Valve has opened up the Team Fortress 2 engine to modders, allowing them to create “entirely new games” based on it

Just when fans start to think that Valve has abandoned the free-to-play online shooter Team Fortress 2, the company surprises the community with an unexpected and major update – and that’s what happened this time.

Image source: Valve

Valve has announced that it has released a major update to the Source SDK, adding all of Team Fortress 2’s client and server code, opening up a wealth of opportunities for modders.

According to Valve, content creators can now make “entirely new games on top of Team Fortress 2.” The Source SDK allows TF2 to be modified, expanded, and rewritten, opening the door to both small changes and complete overhauls.

Mods created with the Source SDK can be published on Steam, but must be free, as must all the content included in them – the development kit is distributed under a non-commercial license.

As Valve notes, most inventory items for TF2 are currently created by the game’s community, and therefore encourages mod authors not to try to profit from the work of other Steam Workshop members.

The release of the updated version of the Source SDK was accompanied by a major patch for Team Fortress 2 itself (see the link for a full list of changes), which includes a number of fixes and improvements.

Valve has also updated other Source-based online games (Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, and Half-Life Deathmatch: Source) with 64-bit executable support, a scalable interface, and other improvements.