Valve is a secretive company and it is rare, but possible, to get a leak out of them.

How does Valve count to 3? On their fingers first, apparently.

Now, once they know, practice it for the next half of their life.

PC Gamer was lucky. A portion of Valve's corporate changelog was photographed and somehow made its way into their possession. Due to the condition of their picture, more commonly known as "low resolution and bad", I am guessing someone was… phoning it in… at work that day. A couple of entries are a little more serious than I am:

valvechangelog.png

Pardon the ugliness and eyebleed: my attempt is to make text more visible.

Click to make larger or check out the original at PC Gamer.

Update: Or, thanks to one of our readers, a *much* better version at imgur.

  • [Source2] Changed typedef for ENTITYFUNCPTR to point to a CEntityInstance member instead of a CB…
  • [Source2] Changed L4D3's test_networking unit test to use the devtest level again. Ran assert-free…
  • [Source2] Restored L4D3's devtest unit test. Ran locally 6 times without an assert. There may be an…

Looking into patterns, I would expect that all changes tagged with the yellow "2" refer to a Source Engine 2 change. If true, that would add the following four entries, alongside the above three, referring to Valve's next-generation of video game engines.

  • Getting VScript running on the client: Created tier4 interface VSCRIPT_SERVICE_INTERFACE_CLIEN…
  • Auto-submit of game binaries – built from revision 1858395… Changes included in this submit: Chang…
  • Auto-submit of game binaries – built from revision 1858344… Changes included in this submit: Chang…
  • Added model_editor support for creating a blank vagrp->SplitQC translator into own file in model…

I have the feeling that a few little nuggets can be extracted from these entries if left to the crowd. First and foremost, Valve is a very productive company; these entries illustrate just an hour of development time. Valve caffeine consumption aside, production of Left 4 Dead 3 seems to be ramped up to a decent level. They are at the point of testing networking code modules which, I expect, occurs after the prototyping phase.

Have any reading to add from these tea leaves?