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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.
Not a bad idea. By allowing other people to port the code to different OSes they could get some instant karma, save themselves some effort and get a bigger potential market all in one go. After all, people would still have to buy the game to get the datafiles.
The only problem is if the code contains third-party stuff like sound modules, physics engines etc.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
I have downloaded the code and taken a quick peek, It does indeed seem to be legitimate. More disturbing though is , a simple grep through the code tree reveals that this leaked source tree contains gpl'd code .
./ivp/havana/havok/hk_math/ ./utils/vmpi/mysql/include/
files in these directories contain such code for example
It would take someone a little more clued up than I to verify that this code is actually used in a binary release.
Someone should take a closer look.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Falcon 4.0, a landmark achievement in consumer flight simulation technology had its full source code leaked several years ago. What happened aftewards?
Nothing for several months. People went about playing Falcon 4.0 as they did before. Then a user posted a single screenshot to the combatsim.com fora. It showed the Falcon 4.0 options menu, except with some rather peculiar options-- 3dnow! support, 32 bit textures, object texture filtering, DirectX 7 support, and some others. Falcon 4.0 did not ship with support for said features, so either it was an edited screenshot or the user had modified the source code. Then the actual executable was released. It was real, the engine enhancements worked.
Development of the leaked source code exploded shortly after that. A team known as eTeam (the executable was called eFalcon) was created to work on it, devoted to closing the numerous memory leaks, and improving the overall realism and performance of the game. The improvements were incredible, bringing a game released in 1998 to a 2001 state, competitive (or far superior, which was most people's opinions) to simulations released that year. The game's publisher ignored this for a few years.
The game's publisher then put its foot down. It said that all development of the leaked source code had to be ceased. Quickly though the community reached an agreement. It managed to convince the publisher to allow continued development of the leaked source code, as long as the publisher maintained all rights to all of the community's work and was not required to compensate the actual contributors. The result was the Falcon 4.0 Unified Team, composed of most of the eTeam members (not all though, some refused to join because of the constrictive agreement) as well as many from the Realism Patch group, a non-source code team focusing mostly on realism enhancements. The F4UT has succeeded in making hundreds if not thousands of changes to Falcon 4.0, ranging from technical (graphics engine, campaign engine, AI, sound engine, etc.) to gameplay (new flyable aircraft, dogfight AI improvements, numerous miscellaneous tweaks etc.) to other content (re-done textures, models, sound effects, completely new cockpit art, etc.). The F4UT finally brought Falcon 4.0 to what its original developers intended, not only simulation of F-16 combat, but a true military aviation experience taking place in a dynamic computer simulated war.
How does this relate to Half-Life 2's source code being leaked? Well, sometimes leaked source code can lead to greater things. After the Falcon 4.0 source code happenings, the full source code, including the graphics engine, network code etc. of a few simulations (Enemy Engaged Comanche Vs. Hokum, MiG Alley, maybe some others) have been released to the public. Maybe this practice could spread to other game genres.
No matter how much I love open source programming, I can't help feeling really sad for Valve. The gaming market is such a competitive place and this is really the worst thing immaginable. It must be absolutely horrible for Valve to see man-years of work fly out the window. Recent posts have talked about different risks, but I think the potential rumors on "HalfLife2 sources are leaked, so there will be too many cheaters" are a lot worse from a marketing and reputation perspective.
As for you GPL programmers, there is already a lot of interesting code out there to play around with. I cannot express in words how thankful I am to different companies letting me play with their products such as Quake2 by id. I think they deserve making money on their hard work and heavy risktaking. GPLing such code is giving me a present I could never make up for.
As I'm quite fond of snowboarding, I ended up working on the Soul Ride snowboard game engine. It would take me years to reproduce the same code on my own. Even if noone ever uses my changes, I really enjoy working on it and it's fun showing my changes to (geek)friends.
Open source is fun to play with. Stolen code just isn't. The whole idea of open source code is built on honesty and solidarity.
Anyway, good luck Valve, I'll buy the game when it comes out. Also, I will enjoy working on the real source you may GPL in 5-10 years, not this leaked one.
(I'm sure some slashdotters won't like what I write, but I've got karma to spend...)