Valve may have just soft-launched Source 2 in latest DoTA update

New workshop tools for DoTA 2 have launched and it appears to migrate the game to a new engine.

According to modder RoyAwesome, the new engine could be Source 2. The Source engine has been used in seminal first-person shooters Half-Life 2, Portal 2, Left 4 Dead 2 and Team Fortress 2.

"Everything in this package is a new game. It's all the Dota assets and code ported over to Source 2," he wrote on Reddit.

"Guys. Valve just soft launched the entire Source 2 engine."

"Everything that would share a name with Source is named '...2'. That's 'engine2.dll', 'vconsole2.exe', 'vphysics2.dll'. When you go to open a map in Hammer, it asks for .vmap files. One of the other options is '.vmf (Source 1.0)' files."

The DoTA 2 workshop tools were released yesterday and are very system heavy.

"This is the first release of a new set of tools to create, play, and share custom maps and game modes for Dota 2," said Valve.

"This is a developer focused release and currently has high system requirements which means not everyone will be able to run the tools. At the moment the tools require a 64-bit version of Windows and a Direct3D 11 compatible GPU.

"We are working on expanding the number of PC configurations (including 32-bit OSes like Windows XP) that will be able to run this but wanted to get the tools out there so developers could start working on their Custom Games."

Valve's Source engine was released ten years ago. Is this Valve's first public release of the new engine, and does it mean we're any closer to seeing progress on - whisper it - Half-Life 3?