Valve Working On 'Next-Gen' Source 2 Engine - Rumour

Half-Life 3 news may be fairly thin on the ground (apart from this), but it could be because Valve's Source Engine, which first debuted with Half-Life 2, could shortly be due its first significant upgrade according to evidence found in the recently released Source Filmmaker.

Fan site Valvetime has looked through the Filmmaker's files to discover more than a few references to "Source 2", with one specific line of text reading:

Return an str with the current engine version. If key doesn't doesn't exist, assume 'Source', otherwise invalid -- assume next-gen 'Source 2

The same file that includes the line above also mentions Source, Hybrid, and Source 2.

What's Hybrid? VT speculates it could be the base code for Source 2, but it's probably a reference to 5th Cell's third-person shooter, built with Source, which hits XBLA this week.

The Source 2 icons (below) were also found in Filmmaker - the first, called 'appicon' appears to be for a new version of Source Engine's Hammer Editor while the others are all related to 3D engine tools.

The company page on Valve's site mentions that Source is "about to get even better."

Is Valve going to launch a new game with the new engine? Is it going to happen anytime soon? We'll drop Valve an email for comment.