Valve Appears To Be Rolling Out Source 2 Version Of Dota 2

[zanny]

i highly doubt this game supports vulkan as there are no intel/amd/nvidia gpu drivers out yet that support vulkan. Vulkan support for this game will likely come with a future patch.

Valve has had an insider look at the Vulkan draft APIs for months. They also knew it would be using GLSL for its shader language. In practice, porting to Vulkan is a lot easier than, say, DX -> OGL. It is not that unbelievable that an engine that must already have a lot of abstractions to support so many graphics APIs and hardware types to be able to drop in Vulkan handling easily when they have early access to the API.

[smitty3268]

Valve has had an insider look at the Vulkan draft APIs for months. They also knew it would be using GLSL for its shader language. In practice, porting to Vulkan is a lot easier than, say, DX -> OGL. It is not that unbelievable that an engine that must already have a lot of abstractions to support so many graphics APIs and hardware types to be able to drop in Vulkan handling easily when they have early access to the API.

Source 2 certainly has a Vulkan backend, but it's going to be disabled in the current build. There's no point in pushing that part out while there aren't any drivers which can use it, and it could potentially cause problems since the Vulkan spec hasn't been finalized yet. If it changes, the current build of the game might start crashing as soon as the actual drivers come out, which would be counter-productive in terms of trying to convince people that Vulkan will be a good thing.

[Laughing1]

Is this supposed to be out Thursday or earlier, this week?

[boot]

I'm not sure they'll push this straight into the main client without going through proper testing.
It should appear first in Dota 2 Test, like all major updates, and they haven't even archived the posts of the last one yet.

http://dev.dota2.com/forumdisplay.php?f=332

[kaprikawn]

I've never played this, or any MOBA for that matter. I sometimes feel as though I'm missing out on MOBAs, I'd like to be able to watch the pros. But I never understand what's going on so I don't enjoy watching. Is this a good MOBA to get into the genre just to get an understanding of how it works? Or should I maybe go with Heroes of the Storm?

For reference, if it makes any difference, I watch a lot of Starcraft 2 and play a little too.

[nightmarex]

I've never played this, or any MOBA for that matter. I sometimes feel as though I'm missing out on MOBAs, I'd like to be able to watch the pros. But I never understand what's going on so I don't enjoy watching. Is this a good MOBA to get into the genre just to get an understanding of how it works? Or should I maybe go with Heroes of the Storm?

For reference, if it makes any difference, I watch a lot of Starcraft 2 and play a little too.

Well... The current meta for MOBA's like DOTA(2),LOL,Strife. Is 5 players per team (2 teams) pick heros and try to out resource each other while making in roads to destroying a "throne" at the opponents base. There are towers that attack opponents which can be killed and little guys running around called creeps which if you get the last hit on them earn gold for doing so. Also there are some special mob(s). DOTA2's community is absolutely toxic and chuck full of Russian and Peruvians so unless your fluent in other languages this can be problematic. Strife was real fun when it was first in beta but sadly the elitism attitude soon followed and the community became less welcoming quickly. If you don't mind muting half your team or your opponents every match DOTA2 can be fine but the learning curve is huge. Learning the items, heros strengths and weaknesses and situational timings for ganks, roshing,high ground is something that isn't learned in a match or two. If I were you I would play Strife, less heroes to learn. Performs well on linux. Has a more LOL feel (graphics wise, I never played LOL to comment on the speed or battle aspects) which most ppl seem to want.

[d2kx]

Is this supposed to be out Thursday or earlier, this week?

Whenever the next regular update rolls out, which could be today, or tomorrow, or thursday.

I'm not sure they'll push this straight into the main client without going through proper testing.
It should appear first in Dota 2 Test, like all major updates, and they haven't even archived the posts of the last one yet.

Dota 2 Test is for gameplay changes etc., the Source 2 beta client will be distributed as a "DLC" until it's completely stable and will be compatible with Source 1 servers, not to split the community.

I've never played this, or any MOBA for that matter. I sometimes feel as though I'm missing out on MOBAs, I'd like to be able to watch the pros. But I never understand what's going on so I don't enjoy watching. Is this a good MOBA to get into the genre just to get an understanding of how it works? Or should I maybe go with Heroes of the Storm?

Dota 2 would be the best choice. It has a nice tutorial nowadays that teaches you the basics when you play it for the first time, and there are great videos on YouTube for more advanced stuff. Dota 2 runs on all platforms, has a big, worldwide community, has the most advanced technology/engine and is easy to learn yet hard to master. If you understand Dota 2, you will be able to learn LoL and HotS easily, however it would be harder the other way round.

[Stellarwind]

I've never played this, or any MOBA for that matter. I sometimes feel as though I'm missing out on MOBAs, I'd like to be able to watch the pros. But I never understand what's going on so I don't enjoy watching. Is this a good MOBA to get into the genre just to get an understanding of how it works? Or should I maybe go with Heroes of the Storm?

For reference, if it makes any difference, I watch a lot of Starcraft 2 and play a little too.

Heroes of the storm is easier for beginners. Talents instead of items simplifies the game. Team xp is also easier for new players - you wont fall behind on levels that much at the beginning. Less farm, more fights. Same is the downsides - less build variety, newb on the team means you will be penalised for them.

[Passso]

Heroes of the storm is easier for beginners. Talents instead of items simplifies the game.

Do you play HotS on Linux ? If so is it easy to install and has good perf ?
I play mainly Dota 2 but I am interested into testing other moba-like games.

[mwendt]

Technically I guess Valve *could* release a version running Vulkan right now. They could just embed their prototype Vulkan implementation in the source 2 engine and call it "Valvekan". In other words "Valvekan" would be an internal abstraction layer in the engine that would just bang on the API agnostic kernel driver directly.