Valve has made a trio of big announcements at the Game Developers Conference: Source 2, Steam Link, and Steam Lighthouse VR technology.

Source 2 is the successor to the original Source engine, which has been around since 2004 and powers games such as Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead, The Stanley Parable, and Titanfall.

"With Source 2, our focus is increasing creator productivity," said Valve developer Jay Stelly.

"Given how important user generated content is becoming, Source 2 is designed not just for the professional developer, but enabling gamers themselves to participate in the creation and development of their favorite games."

Source 2 will be available for free to content developers, and a special version of the engine will be compatible with Vulkan, a "cross-platform, cross-vendor 3D graphics API that allows games developers to get the most out of the latest graphics hardware."

A release date for the engine was not specified.

Valve’s second announcement is Steam Link, new hardware that the company says will "extend your Steam experience to any room in the house".

Steam can stream content to the small box, provided it is on the same home network at the host computer.

“Steam Link is designed to take advantage of the PC horsepower you already have in your home, with In-Home Streaming,” said Valve.

“If you have a gaming PC and a fast home network, Steam Link may be the right choice for your living room.”

It will support 1080p at 60Hz with low latency, and release in the United States this November US$50.

Incidentally, US$50 will also be the price of Valve’s Steam Controller, which will include motion detectors for use with VR set-ups. Both the Steam Controller and Steam Machines will officially launch in November.

Speaking of VR, Valve also unveiled something codenamed Lighthouse, a technology that enables VR equipment to quickly gauge the size of the room the player is in. It is also an input device.

“In order to have a high quality VR experience, you need high resolution, high speed tracking,” said Valve VR engineer Alan Yates.

“Lighthouse gives us the ability to do this for an arbitrary number of targets at a low enough [cost] that it can be incorporated into TVs, monitors, headsets, input devices, or mobile devices.”

Said devices scattered around a room can keep track of the player, said Valve. Lighthouse is the technology included in the base stations mentioned in the VR headset announcement by Valve and HTC earlier this week.

“Now that we have Lighthouse, we have an important piece of the puzzle for tackling VR input devices,” said Valve’s Joe Ludwig.

“The work on the Steam Controller gave us the base to build upon, so now we have touch and motion as integrated parts of the PC gaming experience.”

Lighthouse will be free for all hardware manufacturers.

"We've been working in VR for years and it was only until we used SteamVR's controllers and experienced the magic of absolute tracking that we were able to make the VR game we always wanted to make," said Alex Schwartz of Owlchemylabs.