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News Catch-Up: Source 2 and Lego Portal Edition

News & Rumors Valve

If you’ve been following us on Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook, you’ve seen that a lot has happened this past week. Even if you set E3 aside there’s still things like the Summer Sale and the unveiling of Dota 2 as the first Source 2 game. There hasn’t been much coverage on the site of these major stories, so it’s time to change that. Time to catch-up.

News Catch-Up: Source 2 and Lego Portal Edition

Dota 2 is the first Source 2 game.

QTnYTOo

It’s for real this time, ever since the Dota 2 Workshop Tools Alpha dropped the Dota community has been anticipating the big switch to Source 2. Now it’s finally happened. During E3 week of all weeks. This update is still in beta form so all you have to do to get the Source 2 beta update and the tools is to just head to the ‘Play’ tab and select ‘Dota 2 Reborn Beta’.

Not only do the tools include updated versions of what we saw in the Alpha, there’s even a new version of Source Filmmaker. It’s identical to the other Source Filmmaker in almost every way, with some minor changes. Currently, there’s no real reason to switch over to the Dota 2 SFM, unless you’re creating a Dota specific movie.

Now that Dota has moved to Source 2, maybe we can finally get Diretide this year?

 

Lego Dimensions – Portal Level Pack Detailed

What on Earth? Not only is Chell back in brick form, GlaDOS and Wheatley return as well. With Ellen Mclain and Stephen Merchant returning to the roles respectively. Lego Dimensions won’t be coming to Steam, but PS4, PS3, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Wii U owners will get to enjoy the pack when the game launches, September 27th of this year. (Though I imagine people will buy the pack just for the Chell Mini-fig.)

Here’s hoping to see a Half-Life Lego Dimensions pack. Who wouldn’t want a Gordon Freeman Mini-fig?

Steam Monster Summer Sale

steam-monster-summer-sale

It’s over now, but we can still talk about. Did you enjoy the Monster Game that came with this sale? How many Monsters did you kill? I managed to squash more than 100,000 of the little buggers, a bit quaint compared to the millions people were racking up. Monsters aside, the sale brought many to deals, what did you manage to nab? How big is your back-log at this point?

Let us know in the comments about what you walked away with in the sale and any other story discussed here. Always glad to hear what the readers have to say.

6 Comments

  1. From what I understand, Lego Dimensions and other games which use the real-life toy mechanic are unlikely to ever come to PC because publishers worry that it would be too easy for players to circumvent having to actually buy the toys.

    As much as I love Lego I don’t really understand who the target audience for this thing is. While I’m sure that Portal 2 has a reasonable number of younger players, I wouldn’t have thought that the core of Portal fans would be the sort of people likely to buy an expensive Lego console game.

    The switch of Dota to Source 2 is good news, although as a complete Dota novice I probably won’t be getting stuck into learning the new engine any time soon.

    • I’m more waiting for when Source 2 becomes a standalone entity like a Source 2 SDK, something that doesn’t require me to launch Dota 2 to make stuff.

      However, I hear the new tools are reviving the classic Warcraft 3 custom games. So that is really soon.

  2. Good to see that Source 2 is enough mature to be put in production in the most played game on Steam according to the number of concurrent players. I’m no Dota player but as I have heard, the transistion was really flawless and it improved a lot of things. The GNU/Linux version came a bit after, I do not mind about that, and had a bit more troubles with users since the renderer actually moved from OpenGL 2 to 3 and caused few bugs to be caught and fixed in the FOSS video stack.
    I have a friend that summarized the discussion well. For every bug found in Dota in the past, the community was jokingly saying that “Source 2 will fix that”. But as he saw, Source 2 really fixed it.

    For the Lego stuff, sad story it will not get on the PC. There is a whole lot of Lego games on Steam as we know, and many people do like them. I’m personally not really interested in those, and I have better things to play instead of this. No offense, but those Steam sale games needs to be played one day. 🙂

    About this summer sale, I got Hotline Miami 2, played it and finished it (sadly I gave up in my 2nd play on hard mode on Dead Ahead because I was dumb enough not to take a silenced gun, maybe another time). I was also able to get System Shock 2 after selling a bunch of cards. I also offered Ori and the Blind forest to my brother, let’s see if he will like it.
    For this sale, killing monster was mostly a way to get cards a sell them as quick as possible on the market for me.
    Maybe next time I will look more at the GOG sale, it’s DRM free and they have interesting stuffs there too.

    And darn, to play those games I still need to get a decent build. It is still something raw on a text file at the moment. I want to make sure I will earn few bucks in the upcoming months to pay this thing. I’m right now hesitating if I should take an unlocked i5 or not. This question implies the Mobo and the CPU cooler. Hesitation is my worst enemy…

    • Yeah, even the Source 2 version of SFM version surprised me. Multiple maps can be loaded in the animation timeline and easily scrubbed through. Very powerful. I’m most excited to see what they have in store for when and if Valve decide to go Standalone with Source 2.

      As for Lego Portal, probably gonna go in on it. I gotta have a Chell Mini-fig.

      And, yeah I feel you, my backlog is huge and some of my hardware definitely needs to be upgraded. Might make the big switch from 8gb of RAM to 16gb.

      • You think they will completely drop the good old Source and move to the newly coded Source 2 engine for all their games? I’m quite divided they will really do that. They kept goldsrc for their old game and just updated internal sub-versions of source. I can imagine that they will update only CS:GO to Source 2 for performance and that’s all. Let us see where things will go, maybe we will see a Half-Life 2: Episode 2: Source 2 announcement 🙂

        I have never tried to use SFM. Loading multiple maps and being able to jump from one to another looks to be an awesome idea to preserve continuity in a short movie happening in many locations. How were people doing this beforehand? They needed to create separate movies and put them one after the other as a last processing step? I can imagine this starts to be heavy on RAM this way, but I have heard a lot of people saying it was overkill (for simple gaming, maybe not for SFM and video work though) to have more than 8Go. But anyway, RAM is now cheap compared to like 7 years ago.

        • I think certain games, like CS:GO ,obviously, should get ported to a new version of Source 2. It could be quite a controversial move considering any little change internally with the engine could throw off tactics. People have mastered throwing grenade throws and since this new engine doesn’t use Havok, grenades might not function the same way when thrown.

          Not sure if Half-Life 2 and episodes will be ported. I imagine because Half-Life 2 was created to showcase Source 1’s new tech that it will stay on Source 1. L4D2 seems to have a Source 2 version up and running.

          For SFM, if you had multiple maps loaded in the timeline, you would scrub, wait for the map to load, then be free to continue animating. People don’t really like this, so most animators just separate scenes on specific maps and just cut them in a video editor.

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