I wonder if the new Source engine, or rather 'updated' Source engine is simply the work Respawn Entertainment has done on it for Titanfall. Which would be great, since Respawn's version of the Source engine is actually pretty amazing, namely for FPS, which is where the regular and current Source engine falls flat on its head, especially with the networking code.
though the game itself is built on somewhat old-school technology. Respawn Entertainment's Drew McCoy recently explained how Titanfall makes the most of the nine year old Source Engine, and why he prioritizes performance over cutting-edge effects.
The Source Engine may be the foundation that Titanfall is built upon, but Respawn's engineers have made some liberal changes to the way it works. According to McCoy the overhaul was essential to make the engine fit with a game like Titanfall, which is incredibly different from Valve's titles, computationally speaking. "It's actually a pretty slow engine for showing stuff on screen," he explains. "What we have in a level now would run in single digits on what it was before - if you could even get it to load at all. It's been a huge engineering task." The advantage, of course, is that Source comes with nearly a decade of refined tools and polish.
Don't let the single digits comment scare you, though - Respawn is investing the power of next-gen processing in relatively traditional graphical effects. The performance boost should be clear: no promises of 60 frames-per-second have been made just yet, but McCoy seems hopeful. "We'll see how performance goes," he says. "Framerate is king."
If the new Source engine does entail these huge and serious changes from Respawn then I'm certainly hyped for any title Valve might release, I just hope they didn't try and do these changes on their own, or that they thought their own developers would make better networking code than Respawn's etc.
