The Half-Life franchise is no stranger to rumours about a new game, especially since the ending of Half-Life 2: Episode 2 left us with a cliffhanger. Even the VR-only Half-Life: Alyx hasn’t been able to slow these rumours down. A new report, courtesy of Tyler McVicker, indicates that development of the project – codenamed HLX – has hit a new milestone. McVicker has a good track record with revealing updates made to Valve’s Source 2 engine well before the company itself has announced these things in the past, and in a new video, he noted that a new update has been made to the engine that focuses on optimisation.
According to McVicker, past major internal updates to Source 2 have revolved around the addition of new features. The latest one, however, has more to do with bringing in automation to free up system resources that can then be used for other parts of the game. Sound and liquid simulation systems have also seemingly seen an upgrade. It is worth noting that these new features are unlikely to be used for titles like Dota 2 or Counter-Strike 2. Rather, these features are instead believed to be made for HLX. However, owing tot he nature of how Valve updates its game engine, these features can also be found in Counter-Strike 2.
One of the biggest indicators that this Source 2 update have more to do with HLX rather than Counter-Strike 2 is the addition of a new asset group, which has been labelled “Science”. This has sparked quite a bit of discussion in the data mining community for Valve’s projects, and there is a strong possibility that the group name might refer to characters in the rumoured title that also happen to be scientists, like Dr. Kleiner.
While optimisation upgrades like this are often done towards the tail end of a game’s development, Valve isn’t quite known for sticking to strict schedules for its major projects. McVicker, however, believes that we might see an announcement or tease of HLX some time in November. As is the case with any rumour and speculation regarding the subject, however, this is also best taken with a grain of salt.
Interestingly, reports had noted back in August that the development of Half-Life 3 – or HLX – is in its final phases. This came from another update that had been made to Source 2 engine, with a line of code referencing thumper machines. These machines were last seen in Half-Life 2 and its episodic follow-ups, and were used to keep Antlions at bay. While the line of code doesn’t strictly mean that we will see Antlions once more in Half-Life 3, it is instead believed to be a cryptic message left by Valve for data miners to find, and thus indicate that development progress is continuing.
Along with this, the update at the time also indicated that Valve is working on a new style of NPC scripting that would make characters in the rumoured sequel much more reactive to the player. Rumours from back in May have also indicated that Half-Life 3 is playable internally at Valve “end-to-end”.
