The Dota 2 community has woken up this morning to a brand new game. Yes, the MOBA looks and plays identically – but all of its assets and code appear to have been ported over to a new engine. Valve’s new engine: the fabled Source 2.
Dota’s map editor, Hammer, has received a major update. That’s in line with the alpha release of the game’s Workshop tools Valve announced yesterday.
“This is the first release of a new set of tools to create, play, and share custom maps and game modes for Dota 2,” wrote Valve. “This is a developer focused release and currently has high system requirements which means not everyone will be able to run the tools.
“We are working on expanding the number of PC configurations that will be able to run this but wanted to get the tools out there so developers could start working on their Custom Games.”
But those community developers have noticed changes with far bigger implications. The console – the command line user interface that allows users to modify Dota 2 – has been revamped. Key files in the game have been sequelised: ‘engine2.dll’, ‘vconsole2.exe’ and ‘vphysics2.dll’.
The Source reverse engineering community on reddit is in agreement: the new scripting architecture represents a serious amount of new engine work. And to top it off, Hammer now explicitly offers a non-default ‘Source 1.0’ file type.
There isn’t much of this that’s visible on the surface. Dota 2 plays much as it did. But roll on Left 4 Dead 3, eh?