DoTA 2 Update Soft-Launches Source 2 Engine?

Valve Software’s free to play juggernaut DoTA 2 received a new update yesterday and according to a modder on Reddit, it apparently uses the heavily talked about Source 2 Engine.

The modder stated that “Everything in this package is a new game. It’s all the Dota assets and code ported over to Source 2. 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.”

This coincides with the release of new workshop tools for DoTA 2 to allow developers to create their custom games. Interestingly, the new workshop tools support Windows 64-bit editions and Direct3D 11 compatible GPUs. As for Source 2, it was heavily rumoured that Half Life 3 would be the first game to usher in the new engine. With the recent soft-launch, it’ll certainly be interesting to see what comes out of Valve next. Stay tuned for more information.