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Valve was working on the Half-Life 2 engine as soon as the original was released.

"The Counter-Strike developer has previously bragged its engine is "considered the most flexible, comprehensive". I hope it was a reference to the new engine and not the existing one which is fairly painful to work with. Hello map compilation which takes hours.

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The current source engine is what they were talking about. It was designed to be module to allow for upgrades to the system, for example, since HL2 was release it's gained some major upgrades such as HDR, Soft particles, hardware accelerated facial animations, multi-core support, xbox360, ps3 and osx support (and currently in the process of adding linux support.) All that with very few and minor backward compatibility breaking instances.

Switch your lightmaps to lower quality (or off) while you're working and building the map, flip them to higher quality right before you release.

It's the lightmaps that take the longest to compile.

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