Valve Will Not Completely Remake Source Engine - News

by VGChartz Staff , posted on 13 May 2011 / 3,647 Views

Valve’s CEO Gabe Newell told Develop Online that they currently have no plans to completely rebuild Source Engine, instead relying upon updates to their existing structure.

Newell said that Source has numerous advantages for Valve, who have been using the engine since 2004. The Source Engine has been used on all major Valve titles since, including Portal 2.

"There are a lot of advantages on iterating on a mature and stable and shipped codebase, as opposed to starting over again," explained Newell. "I think, when you see a game like DOTA 2, you'll see how developers can get a lot more out of Source than most companies can get from a scratch-built engine. I think that incremental updates model has worked really well for us."

DOTA 2 is an upcoming action/fantasy/strategy game based upon Defense of the Ancients 2 custom map for Warcraft III.

Newell also said he’s happy that people want to use Source Engine, but Valve’s not trying to muscle in on what Epic Games does.

12 Comments

ssj12 (on 14 May 2011)

@Solereon - It sounds more like your CPU cant handle the load for the transition between game and desktop.

naznatips (on 14 May 2011)

@ Solereon

Uh... you've got some problems completely unrelated to Source.

@ Everyone whining/calling Valve lazy, really? A company that's released more than a dozen games in the last 7 years, spanning a number of genres, all the while maintaining and upgrading the world's premier digital distribution service and you're complaining that they stick to an engine that ONLY looks great, and not top-of-the-line?

Dinges (on 14 May 2011)

It's too late in the console cycle to build a new engine. I guess they'll have a new engine in 1 or 2 years when new consoles have more power.

Soleron (on 14 May 2011)

Stable?

The thing crashes at every turn, especially when you try and Alt-Tab out of it or open/close it. Not been fixed since I started playing HL2.

Alby_da_Wolf (on 13 May 2011)

If they ever decide to rewrite it in the short or mid term, it makes sense that they wait for having next gen dev kits and taylor the new version for the next consoles, current ones should be fine with evolutions of the current engine.

greenmedic88 (on 13 May 2011)

So much for the theory that HL Episode 3 was being held back to be the debut release for Source Engine 2.0.

I suppose as long as it can be scaled to utilize new shaders and lighting, accommodate additional memory and optimize on newer hardware and GPUs, it's not a requirement to re-write the Source Engine every 4-5 years.

snowdog (on 13 May 2011)

The Source engine hasn't aged well at all and needs to be more portable. It's crap on the PS3 and they haven't even bothered porting it to the Wii. They're not lazy, they're just over-rated developers that don't have the skillset to work on something new that'll perform well on multiple platforms. Their level designers are top-notch but they haven't got much else going for them imo.

Kenryoku_Maxis (on 13 May 2011)

When they can sell over 4 million copies for games like Portal 2, HL2 and Team Fortress, there's really no need to make a new engine. Its EA who's trying to 'overtake' Activision with new engines (BF3 being the latest example). Valve is kind of like BLizzard, whatever they make gets popular so why try to beat Crysis in graphics?

disolitude (on 13 May 2011)

if this was Activision about call of duty engine, they would be ripped to shreds for being 'lazy'. Valve tho is gaming royalty so they will not be accused of such thing.