format. We haven't found any references to DirectX or OpenGL yet, or Episode Three for that matter, but we're still investigating.

The Ep3 reference from before was just a comment, so it's unlikely we'll find any more mentioning of it. Source Filmmaker was in development parallel to Source 2, hence why these script files have so many references to the new engine.

Valve wants you to know that they "don't like to brag, but Source is considered the most flexible, comprehensive, and powerful game development environment out there. And it's about to get even better."

We'll keep you posted if we find anything else! Or if you come across some new stuff, we'd like to help you share it with the world, so you can submit any findings to news@valvetime.net.



Update #1

Another member from Facepunch, GameDev, has pointed out that there are some new "Source 2 tools" icons stashed away in the SFM files. Here's a preview of a few of them:


And the file names in their respective order...

• appicon
• terrain_tool_toggle_control_cage
• terrain_tool_select_verts
• terrain_tool_edge_smooth
• paint_tool_icon
• scale_tool_icon

You can find these at:

".../SourceFilmmaker/game/platform/tools/images/hammer"



Update #2

J*Rod from Facepunch has noted a few new things in his recap. First, now there's some evidence that suggests Source 2 will take more advantage of 64-bit systems. You can find the reference at:

".../SourceFilmmaker/game/sdktools/python/global/lib/site-packages/vproj/vprojUI.py"


Line 1540:


From what I can understand, this if/else statement is disabling 64-bit for 32-bit projects that are from either the Source, SFM (the 2nd engine from SOURCE_FAMILY), or Hybrid engines. But, it's not disabling 64-bit for Source 2, so the take away here is that it's suggesting Source 2 supports 64-bit. But it's not for sure as I don't understand the entirety of the code.

You'll remember that Valve had implemented support for 64-bit in Source way back in 2005 with the release of The Lost Coast, but Valve hasn't added the support to any of their other games due to some cases of poor performance and glitches.

Second, currently Valve's game models are of the MDL format. Well, it appears that Valve will be moving to a new format, VMDL. And the "V" prefix is popping up all over the place. VGAME, VPROJ, VMOD, VMDL, etc, which could support the fact that they're going to use a new filesystem and pipeline. From:

".../SourceFilmmaker/game/sdktools/python/global/lib/site-packages/filesystem/valve.py"


Line 138:


And just as well, the key values that current Source games have are stored in a file called gameinfo.txt. It looks like Source 2 games will be storing these values in a gameinfo.gi.