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Half Life 2 Source Code Leaked
Pyroman[FO] writes "Gamers with Jobs is reporting that the Half Life 2 source code is floating around the net right now. It looks to be about a month old. There's no official word from Valve on the source code leak yet. Unfortunately those who want to use it to cheat already have it, we need to get the word to legitimate customers to educate them about the situation." Update: 10/02 21:51 GMT by S : Valve's Gabe Newell has an official statement, via ShackNews/HalfLife2.net, indicating "infiltration of our network" and appealing for information on the culprits.
... cheating is considered the 'big threat' of a source code leak, rather than the huge impending theft of intellectual property ;-)
Not with games, especially first-person shooters. It's a problem of distributing the workload with limited server resources and limited bandwidth / high latency between nodes. To make the game playable, the clients have to know things and be trusted to do calculations that from a security standpoint they should not.
This really is unfortunate. It means you really can't stop cheating with this sort of game. It's especially easy when the source code is available, though it's still possible otherwise.
Mod this man up, I wasn't talking about the latest OpenSSH release getting leaked, it's Half Life 2. The latency problems mean you can't really have secure netcode, however obscurity goes a long way to help.
The CDKey and Steam authentication systems are also supposedly included, so any security control they had before goes out the window, you can't trust the CD Keys or Steam anymore. Not that they were perfect before, but this is going from "wait a bit while the crackers figure out this new authentication system, then it's changed in a patch, repeat" to "here it is on a silver platter, before it's released"
Looks like our best bet for a secure, low-cheat ridden version of Half-Life 2 multiplayer might be on the Xbox now...
Just a thought.
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
If this is legit, this all applies. If not, then obviously it's not worth anyone's time to debate.
:)
Valve will not lose any licenses due to the code being available. Nobody is going to not license the engine because they can get the source. You'd get your ass sued to oblivion to commit largescale copyright infringement on a major retail product. The first thing anyone asks when you're working on a game is "what engine are you using?". You can't hide your engine - knowledable people can easily tell what engine it is by running it.
The real risk is cheating, which could very well have a real impact on sales (why buy HL2 to play the new CS when the new CS has at least as many cheats as the old one?). Plus if cheating is rampant, it could scare away licensees.
So they could lose real sales and licensees, but only because of cheating, not because they don't need to pay for the source because they can get it for free
Jon (Slothy)
Programmer, S2 Games
Just a thought but maybe Valve knew about the leak and then pushed back the release date to fix code which could have been comprimised !
... so valve can probaly go though see who checked out the whole build ... or just certain parts and figure out who leaked it. (most managemnet tools use 128 bit encryption and a key) Its very easy to track these things.
So lets just say thanks to whom ever leaked the code and we can all blame them for the delay of the release date !
I hope they also know that NDA's are a big part of the game industry today so that either means your loosing your job, your company, or you getting sued.
Each file contains a date, what was modified and when for the most part depending on what code managemnt tool they use
- MOSKIE