It seems Gabe and his team are finally coming back fix and improve the Source SDK. This is incredibly exciting news for the Source community as the current toolset is best described as an awkward and painful experience. We don’t have much information at this point, all we know comes from a recent interview with Gabe on the Steamcast podcast
Here is the relevant quote retrieved from the transcript
Backstepper: MasterGir asks: ‘Will Valve ever update the source SDK, especially Hammer?’ Newell: Tools are… very painful, so we probably are spending more time on tools development now thananything else and when we’re ready to ship those I think everybody’s life will get a lot better. Justway too hard to develop content right now, both for ourselves and for third-parties so we’re going tomake enormously easier and simplify that process a lot.
The Source SDK has long needed an update and it seems our prayers have been answered. Over the recent years we’ve seen some mod developers make the jump to UDK which is updated often and has some very lovely features. Despite this many developers have stuck it out with Source, whether it’s just out of familiarity or just pure dedication to a great engine.
While the tools have their quirks, they are still familiar to most developers and the Source engine continues to have a huge player base and this update promises to further improve things.
We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for future updates but in the meantime check out Steamcast for excellent podcasts and you can listen to the interview with Gabe here: Part 1Part 2
