[BAILOPAN]

With the beta release of the Orange Box engine, Valve has announced that it is backwards incompatible against the old Source engine. What does this mean? For Orange Box games only (that is mainly TF2 right now), Metamod:Source, Metamod:Source plugins, Valve plugins, and Valve mods may not run on the Orange Box engine unless they are recompiled against the newer SDK.

The real depth of these changes is not yet known. We will not make changes to Metamod:Source until Valve releases definitive specifications to the new engine. When Valve does, we will make both Metamod:Source and SourceMod fully compatible with the Orange Box engine.

Please do not post on the forums asking when this compatibility will be added, how long it will take to add it, when Valve will release the specifications, or if a specific Metamod:Source/Valve plugin will be compatible. At this time, not knowing the scope of changes and not knowing when Valve will release more information, we can't answer. When Valve releases the specifications we will make another news post estimating how long it will take to get each of our major projects compatible.

Thanks, and enjoy the (upcoming) TF2 beta!

Note 1: SourceMod scripts do not rely on binary compatibility with the Source engine, and thus as long as Metamod:Source works, SourceMod will work, and SourceMod plugins will work.

Note 2: Depending on the scope of the changes, we will potentially consider an option where old plugins for the Metamod:Source platform will automatically work on the Orange Box platform. If we can save developers and users the huge hassle of dealing with this compatibility issue, we will try. This note is merely speculative pondering and is not a guarantee to expected functionality.