Valve officially announced Source Engine 2 at GDC 2015 yesterday and confirmed that, much like Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, the graphics engine will be free for developers to make use of.
Source 2 is of course the successor to the venerable engine that debuted back in 2004, and powered hits such as Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, and Titanfall.
What Source 2 brings to the table in terms of technical specs isn’t yet clear, but Valve did reveal that it will be releasing a Vulkan-compatible version of the engine; Vulkan is a next generation 3D graphics API developed by Khronos, the company behind OpenGL. We also know that Valve is focusing on “creator productivity” - in other words making the engine as easy to develop on as possible in order to encourage gamers, modders and first-time developers to dig into it.
”With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity. 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 favorite games,” explains Valve’s Jay Stelly. ”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 also found time to announce a couple of other tidbits; Steam Link, a small piece of hardware that can be hooked up to your TV, and allows you to stream games from your PC to various devices in your home in 1080p and 60Hz quality. Steam Link will be available in November this year for $49.99. It popped up on the Steam store briefly, but has since been removed.
Finally, the company revealed Lighthouse a “room scale tracking” and VR input system. This one allows Valve and other developers to perform high resolution, high speed tracking, ”for an arbitrary number of targets at a low enough BOM cost that it can be incorporated into TVs, monitors, headsets, input devices, or mobile devices.” Lighthouse will also be free for developers to use.
So there you go. Quite a busy GDC for Valve, even if no third entries in certain popular video game franchises were mentioned. The arrival of the first Source engine heralded an era of impressive growth for PC gaming - will its descendant make a similar impact?
