Team Fortress 2 remake in Source 2 engine fully cancelled after Valve issues a takedown

12.01.2024 - 20:01 / rockpapershotgun.com

A fan-made remake of Team Fortress 2 in the Source 2 engine has been cancelled after the ambitious project, three years in the making, ran into a double-whammy of recent development issues and a legal takedown from Valve.

Team Fortress: Source 2 has been in the works since at least 2021, aiming to port the venerable multiplayer shooter over to the updated graphics engine used in the likes of Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 and Half-Life: Alyx.

Specifically, the remake was built in s&box - pronounced “sandbox” - the long-in-development Source 2-based spiritual successor to immensely popular physics sandbox and piss-about simulator Garry’s Mod from developers Facepunch.

Using s&box as a foundation ran Team Fortress: Source 2 makers Amper Software - made up of fan devs - into trouble last September, as planned major changes to the underlying engine forced the project to be paused while s&box was “retooled” to separate its engine and client/server system and allow creations to run “out of game”. The upshot was that the majority of existing creations built in the older s&box - including Team Fortress: Source 2 - would no longer work.

“This doesn't mean the project is over, we are simply putting it on hold,” Amper wrote at the time. “The team decided we will be holding off our efforts until s&box's future gets clearer and more stable.”

Hello everyone. We have some unfortunate news to share with you.

Today, we received a DMCA takedown from Valve on all our public GitHub repositories and all its forks made by the community.https://t.co/BQvtPwjPtn

While the engine hurdles didn’t bring an immediate end to the project alone, Amper announced this week that original Team Fortress 2 developers Valve had issued a DMCA takedown request to the GitHub page for Team Fortress: Source 2, flagging the use of TF2 assets “without permission” as a violation of their IP rights.

Amper admitted that they had “already came to the conclusion to stop the development of the project due to the current state of the code being unusable anymore with s&box's recent major engine changes”, adding that Valve’s takedown notice was simply “the nail in the coffin” for the project.

While Valve have allowed some use of their IP in fan-made mods and spin-offs such as Half-Life remake Black Mesa and recent Portal 2 prequel Revolution, Amper accepted that the refusal in the case of Team Fortress: Source 2 - which effectively offered the whole of Team Fortress 2 for free, mind - was “totally fair and legal”.

“It's been an honour to grow this project with all of you and the incredible team behind, we cannot be thankful enough for all your support and enthusiasms over the last 3 years,” the team wrote. “We're so happy we got this far.”