Dota 2’s Workshop Tools are apparently in Source 2

If the new Hammer editor is much simpler than the original, it should have the slogan “You CAN touch this.”

I don’t know where to begin with this, so let’s start with “Dota 2‘s Workshop Tools seem to be using Source 2″. I might’ve misunderstood this because I am terrible at engines and there’s nothing officially announced, so bear with me.

Also, let’s get the credits out of the way quickly: we found this on Reddit, and then NeoGAF showed up and also started investigating.

Right, so. Those Dota 2 Workshop Tools that hit earlier? Apparently, they’re running in the Source 2 engine. As in, they’re running Dota 2 as ported into Source 2. There’s a lot of evidence for this – most of the files that would share a name with a Source file are appended with a “2”, the Hammer editor has the option to search for “Source 1.0” files in addition to the ones it prefers, there are repeated mentions of Source 2, the whole thing has some serious improvements over what Source previously did, etc. This might also explain why the Workshop Tools are so system-hungry, requiring 64-bit Windows and a Direct3D 11 GPU – it’s because Source 2 probably isn’t all that well optimised yet.

Now, this does not mean lots of things. It doesn’t mean we’re going to get a super-gorgeous, visually updated version of Dota 2 anytime soon; it also doesn’t mean that Valve are on the cusp of announcing a brand new Source 2 game. What it does mean is that Source 2 is presumably now at a point where Valve are comfortable rolling it out so that content creators can actually get used to it.

Excellently, the Hammer editor is also less terrible. User DarkMio posted up this little .webm video of creating a map by just painting with the tilesets, which is rather neat. If Custom Game functionality and custom maps actually hit base Dota 2 anytime soon, I’d wager it’s not going to be too hard to craft something workable.

Oh, and there are quite a lot of mentions of Left 4 Dead 3. I’ll just leave that there.

There are a few mentions of Xbox in the code, but I suspect that’s both a bit of a legacy from Source, and to do with the fact that Source 2 games will likely end up on consoles. I wouldn’t read too much into that, just yet.

Finally, YouTube user rilezfp put up a video of the new Hammer in action, and it’s a bit special. I’ve embedded it below.