A company which actively develops software has the ability to snapshot a stable development tree and call it a "New Engine"? Shock horror.<p>Fans of these games blatantly don't know what an engine is; the difference between a graphics library and a suite of tools and code to create a game.<p>Perhaps they are excited because the Valve developer wiki and Source Filmmaker have been teasing newer versions of the tools like Hammer, built with Qt.<p>Valve have never been one for pushing the limits of GPU's, like Blizzard, so they don't limit their audience. id tech, unreal, and crydev are the ones showing off what they can do with OpenGL/DirectX, not Valve.
I nearly cried of joy when I heard they would do an open world Skyrim like Half Life 3. I would have paid $500 on Kickstarter for that.<p>Better engine? Nice, but the HL2 engine would be good enough for me. HL is about atmosphere and story, not GFX - for me.
"We've been working on new engine stuff for a while, we've just been waiting for a game to roll it out with."<p>Something something Half Life 3 something something something.
Valve was working on the Half-Life 2 engine as soon as the original was released.<p>"The Counter-Strike developer has previously bragged its engine is "considered the most flexible, comprehensive".
I hope it was a reference to the new engine and not the existing one which is fairly painful to work with. Hello map compilation which takes hours.