Portal 2 Update Released by Valve

A small Portal 2 update has been released that also changed the Authoring Tools, which means that Steam Workshop creators and users should be pretty happy. What does that mean in English? Well, the most important thing that users should be aware of is that the Steam Workshop 100 MB file limit has been removed, so after 10 years creators can do pretty much whatever they want with the tools they’re given.

This is a pretty big deal, because even though Portal 2 is over 10 years old, there are over 800,000 entries on the Steam Workshop, and at this moment there are over 1,700 people playing Portal 2 on Steam. This isn’t a dead game at all, and with this change Steam Workshop creators are definitely going to take advantage of it.

But before we go too crazy with hypothesizing, let’s check out the rest of the patch notes:

    Fixed custom maps with no lights disabling lighting for the rest of the play session
    Fixed Model Viewer and Face Poser not opening
    Fixed demo playback for workshop maps
    Fixed some text corruption related to UTF-8 conversion in some instances on Linux
    Moved the 32-bit Linux binaries into linux32 Misc. rendering and other optimizations
    Removed the 100MB workshop level file size limit
    Added a +bench_demo [name] <stats output> command line parameter which will run a demo, and quit after it is finished.
    Added a -bench_settings [name] command line parameter to load a cfg/video_bench_{name}.txt file containing settings to load. There are a set of defaults provided, very_high_4k, very_high, high, medium and low.

These are all good fixes, but nothing really stands out as much as the 100 MB Steam Workshop file size limit removal. Who knows what this going to unlock, but given the amount of creativity that’s already been unleashed it’s probably going to be pretty neat.