Source 2 Announced

[L. Scofield]

Valve announced the Source 2 engine, the successor to the Source engine used in Valve's games since the launch of Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2. "The value of a platform like the PC is how much it increases the productivity of those who use the platform. 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," said 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."

https://steamdb.info/blog/source2-announcement/

 

[Scott_Arm]

cool. More options. Unreal, Unity, Source. Hobbyists rejoice!

 

[L. Scofield]

Possible Source 2 footage:

 

[L. Scofield]

Slides of the presentation, including a couple of images:

http://alex.vlachos.com/graphics/Alex_Vlachos_Advanced_VR_Rendering_GDC2015.pdf

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Am I the only one who's unimpressed with those screenshots?

 

[fehu]

Look like they have not implemented definitive light yet

 

[L. Scofield]

Well, according to the slides they want the engine to run as fast as possible to be available on as many hardware configurations as possible. That means no high-end graphics.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Well, according to the slides they want the engine to run as fast as possible to be available on as many hardware configurations as possible. That means no high-end graphics.

That doesn't make much sense. Unreal Engine 4 was made available for Tegra 3 and that's DX9-esque hardware with very, very low performance. id Tech 5 was used in both the desktop/console version of Rage and the iphone version using an OpenGL ES2.0 PowerVR SGX535.
Having low minimum requirements isn't an excuse for not being able to scale up for better visuals.. at least not for the competing engines.

I look at these screenshots and I don't seem to notice anything that couldn't be done using Source from 2005's Lost Coast using a very high render resolution.

 

[iroboto]

Here is the VR demo in VR mode. I actually like it. If you don't have a VR machine you can still cheat. Reduce the window size of the video to approximately the same size of a VR headset, so small. And then hit play, get close to your monitor and cross your eyes and presto - solid 3d. It looks quite good, quite a bit better than those screen shots. Then again my eyes are crossed, lol but. yea

http://a.pomf.se/byxmyw.webm

 

[L. Scofield]

That doesn't make much sense. Unreal Engine 4 was made available for Tegra 3 and that's DX9-esque hardware with very, very low performance. id Tech 5 was used in both the desktop/console version of Rage and the iphone version using an OpenGL ES2.0 PowerVR SGX535.
Having low minimum requirements isn't an excuse for not being able to scale up for better visuals.. at least not for the competing engines.

I look at these screenshots and I don't seem to notice anything that couldn't be done using Source from 2005's Lost Coast using a very high render resolution.

We'll have to wait for more information but right now it doesn't seem very promising.

 

[Grall]

It doesn't rely entirely on pre-baked lighting still, does it?

 

[Scott_Arm]

Well, it's very possible that Source2 supports a lot of stuff that they find unsuitable for VR.

 

[milk]

While visually unimpressive, I like it that they are focusing on different priorities for their engine. We don't another Unreal 4, we have Unreal 4 for that.
It seems like they wanna take no shortcuts when it comes to AA, pixel quality and framerate. A lot of the IQ worshiping folks should be all over this engine for that.
Anyway, I'm still on wait and see mode, but am definetely curious.

 

[psurge]

Fully agree. Given how specific the presentation is and what is being prioritized for VR, I'm not sure it makes sense to be worried about Source 2 features/scalability as a whole just yet.