Has Valve just soft-launched the Source 2 engine?

Overnight Valve released the Dota 2 Workshop tools, and some people reckon in doing so the company soft-launched the long-awaited Source 2 game engine.

"Everything in this package is a new game," wrote RoyAwesome on the Dota 2 subReddit.

"It's all the Dota assets and code ported over to Source 2. That's why Hammer is different. That's why the console is different."

Hammer is Valve's map creation program for Source. A video of the new version being messed about with is below.

"The general consensus around the Source reverse engineering community is that this is really Source 2," RoyAwesome continued.

Valve, which operates on US West Coast time (eight hours behind UK time), is yet to make any announcement around Source 2, but it has been rumoured for some time.

Gamer Network's tech wizards tell me Valve may have simply released tools that relate to the Source 2 engine to be used to mod Dota 2, rather than launched the engine proper, but Valve's plan is unclear. We'll have more on Source 2 as the story develops.