Valve reveals Source 2 game engine

Valve has officially announced its work on the Source 2 game engine.

In a statement, Valve’s Jay Stelly said the tech was for both professional developers and gamers interested in creating content through Steam Workshop for their favourite games.

Stelly added the tool would be free to use for those content developers.

Valve also plans to release a version of Source 2 that is compatible with the newly unveiled open-standard graphics API Vulkan, the next step of OpenGL.

It is not currently clear when the engine will be available to developers. More details are expected to be announced this week.

"The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform. With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity," said Stelly.

"Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not for just the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favourite games.

"We will be making Source 2 available for free to content developers. This combined with recent announcements by Epic and Unity will help continue the PCs dominance as the premiere content authoring platform."

Valve has been using the previous iteration of Source for years, in games such as Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2 and all the way through to more recent releases including Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2.

No details have yet been given on what new games Valve may be working on with the new Source 2 game engine.

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