For those looking forward to Portal 2, Valve has now given us a release date to put on our calendars.

It'll be coming out on Windows, Macintosh, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on the 9th of February 2011. So not as bad as many of us had feared earlier this year when Valve said it would be sometime next year, often bringing worries about it being the end of 2011.

Update: And it has now been confirmed to be delayed until 21st of April.

A Portal 2 trailer was shown at Sony's press conference yesterday. The reason Valve were hanging out there is because they've brought the Steam Cloud over so now your saved games on PS3 will be stored like they are on the PC with games which support the Steam Cloud ie on the Internets.

Here's the trailer and some gameplay footage that IGN captured, I must say I'm quite impressed.

Part 2 and Part 3.

Portal 2 will be released for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 next year.

HomeLAN Fed had a chance at this years E3 to sit down with Valve and have a quick go on Half-Life 2.

Here's a slice of HomeLAN Fed's preview:

"The first part showed off the myterious G-Man and his detailed facial artwork and animations as he basically make some on-the-slide theats against us. While he talked, scenes from Half-Life 2 were shown as a kind of super imposed image on his face. It was weird but cool looking. Then we witnessed the entrance from the beginning of the game and the buggy-mine car chase that we had actually played in our E3 demo last month. One new thing in the latter sequence that was not in the VUGames hands-on demo was a new weapon, an energy rifle that vaporised the humanoid guards."

Good news everyone we've finally got the forums up and running, better still it shares the same user data base (I spent 3 hours working on sharing the database!!!) as over on our partner site DOOM 3 Portal so there's no need to re-register if you've got an account over there.

Enjoy, let us know if you're having any problems as they are still under some developement.

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for VALVe.

Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.

Here is what we know:

1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.

2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.

3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.

4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.

5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).

6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.

What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.

We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe