The latest update from Valve improves numerous games from its catalog

May 19, 2014 14:55 GMT  ·  By

Valve has a large catalog of games and some of them are pretty old, but that doesn't mean developers don't care about them any longer. They've now released a massive update for the Source engine, which applies to quite a few titles.

The Source engine has been made famous by Valve because it was implemented in all of its games. Some of the most famous titles that benefited from this great engine are Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, but Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source are also built with this technology.

There are very few companies that issue patches for games 6 or 7 years after the initial release and Valve is one of them. It would have been easy to upgrade just one of the newer titles, but they chose to fix all of them.

“Updates to Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch have been released. The updates will be applied automatically,” noted the developer on the official Steam website.

The number of changes for the Source engine is quite impressive. For example, the skybox on 3rd-party maps when using certain sky materials has been fixed, while using the Vertex Tool in Hammer, users can now press CTRL+B to snap selected vertices to the grid, and about:blank is now allowed in the MOTD.

Also, the mat_texture_list has been marked as a cheat to prevent client exploits, the sv_voicecodec convar has been removed because it isn’t necessary anymore and was being used as an exploit, the con_logfile convar has been updated to check for invalid filenames, the network resource download path has been updated to check for invalid filenames, the plugin_load command has been updated, and servers can only load plugins if they are not running a map.

Team Fortress 2 is the other big title that got a multitude of fixes with this update for Source. According to the changelog, a bug that would cause the Sentry’s health to look overhealed when it wasn’t has been fixed, a bug where the Spy could not place a sapper without switching weapons first has been corrected, and the client-side critical attack prediction for rapid-fire weapons has been improved.

You must know that if you are running any of these games you don't have to do anything special in order to get the updates. The Steam client will download them automatically.