14 DAY TRIAL // One of the leading developers at Valve has said that the company will continue to offer incremental updates for its Source video game engine instead of trying to create a completely new version in the near term.
Talking to GamingLives Valve's Chet Faliszek has stated, “That’s just the way we work with that engine, we’ve just update it not just replace it, and some point we may say there’s Source 2 or whatever, but really for us there’s been a pretty easy way to keep it and understanding the tools.”
He added, “When you replace an engine you’re replacing the tools and the way that people work, there’s an expense in man hours and people learning and people getting up on it right.”
The Source Engine was introduced all the way back in 2004 and since then Valve has added a lot of new features that have kept it relevant and allowed it to power successes like the Left 4 Dead series and the new Portal 2.
The main advantage of the Source Engine is that it's stable at its core and allows the company to iterate and see what new features players might like.
This approach is pretty different from that of other developers, like Epic Games and id Software, who tend to launch new versions of their engines, Unreal and id Tech, every few years, incorporating the newest tech and standards.
At the moment Epic is preparing Unreal Engine 4, which was demoed via the very impressive Samaritan video, while id Software has just shown what its fifth generation engine can do with the launch of the first person shooter RAGE.
An announcement from Valve that a new Source Engine is in development will probably again spark rumors that Valve is actively waiting for it to be ready before launching the long delayed Episode 3.