Source 2, the sequel to an engine that made the wildly successful and acclaimed Half-Life 2 so popular, may well be upon us. Not in an easily acquirable form, no, but rather in a creeping, developer-oriented one. Recently, Valve announced that Dota 2's workshop tools were coming. These are different from the workshop items in that the tools themselves are used to create and edit custom maps and game modes, much like how the original DotA was spawned out of custom maps and mods for Warcraft 3. In a post on the Dota 2 discussions page, one of the developers outlines what's going to be coming in the release; that is, requirements of 64-bit Windows and a DirectX 11 compatible GPU, which may not be possible for all users.

But that's not all that was found. Naturally, with every new update to a Valve game, codemonkeys start poking around, looking for any references to an ARG for Half-Life 3 likely involving the number of digital hats you've acquired across all Valve titles. This time, however, they actually found something. There's been an overhaul to the library structure, an option to load old Source 1.0 map files, and certainly many others. RoyAwesome over on Reddit has done a much better job than I ever will be able to sum up the changes and what this means.

So what does this mean? Likely nothing yet, as the tools themselves are still in alpha, and may not move from there for a while. But at the very least, parts of Source 2 have made it into the wider public's hands, so once again, let the conspiracy theories start firing up, as the year continues.