Although not confirmed, it appears the next Source engine has quietly arrived.

Oh Valve, you cheeky lot – of course you would do it like this.

Amid the release of Dota 2 workshop tools, a few keen-eyed players discovered that Dota 2 can be run on a new engine, Source 2. The discussion on reddit seems to be the hub of new information.

redditor /u/RoyAwesome details what may be the "strongest evidence":

"That script also allows for different dlls to load and render different assets (vmaps are rendered by worldrenderer.dll, etc). This is quite a bit different from Source 1, as they had a large number of things in the engine libraries. This bit alone would indicate a significant amount of engine work has been done to split these bits out of the engine and into their own libraries."

And something more cut and dry:

"Everything that would share a name with Source is named '...2'. That's 'engine2.dll', 'vconsole2.exe', 'vphysics2.dll'."

It's been 10 years since the release of "Source 1." We've got hundreds of hours on games that run on the original engine. Source 2 could usher in a new era of Valve titles – an exciting prospect years in the making. Worst case, the games we know and love get a major refresh.

When will we learn more? Very soon, it seems: the Dota 2 Twitter sent a cryptic tweet last night saying only "gamescom" – referring to next week’s major event.

Valve will be there. We'll be waiting.

Colt "ShdwFlm" Casey
Deputy Editor