14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Valve in charge of Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Half-Life 2: Deathmatch is delivering a set of changes for the Source engine, designed to improve the overall game experience.
The official list of modifications from the company includes:
Fixed the skybox on 3rd party maps when using certain sky materials In Hammer, while using the Vertex Tool, pressing CTRL+B will snap selected vertices to the grid Allow about:blank in the MOTD Marked mat_texture_list as a cheat to prevent client exploits Removed the sv_voicecodec convar because it isn’t necessary anymore and was being used as an exploit Updated the con_logfile convar to checking for invalid filenames Updated the network resource download path to check for invalid filenames Updated the plugin_load command Servers can only load plugins if they are not running a map Clients can only load plugins if they are not connected to a server
There are also a set of Team Fortress 2 specific modifications that Valve has made, mostly linked to bugs and exploits, in order to make the multiplayer experience smoother.
Source is one of the oldest engines still used in the industry, but the fact that it is receiving constant updates from the development team means that it still manages to remain relevant.
Valve is at the moment more focused on the long-term prospects of Steam as a digital distribution service, and later in the year the company and its partners will launch both an operating system and hardware associated with it.