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Half-Life 2 Delayed Following Code Leak
jhol writes "CNN is reporting that Half-Life 2 is delayed "by at least four months, that is to April 2004.", due to the code leak. VU Games has already suffered a 29% fall in revenue and an operating loss of $61.36 million this year. A Christmas release of Half-Life 2 would probably have been most welcomed." Update: 10/07 20:38 GMT by S : CNN Money are now reporting there's a newly public leak, allegedly involving a partially playable, Beta pre-release of the game.
Thanks very much to the person(s) who leaked the code. No Half-Life 2 for Christmas.
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical (read millions of dollars) work, you're best off having the production machines OFFLINE.
It would be a pain in the ass only being able to code on one machine, but even something as simple as a KVM switch would make it tolerable.
No internet, and none of this stuff is a problem. Not to mention you can keep working while various worms/viruses make their rounds.
The 'net is just too insecure these days, especially if you're running some version of Windows.
I just have to wonder if a serious delay was in the works anyway and the code theft gave Valve a publicly acceptable reason.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Here's my theory on the HL2 delay. Since VU is operating at a substantial lost, they are prime to be saved by Bill Gate's wallet. Since Half Life2 and Xbox2 are both optimized to run on ATI's hardware, I can see the Richmond's Borg needing their killer app for XBOX2. Gates says "Hmmmm, Half Life2 sounds good. Buy them out boys!"
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
This is just another stupid excuse not to release their product on time (even though that's been set back several times). They probably planned this because it wasn't even close to being ready. You suck valve.
This is complete B.S. Why would having their code leaked force them to rewrite the game. Some people may say that it's due to cheat prevention... but c'mon. Security through obscurity is no security at all, if that's what they were relying on.
This is nothing more than them using this as an excuse for delaying the game - something that would have happened anyway. Also, by saying this, if they find the people that hacked their systems, they can sue for large monetary damages.
Why exactly should this delay the game? If it was close to being ready, and according to their release date(s) they should have been pretty close, why are we expected to believe a delay until April?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
are you loving bittorrent and filesharing now?
Wouldn't wrapping all the network communications in SSL be sufficient to thwart many hack attempts? or do some type of aimbots do some dynamic patching of the executable?
In other news a new startup company (founded last week) has announced the release of a revolutionary new game: Full Life: The Adventures of Frodan Greeman."
(I got nuttin)
...maybe the Valve version has been delayed.
Karma: Bad. Calmer, good.
Was the code that was stolen then deleted by the thief? Why would this cause any sort of delay? This sounds like a fairly lame excuse for shipping late.
It only makes sense that code that would generate millions of dollars in revenue for Valve would be backed up quite reguarly offsite.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
And waiting another 4 months for Half Life 2? Come on Valve, I'd still buy it if you released it tomorrow.
www.google.com
Maybe it was someone annoyed with the amount of time they're taking to release it? Or maybe some Unix user that was worried they wouldn't do a port for *nix?
There is no way they can re-write the game from scratch in 6 months, so why the hell are they delaying it? It has NOTHING to do with the code leak, they just needed an excuse, one where the gamers would feel sorry for them... Otherwise they'd suffer the Duke Nukem Forever fate...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Are you serious? How much money do you think Valve makes off of the sale of a game? How many MILLIONS?
Do you HONESTLY think that they would even make 1/10 of that solicting for donations from the good of one's heart?
How much money do you think cdex + xiph + bittorrent + scorched3d + blender + tons o' other donation-based projects get per year? Answer) A mere fraction of a fraction of a fraction as much as Valve does.
Because the cost in terms of time and money to create all of those combined likely does not compare to the cost associated with creating Half-Life 2.
I can guarantee you if Half-Life were freely distributed, the money they would make back on donations would come up far short of the costs, much less make Valve a profit (which is the inevitable intention of the whole venture.)
The leaked code contains the frame source to Half Life 2, allowing free reign for cheat coders and (most likely) unlimited cd keys... is six months really enough time to really fix these holes, or will gamers just be screwed of honest gameplay no matter what?
Sorry guys, I promise the version I compiled on my computer will be ALOT better.
Pay off BIG? I know donations have been made to some projects, but I don't know of anybody who makes LOTS of money on the donation system. Can you give us more specific examples? How much have these projects managed to rake in via donations? I would like to see a major studio game go open-source out of the gate as much as the next guy, but I'm not sure donations are the way to go. Maybe a game with a huge community could make some money selling swag, or going on network party tours (ticket sales)...
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
First-Quarter Life
I don't see how the leaked fragment of code would mean they have to delay the release.
I think it's more likely they're giving themselves time to look over the final version of DOOM III.
It was Myg0t that got it, and Hitman, an ex-member of Myg0t, that released it.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Why have a delay? I don't get it... so code was leaked and people will find some multiplayer hacks - release single player (which is what the game is really designed for) and mop up networking code later.
The "spy" program was sent to the founder's email. He downloaded it and installed it. Come on... how stupid can someone be?
.vbs file and spreads the virus.
This is just like the stupid office secretary that thinks, "OOooh someone LOVES MEEEE!!" Then they open the
This is also like the millions of people who fail to patch their Windows XP machines and complain once they get a virus.
Come on, people. It should be implanted into your HEADS to not do dumb crap like this.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Ok, it's not that bad but I'm modarately disappointed. But some of these fanboys I've been reading posts from on USENET might just kill themselves. Maybe someone should set up a crisis counciling center?
What kind of genius is emailing around source code? That clown should be flipping burgers...
Why, indeed, does the code need to be rewritten? What are people going to do, mod it so they can beat the single-player game more easily? And hadn't they delayed the game before the code leak was announced?
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
And how do you plan on supporting mulitple developers? Code repositories? Cross-platform development?
Dificult (nay, impossible) to do any of this without have some kind of network connection. There is a difference between offline and off the internet
Sucks even more for the developers who work extrenuous hours to produce the games for gamers if you ask me. Especially the Valve coders.
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
I hear it will be released along side Halo, Doom III, and Duke Nukem!!! I'm holding my breath right now!!!
I would submit it as a story, but someone else probably has, and I've never had a story accepted yet :)
The NFO was on nforce.nl for a short time, but has since been removed. The leak has been confirmed here, and a few claim to have it (but they could be lying).
I've also seen a screenshot of the folders with all the map files in it, and the names look very much like what one would expect the long gameplay demo to be made from.
Not good news for valve :( I am disappointed that the game had to be delayed - and for all of you who have taken the source or download the beta, I hope you remember your duty to purchase the game when it does come out.
Goes to Black Mesa [pound-me-in-the-ass]Prison, if only there were such a place...
People seeing your code requires it to be rewritten? There something seriously wrong there, Valve.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
This proves that Eric Raymond was wrong in the Cathedral and the Bazar when he wrote ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.''. It's just wrong.
If ESR had been correct, surely the source code leaking out to thousands of open source developers would have increased the speed of development, rather than slowing it down.
"Yeah, boss, sorry the code is late, but it was leaked : therefore, it must be rewritten."
Jack Valenti and the MPAA are to technology as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone
A Christmas release of Half-Life 2 would probably have been most welcomed.
ATI must be pissed. It's rumored they paid $6 mil to get the half-life bundle. I'm sure they paid to get Christmas sales pumped. Guess Christmas is now Ground Hog Day.
Valve spends years developing Half-Life 2. What seem at least like countless delays.
Finally, they demo it. After hearing the critics rave, Valve decides to DELAY the game again and REWRITE portions of it. They cite the release of a small portion of the source code, rather than any bugs or incompleteness in the game itself.
While some companies would keep or accelerate a release if they were worried about piracy, valve has deceided to take the opposite approach. Delay yet again.
And the story continues...
No Mac version of Half-Life....'nuff said
My other sig is extremely clever...
Isn't it possible that the code was not just leaked? (Assumimg the crackers had full access to the production box.) What if there was subtle addition of mal-ware? Can you imagine what would happen if Half Life 2 installed a Trojan? I can easily see them spending a good amount of time just trying to make sure this doesn't happen.
Yeah, or they could consider free copying of the games as promotion for their concerts, where they make the real money.
When will Slashdot users grow up?
Games, movies, and even songs from the Backstreet Boys cost huge amounts of money to produce. You will be charged for copies, one way or another.
If people can't figure out how to slow down this ridiculous level of IP theft pretty damn soon, I guarantee you that we will have DRM shoved down our throats. In this case already, the delay of several months is probably to put in place with is effectively DRM, in order to cut down on multiplayer cheats.
Still, it sounds more like this is a convenient excuse for late delivery to me. I'm sure this guys email really was compromised, and hey, it sounds good to the uninitiated - "our code was 'stolen', we have to go rewrite a lot of it, we'll be delayed by a few months".
Good idea. They could ask for $15 million or so and setup a Paypal link.
Better idea: they could setup a seperate paypal link for each employees paycheck!
Its obvious though that since the code was stolen, they need to completely change their business plan. That is obvious. There is no way that anyone else could possibly sell software now. Microsoft should give up selling software too, someone might steal the sourcecode to Wordpad.
No worries. There is a working "beta" floating around. Source isn't all that was taken.
Believe nothing you read and half of what you see.
Ati is supposed to be bundling Half-Life 2 in with their new 9600XR and 9800XT graphics cards.
So, will we all just get a coupon?
How will this this affect Dell? They are the other partner involved. more info here
OK - who stole my duct tape?
There are a lot of posts asking why the delay and why does it need rewriting. I would guess that the majority of the game WON'T need to be recoded, but certain things like CD key auth code will, certain networking code, etc.
Did they say why they were delaying it?
Valve just sounds like a bunch of whiny babies now, somehow punishing everyone for one person's wrongdoing. I'm not sure what they hope to accomplish by doing this.
3. Act stupid
4. !Profit
I guess Doom 3 will be ruling the shelves this winter
Check out here for screenshots.
Before, it was just the blueprints that got released. Now the whole house with wallpapers and furnishings as well was released.
I did a exe size comparison and guess what? They match the sizes you get from compiling from the source.
Feel free to mod me up as I'm sure you all will ;)
This says otherwise. In fact, Gabe Newell says only a small portion of source was taken.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Four months to rewrite what exactly? Apart from possible Steam issues, for which I can't see four months solving any more than two weeks, there is (allegedly) nothing in the actual game source worth changing. Let's outline what will probably be done, to what should really NEED to be done:
:)
* A week or so to fiddle with Steam and break compatibility enough to prevent the leaked source being of any use. Although, as it is supposibly a secure content distribution system, I do not see how the source floating around would hurt it. But then again, HL2's "Source" engine was supposed to be all new, but in reality it's (allegedly) still based off of Quake1/the original HL1 codebase.
* A few days to change some APIs to prevent engines compiled against the leaked code from running the release game DLLs. Again, this shouldn't really be needed - the server should be anti-cheat enough to catch abnormal physics behavior (eg, no walk/shoot-through walls, Neo style flying blah blah), and optimised enough not to send entitiy data for players/objects not REALLY in the players view (eg, no see-through-walls cheat)
* Another few days to similarly break the network protocol. This is easy enough to do ACCIDENTLY when coding engines, so...
In reality, nothing SHOULD need to change... and the only things worth changing should only take a short amount of time and only be in the form of obscurification and not be subject to the need for extensive re-testing.
Ah well.
Please define 'big'
A) Big as in cover the cost of the webpage, the weekly caffeine and *maybe* a little computer hardware.
-or-
B) Big as in the #1 computer game release of the year. More revenue than most Hollywood productions. Hundreds of millions big.
Even though the source code was leaked, can we still classify this as vaporware?
But seriously folks. I would think if anything they would want to push the release of the game and get it out as soon as possible. With the source code being leaked another company might be trying to use the stolen source.
Why exactly does a source code leak push the project back 4 months? Are they trying to punish the gaming community? Did they need to push back the release, and this is a good excuse?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
This is a great example of how important a highly competent IT staff is to a business. The end of year figures for their finances is going to look horrible, probably in part because they viewed 'cheap guy that happens to have a MCSE' as suitable IT versus seasoned, yet experienced IT experts.
In the face of this, the 15-20k a year extra per IT staffer can be seen as a reasonable insurance rate when this much is at stake. What kind of infrastructure do they have there? Obvious that the development workstations are Windows, the use of Outlook makes me suspect they likely use Exchange and therefore likely a Windows-centric infrastructure through and through, including net-facing systems running open services.
I can understand in Windows game development that Windows workstation is a requirement, but I will kick and scream and point out this incident among many others as examples of why not to use MS products to handle mission critical or sensitive information. You just don't have the control and flexibility required to really adequately secure a MS box.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There are not infitinite budgets, your products WILL HAVE SECURITY FLAWS.
Since we are talking video games and not Nuclear Secrets,....Security though obscurity is "STILL SECURITY".
They could throw another N million at the issue to hopefully eliminate all issues but:
-This costs money
-This delays release
And they'd be in the same boat they are now.
I am dubious of this claim. The loss of the HL2 code was not actually as damaging as they claim. The cheats will be out there no matter what.
What game companies should be doing -- only they do not have the smarts to understand why it would be a good idea -- is pursuing open-source development right from the sort. Let any fan who wants to see the status of the completed project log-in and see the code at any time. Hell, let them send in their own code and save you the work.
What would a company lose? Will other game companies steal their code? Yeah right -- like they'd risk it. Valve's grandest dream is for id to steal even one line of HL2 code. They would morph into the SCO of the gaming world in about 5 seconds.
Would they lose out because "techniques" were stolen? Yeah right. Most game programming is the insertion of completely obvious techniques into a huge mess of a game. It is organization that is the hard part, and that cannot be stolen without lifting code wholesale.
So until some company wises up, we are going to hear a lot of whining from game companies about this sort of thing: "We are working so hard for the community, why are they so ungrateful as to do this to us poor programmers, now we'll delay the game." Cry me a river.
Also, I hear the leaked code compiles fine - so I'm not sure where this 1/3rd figure comes from. Gamecode I guess...
I think they're just waiting until I upgrade my 700mhz Duron. Thanks for thinking of me, Valve! DJCC
DRM Rewrite? The code that was copied was the game's engine. Not the levels or graphics files. Nothing would be spoiled by this, because the player interaction part wasn't copied. A delay of a little while would make sense just to make sure the game itself wasn't trojaned, but an additional four months? I don't buy it.
This has to be DRM vulernability concerns. They will lose millions from not selling over the holidays, and nothing with the engine itself would justify this.
After all the engine is fairly easy to detect if someone ever decides to try and make an unathorized copy or derivative, and this would be suicide to commercially exploit. Are they sincerely that worried about a driver exploit based on insider knowledge of the engine, enough to deliberately lose millions in holiday sales - especially with Doom 3 already pushed past the holiday season which they would have owned, I don't think so.
They are bringing this delay on themselves, causing their own problems, and deserve no sympathy for any lost sales.
omfg... even if they work with 600 programmers, that's still a whopping $100.000 per programmer in one single year
HL2 better be damd good for such an insane amount of cash. Considering that they've been working on it for what, 5 years ? They've drained a staggering $300.000.000 or so. At 40$ per copy, they'd need to sell 7.5million copies of the game to get break even. And that's not counting money spent on advertising, distribution, and the cost of setting up a central network server that can handle 7.5 million players connecting to play online.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
It is my understanding that the game was to be delayed for some time because the game runs unplayably slow on most (even the newest) nvidia hardware. I think this is partially because the shaders are written in DX9, and DX9 does not take full advantage of the GeforceFX features; in fact it rather favors the ATI cards.
I don't even know why they try to set release dates based on marketing efforts. They should be based around the build of the application
This whole story smells IMHO. If the game was to be released to market for X-Mas then it would be going to the printers now if not already being shipped to warehouses to be on the shelves by Thanksgiving day. A code leak while anoying is no worse then the program appearing on Kazza and 500,000 warez sites within hours of it hitting the shelves.
I would think that game makers would be targets of hacker/cracker all the time so one would think that they would have pretty good security. I've read comments about Outlook preview pane buffer overruns and blaming the lastest IE hole on this leak. Makes a great story and alot of M$ bashers will believe it but I have my doubts.
Also this line In a statement today, the games publisher said that Half Life 2, an expected blockbuster, will now contribute to 2004 results. shows the real reason. They want to delay the profits onto the 2004 books. It's all a bunch of Marketing bullshit. I wouldn't be suprised that the code was LEAKed. After all they didn't get all the code if I heard correctly. They managed to get breached yet DIDN'T get the whole code? Yeah right...
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I have to wonder how long until people start to realize that for truly critical (read millions of dollars) work, you're best off having the production machines OFFLINE.
Well, before you start blasting Valve, why don't you actually read up on the hack? It was a buffer overflow in the Outlook preview pane that allowed the hacker to install custom versions of RemoteAnywhere. Password sniffers and other keyloggers were installed on various machines to grab passwords and so forth.
The machine with the code was not connected to the net. It was, however, on the network.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Doom3 to beat Half-Life 2 to market
Now isn't this a scary messed up thought
You are a dumbfuck.
Do you not understand why they are delaying the release?
They need to make sure that licensing still works, dumbfuck. They need to ensure that their intellectual property, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, cannot be compromised. What's the point in releasing a product if people can write key generators for all the licenses?
A small portion of the code? It was 33% of the code, and contained the engine. You are a dumbfuck.
Please tell me which companies would accelerate a release if their source code were stolen and released on the internet? Please give me a list of "some of the companies" that would do this? It's stupid.
Something unexpected and detrimental happens to your one and only product, so you decide to continue with the release date? Why? After 9-11, do you think people kept their deadlines? You DUMBFUCK!
You sound like a 15-year dumbfuck who doesn't understand how the real world works. Grow up before you post more dumb shit, asshole.
This is like getting a headache and calling in sick from work, when in reality you wanted to skip work all along.
Why can't they just admit they were going to delay anyways and just needed an excuse?
Probably because vivendi is riding their asses.
It's not because the game leaked, but because the underlying systems that ensure that players can't easily cheat, warez the game, or access the personal information of other players.
Part of what was compromised was probably the code that handles CD key authentication, user online authentication, etc. So clearly warez and such for this game could be hugely rampant.
Part of what was compromized was probably the code that handles Valve's anti cheat system. So clearly the cheats that override that system could be hugely rampant.
Part of what was compromized was probably the code that is the game's engine. So clearly there could be cheat authors easily creating wall hacks, aim bots, and any number of other cheats.
Part of what was compromized was probably the code that handles purchasing the game over Steam. So clearly there could be some risk of credit card and online commerce fraud, personal information leaks, etc.
Look at it this way. The blueprints and plans for the bank got stolen. Thieves are studying them now. The bank is going over the blueprints with a fine toothed comb to fix the obvious (and not so obvious) weaknesses which are more clear when you have the plans.
Bad because it will make it tight for them financially. Bad because of all the whiners (see posts below mine) and conspiracy theorists who have nothing better to do with their lives except assume that whenever something happens its always the company trying to hide something. Bad because we will all have to keep hearing the whiners complain over and over again about a GAME! Bad for hardware makers because there are tons of people waiting for this game before they upgrade their machines or buy new computers.
This is good for those of us who are waiting to buy new computers. It gives us even more time to save up and wait. There is always some new video card or cpu just on the horizon. The money I would have spent today will be able to buy something better for the same price in April.
The playable beta demo with data has been probably been leaked. See here:
= 10 6246&st=30
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic
Also "Today the Half Life 2 Beta leaked across the world onto the internet via IRC channels. The release by "anon" shows it's obvious that the hackers who managed to sucessfully steal source code of the game itself also stole the game itself and who knows what else." from http://www.neowin.net/
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
Ever heard of a little thing called Steam? All mention of CD authentication and so forth aside, Steam was supposed to be the big thing to stop cheating.
Now it's all exposed. People were going to give their credit card numbers to this thing. Now it's open for all to see and anyone can exploit/spoof it.
Yes--contrary to the Slashbot idealist mindset--there are cases where security through obscurity is the best method. You have to look at each situation inviduallly and logically (instead of covering everything with a veil of ideology).
This is nothing more than them using this as an excuse for delaying the game - something that would have happened anyway.
Yeah, it's "nothing more," oh Valve Software insider. Please. The game was ready to ship for September 30. The hack happened September 11. Guess what was announced not much longer later? That's right, the delay.
We'd already be playing this game if it wasn't for the source leak. Valve's plans were ruined. I'm hoping for late November.
"Sufferin' succotash."
When this code was released there were several people on Slashdot calling for a full code audit of the CVS (since in thoery the person who checked out the tree could have checked in backdoor code) could it be that Valve is doing just such an audit and also changing the keygen and netcode to prevent widespread copying? My god people, this company has dumped *millions* into this games development, "poor gamers"? try "poor programmers", this delay could cost them serious money for missing an Xmas launch date.
See the story at The Register. They link to Valve's forum, where the general manager details how the code was leaked: in short, his own account information was stolen via Outlook, then several other employees were hit with a Outlook preview-pane virus that installed a keylogger.
Of course, this is no reason to think that Outlook isn't a perfectly good solution for email. Outlook is great. There's no reason to consider any alternatives. No matter how much money you lose to Outlook virii, simply look at the silly dancing monkey!
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
this will lose them a shitload of money and make a lot of people really pissed. they NEED to get this out by Dec 1 well, thats what I think anyway I wont even be able to run the damn thing
I don't even know why they try to set release dates based on marketing efforts. They should be based around the build of the application.
That's right... GOOD!
I have two reasons to like this decision:
1.) Deus Ex 2 will be out next month, and now I have time to just concentrate on that game without feeling 'rushed' to finish quickly so I can get into HL2.
2.) It will help prevent the cheating that was BOUND to happen with the source being leaked.
Ultimately, don't blame Valve for this. They were going to release on time and this isn't an "excuse." Your real anger should be aimed at the crackers.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
How many whiny posts do there need to be on: "Why did they have to delay it? This is BS". Well, here is a reason. If your company just got hacked in to and important information was stolen and leaked, instead of working on the product, you have to find what the vulnerability was, how to do damage control, how to re-structure how you do business so it doesn't happen again (i.e. redesign the network and create new security policies), and then have to get back to work on finishing the product while trying to make sure that anything cheaters would have gained from the source is fixed. I would say that is pretty large amount to do in a few months. Don't you think they would love to get it out so they can make money? Just use some freaking common sense here. If you are surprised by these delays, then you didn't think very hard. If you are upset by the delays, join the crowd, hunt the hackers, whatever. Just relax, it's a game, go buy a different one. It's not the end of the world.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
It seems like missing the Christmas release is going to cost them quite a bit. Is it really worth it to stop cheaters?
I admit to being a cynic... but this stituation strikes me as being too much of a coincidence.
1. Valve is not in a very profitable place.
2. They promised the world with HL2.
3. Theft of code...
My conspiracy riddled mind tells me that they painted themselves into a corner with a brand of paint called Daikatana... and they need money.
So they arrange the "theft" of their source code. This gives them an excuse to delay release and avoid bad press. Perhaps they can claim insurance for the theft? This way they kill two birds with one stone.
Of course this is just baseless speculation on my part! Cheers!
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
I think they should rename it: "Half-Life Forever!"
Come on people, am I the only one who sees this? A 4 month delay is just enough time to complete a successful witch-hunt, fire the source of the leak, hire and train a new worker bee and complete the project, including new 'features' that make the leaked source incompatible with the release. As an upshot, QA gets the extra time to polish up a few extra bugs.
This isn't so much of a conspiracy theory as an obvious knee jerk reaction by some executives.
*** TOP SECRET DUKE NUKEM 4 EVER CODE ***
/* Standard Call, in lie.h */ /* Delay */e r_unfinished_version);
Project: Version - DN4Ever-- DN marketing strategy (MARKET.EXE):
#define say(x) lie(x)
#define next_year soon
#define the_product_is_ready_to_ship another_beta_version
void main() {
if (latest_fps_game<one_year_old)
if (rumours_drop_below_certain_point)
raise(RUMOURS_ABOUT_NEW_FEATURES);
while(everyone_chats_about_new_features) {
make_false_promise(when_its_done);
if (rumours_grow_wilder)
make_false_promise(real_soon_now);
if (rumours_grow_even_wilder) {
market_time=ripe;
say("It will be ready in one month);
order(start_brainstorm_about_new_version);
  ; order(marketing_permission_to_spread_nonsense);
vapourware=TRUE;
break; }
switch (nasty_questions_of_the_worldpress) {
case WHEN_WILL_IT_BE_READY:
say("It will be ready in", today+30_days," we're just testing");
break;
case WILL_THIS_BE_A_$GAME_KILLER:
say("Yes it will be");
ask(marketing);
pretend(there_is_no_problem);
break;
case WHAT_ARE_MINIMAL_HARDWARE_REQUIREMENTS:
say("It will run on a 8086 with lightning speed due to the video architecture");
inform(ATI, "Video card sales sales will rise skyhigh");
inform(NVIDIA, "Start a new video card plant 'cos all these customers will need a new card");
break;
}
while (vaporware) {
introduction_date++;
if (no_one_believes_anymore_there_will_be_a_release) break;
say("It will be ready in",today+ONE_MONTH);
}
laugh_at(everyone, for_having_the_patience_year_after_year_for_anoth
}
Check this out: http://www.halflifesource.com/ These guys sound like they'll have the real scoop one way or the other here shortly.
I hope they use the time to fix Steam. Does this also mean that they're going to delay having Steam be a requirement for HL? Or has that deadline already passed? To be honest, I stopped playing HL after Steam was released, so I don't know.
Instead of making up conspiracies out of your ass, ever heard of a little thing called Steam? All mention of CD authentication and so forth aside, Steam was supposed to be the big thing to stop cheating. All of that will need to be rewritten.
It's all been exposed. People were going to give their credit card numbers to this thing. Now it's open for all to see and anyone can exploit/spoof it. The whole point of it to get rid of cheating has backfired.
Yes--contrary to the Slashbot idealist mindset--there are cases where security through obscurity is the best method. You have to look at each situation inviduallly and logically (instead of covering everything with a veil of ideology).
This is nothing more than them using this as an excuse for delaying the game - something that would have happened anyway.
Yeah, it's "nothing more," oh Valve Software insider. Please. The game was ready to ship for September 30. The hack happened September 11. Guess what was announced soon afterward? That's right, the delay.
We'd already be playing this game if it wasn't for the source leak. Valve's plans were ruined. I'm hoping for late November.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Vivendi Universal Says Delay Not Confirmed
Tuesday, October 7, 2003
According to a news article posted today on a UK press release, there is a Half-Life 2 delay. We already know that Valve does is not mentioning a delay.
We received an email from Mike Thompson who says he works for Vivendi Universal and writes:
quote: "delay is not confirmed..."
Here we go around and around... again...
From Half-Life Source Dot Com
The delay has not yet been confirmed by VALVe. Last time VU said there was going to be a delay, VALVe spoke up and said that everything was still on track for Sept 30 (and we know how well that worked out). It was noted at that time that VU has no control over the games release and any OFFICIAL word about the release date comes from VALVe, not the publisher (VU). I'm surprised that /. even posted this story. I guess, though, that if Yahoo considers it news, so does /.
"Anyway, long story short... is a phrase whose origins are complicated and rambling...." - Abraham Simpson
When will Slashdot users grow up?
When people realize that when one slashdot user speaks, he doesn't speak for all slashdot users.
and yet it's +5, Insightful.
There is nothing remotely insightful about it-- in fact, it's a completely retarded question, accompanied by a plainly obvious observation.
If I had any confidence in the M2 system, I'd sit back, comfortable that these idiot mods would eventually get their comeuppance. Instead, I'm going to have to go masturbate furiously until I calm down.
As long as Condition Zero hasn't been released, HL2 won't be either. After HL2 has been released, no market will be left for CZ.
Maybe this will give them a chance to take out all the ATI-specific custom shader code that has been found in the source so that it can actually be "generic DX9 code" that is running on the ATI cards as they and Valve claim.
Of course, maybe $6 million dollars (confirmed by ATI's earnings documents) will prevent that from happening (and would have prevented that from ever being known had the source not leaked).
You're right. VALVe knows that if the crackers are able to crack the game and start running rampant over MP and Steam, it would be the end of the game. No one would play it, no one would buy it and it would die an early, messy death.
From what I've been reading at www.halflife2.net and www.halflifesource.com, a lot of people are slowly but surely becoming disillusioned with HL2. More and more gamers are giving up on VALVe and Vivendi because of the nasty, messy way this PR disaster has been handled by both companies, with misinformation, speculation and contradictory statements coming forth at unpredictable times.
A lot of other games like UT2004, Max Payne 2 and Call of Duty are coming out for Christmas. DOOM 3, based on rumors of a fully working game, sans a musical library, might be out January 2004. If HL2 can't get itself into shape in time for Christmas, then no one will buy it. And what could have been one of the greatest games to ever be played will probably fade into history.
And that would be a terrible tragedy, IMHO.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
Set up one machine for your email, web browsing, MP3 playing.. Hook it to your internet exposed LAN, and set up a 2nd machine on its own non-Internet accessable LAN.. A completely seperate network that has NO WAY of touching the internet. Dont use gateway machines and the like, PHYSICALLY keep the private network on its own. If you need to patch stuff, or move data over USE DVDRW MEDIA. I cant believe such a large developer like those who are making HL2 weren't doing this. After the whole Quake fiasco of them getting a beta via a SAMBA exploit you would have thought every dev house would have set up two entirely seperate networks.. One for work, one for play.
First, was the code on their hard drives destroyed, or merely copied? If it was destroyed, why can't they restore it from CD-R backups? They should've backed up all their code on CD-Rs weekly, if not daily. Why didn't they?
SCO claims the Half-Life 2 Source code contains System V code. Darl McBride is expected to announce a new licenscing scheme later today. Anyone that has viewed Half-Life 2 movies, screenshots, or other material concerning it will be required to pay a $699 license to have viewed such materials.
They're not rewriting the game, they're rewriting all the authentication. The entire Steam code was leaked.
It has "EVERYTHING" to do with the code leak. Stop pretending like you know Gabe Newell's mind.
"Sufferin' succotash."
A Christmas release of Half-Life 2 would probably have been most welcomed
Yeah, we just have to settle for a pre Halloween release....
All the comments I've seen are how much Valve sucks for delaying the game, how the source code theft is just a cover up, etc. Let me ask you this one question:
Come release date, will you stick with the opinion that Valve sucks because of this and not buy the game? Or will you still fork over your cash and buy the game like the gamer you are?
"Gripe, gripe, they suck, bitch and moan, hey waitaminute! It's out! Here's my money! Gimmeethegamedammit!!!"
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
No Doom3 and no HL2 this year? Right? Wow what a letdown 2003 was for gaming. Yea I know everyone here can probably name a bunch of games that came out that they like, but they just can't be compared to what these two meant. These two games are the ones that will define what "state of the art" is for both single player FPSers and online gaming for years to come.
This not only affects us gamers, but also cpu and graphics cards vendors. These people were counting on these specific titles to finally convince people that you needed a 2GHz+ cpu and a $300 DX9 graphics card. When the game you want to play is 6 months away why be stupid and buy a new system now? Even worse you'd still be foolish to buy a new cpu or gpu for Christmas because in the 3-4 months up till either game is released both of those items could drop by well over $100.
I see a lot of Gamecubes being bought the Christmas and a lousy sales period for cpu and gpu vendors. Me I'm just bummed because something I've been looking forward to for so long is put off yet again.
Oh well. Back to MAME.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Totally feasible on a non-crap Internet connection.
Released in April of 2004? Unlikely, They will push it back to fall/christmass of 2004 for sales. This is a big bite on Valves ass since they made a big deal of saying that they kept the game a secret until it was near ready, so that they could ship the game on time withought delays. Can we say 'oops'.
One ironic bit of news is that Vampire - Bloodlines might be released BEFORE half-life 2 which used a modified HL2 engine.
The demo of Half Life 2 has apparantly also been leaked. See screenshots here. God only knows what else they downloaded from the computers at Valve and the implecations it will have on them.
Apparently now it's called 'Gordon Freeman Forever' :-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Whats stopping this from happening?
I'm not sure why you're lumping games with movies and music here. Games need not cost *huge* amounts. Granted, you need to pay good money to developers, maybe even better money to graphics designers, and invest some in promotions. But that, plus hardware and dev tools, pretty much sums up the cost. You don't pay millions to the lead star (at least, one would hope they don't), you don't hire hundreds of extras, doubles, assistants, grips and and go-fors, you don't attempt to rent Sydney for a day (Matrix, anyone?), you don't crash cars, trains, choppers or airplanes to produce a game. The cost of amking a game vs the cost of making a movie should be different by orders of magnitude.
And DRM is already being shoved down our throats, while it turns out that bootleg copies of pre-release movies are being distributed by insiders, not by teenage traders.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
OK, let's take a look at this.
1. On face value, they seem to be saying, "Our source code was stolen from us, so we need to rewrite it."
This doesn't make sense. Obviously, they still have a copy of the source code---if they don't, they can just download it from any of the million mirrors on the internet. Admittedly, this is much worse than copying mp3s or even the full HL2 CD when it is released, and it may even be misappropriation of trade secrets, but it's still not stealing. They still have the code.
2. Maybe they really mean, "There are significant secrets in the code which, if revealed, make our product not viable."
Perhaps. What might those secrets be?
2a. The format of the network code.
Reasonable. This is what people mean when they talk about how the release of the source code means in-roads for cheaters. But obfuscating the network code is not a four-month job. They only need to change basic things like the packet layout and their fake encryption or whatever. (Aside: IMO the best way to deal with current forms of cheating is to simply release frequent updates to the protocol and binaries. Reverse engineering is a lot slower than "forward" engineering, so exploit that asymmetry.)
2b. The CD key code.
Seriously, the CD key code is rarely any more useful as a C function than as a compiled binary. People debug key checkers and write keygens in like, a day. Unless they have some seriously new regime here, that's not a reasonable cause for 4 months. (Aside: If they used RSA and a key was just a digital signature (of some token), then cracking keys would be really, really hard, like, net you an instant PhD hard. Also, revealing the keycheck algorithm would do nothing for hackers. It would probably make keys a bit longer, though.)
2c. Buffer overflows and other exploitable bugs, or deliberate backdoors.
Maybe. But if they know about them, maybe they should just get rid of them? If they're thinking of auditing for them, maybe they should have done that even if the source wasn't copied? In truth, I bet having the source code out there will incite a lot of the bugtraq attention-seeking white-hats to audit the code for them. HL2 is a pretty high-profile piece of software.
2d. GPL violations.
Ha, well, yeah. Apparently there are some of those in the code, though I don't know the specifics.
3. Maybe they really mean, "We forgot how long it takes to actually polish a product and ship it. We were going to delay again at the cost of the fan community's ire, but now we can shift that blame onto hackers!"
This is my guess: like a defeated player complaining about lag, they're just shifting the blame.
Even changing a couple API names and such, should be simple, but I've done it before, and it requires a LOT of testing. If only simple changes were as simple...
Ever notice how retarded Mac users don't understand what the fuck they are talking about? From what I can tell it is Vendi Universal who isn't doing too well, not Valve. Just like 3drealms, I don't think Valve has to worry about their finances.
I would also point out your inflated ego and "holier than thou" attitude that comes from people who pay so much for so little, but we already know this because you are Mac users.
Slashdot has been ./'d
/. get it right and stop giving out my website address
Tard, it is
They got in through weknesses in OUTLOOK!!!
they almost deserve to have been hacked if they were running that huge open wound of an infection vector on a developement machiene.
I'm surprised no one has posted a "Code should be free" response. Isn't Valve developing a proprietary, closed-source game? And are they not going to charge the public money to buy a license for said game? I expected to see a flurry of posts to the tune of "THAT CODE SHOULD HAVE BEEN OPEN SOURCED TO BEGIN WITH!!!"
But, I guess there are some sacred code cows for this crowd. Or at least, a lack of internal consistancy. Perhaps the "real" Slashdotters too busy file sharing archival copies of music to make the arguments anymore.
*GRYNN*
---anactofgod---
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
and as best as I can tell, you're talking out of your ass. now hand over the karma, and go back to posting AC, you don't deserve the bonus.
Of course, things like this would not be an issue if the game was open-source.
But how do you sustain a game studio that releases open-source software?
I have a proposition that may or may not work.
Network party tours. Sell lots of swag. Announce regional, national, and world champions based on tour tournament results.
Just a glimmer of an idea. I go into other copyright/ip/money issues in today's journal entry. Check it out and comment if you want to.
MakePassword.com Mp3 Blog
I sware just about every darn forum has someone posting about how much Valve deserved this.
.
Some examples along the lines of the lame justifications I have heard:
"They promised it on Sept 30th."
Correct me if I am wrong, but I don't remember Vavle officially announcing a Sept 30th date. I wonder if these brain dead morons took the retailers dates as a fact.
"They hyped the game, and they are teasing us."
I can't even begin to say why this is a stupid reason. All I can say is that it is more then likely you hyped the game. I don't think they were teasing us, they announced the game when it is very close to ready instead of hyping the hell out of it for several years when they had nothing(i.e. Duke Nukem Forever)
"It will help the Mod makers."
I would think that mod makers would have more ethics then to download and use the unoffically released code. Considering that Valve is going to have to re-write a lot of their code this leak might as well be useless to them. They are better off waiting for the official SDK.
I think I have covered the main ones, feel free to add any more stupid "they deserved this" excuses you find.
Since we all want to avoid a rash of game-nerd holiday depression related suicides, would whichever one of you 1337 haxx0rs stole the code please just return it to Valve? They seem to have a problem with internet security, so simply print out the stolen code and mail it back to them. TIA.
--If 50,000 people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
The product is slipping, the publisher is beating at the door, it's full of bugs, and you don't know what to do next.
Leak the source!
It's win-win. You get it reviewed, you flush out any vulnerabilities, and you get the publisher off your backs. And it's not your fault, because a wizard - sorry, evil cracker - did it.
I can't believe that nobody has thought of this before. Next year, everyone will be leaking their code!
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
http://www.neowin.net/comments.php?id=14249&catego ry=main
Ok: games are diffcult, have lots of bugs, but come on, learn w the RIAA. Once something gets leaked, it gets released BEFORE THE ORIGINAL DATE!!!
This will not be a HL2less xmas for the lovers. But it will be profitless to Valve.
They've already shown their genious when leaving CODE machines ONLINE and USING OUTLOOK!!!
how long until
There are a lot of TODOs and HACKHACKs in all Quake-derived code, even the Quake 'SDK' probably has a couple of them left. It's some kind of design style I think. At least it's not a bad one as it highlights the areas that are not really finished(not that anyone will ever fix it though, they are more like - I want this, someone do it for me?).
If you grep through the official Half-Life SDK you'll find at least 50 TODOs and HACKHACKs. (Much more than that probably, but I'm playing safe.)
Assume that a game costs $10 million to produce at the high-end. It's not entirely uncommon for the high-end of movie budgets to exceed $100 million. So, there you go - at least one order of magnitude.
Battling Beasts
When people realize that when one slashdot user speaks, he doesn't speak for all slashdot users.
April 2004
Hey assholes, listen up. This goes to everyone who participates in leaded material. This includes HL2 source, it includes the Doom3 leak.
Same goes to pirates of already-released material.
I used to do it too, I know... it's fun, it's a rush, whatever.
This is the consequence. Valve was making a huge effort to release a ground breaking product. HL2 is quite possible the most anticipated game to come out in a LONG time.
You motherfuckers had to steal the source, and this is what happened. Why? Was it worth it? You still can't play it, can you? You don't have the models, the textures, or anything.
All you did is hurt their business and the community.
Go die somewhere.
no comment
about the lack of a linux client (even an unsupported one, I mean, c'mon...idsoftware sure has no problem with this on EVERYTHING they release) are irrelevant now as there wont even be a windoze client available.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I should remind you that Counterstrike started out as a free mod done by hobbyists for the fun of it. Sure, there's plenty of crap mods out there, but don't discount the free work of the mod community.
Valve is legitimately trying to protect their IP and if takes them until April to recode some parts of it then so be it. Gabe said its taken at least 30 people 5 years to code the game. Hopefully, Valve doesn't go broke because of this.
To have a trojaned e-mail sent to Gabe's computer is somewhat to be expected. I'm sure script kiddies have also tried similar things on Microsoft computers, etc. It was stupid to actually have any of the computer(s) with the source code connected on the Internet. If they have the budget to run w/o release for 5 years they have the money to buy a few extra computers for Internet use ONLY.
I think its kind of ironic though. Valve is acceptably asking that everyone respect their IP and remove links to and delete stolen source code. Everyone but the script kiddies and hax0rs will comply. But if you try and take credit for a script kiddies' work they'll whine and complain to no end.
..for NVIDIA to release their first "DirectX 9.0 Compliant" video card. Good stuff for NVIDIA.
...
Hmmm, the only company to benefit from the HL2 leak. Hey, wait a minute
"Delayed by at least four months, that is to April 2004"
With math skills like this, is it any wonder their network had holes?
There's a TCO argument if I ever heard one.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
I don't know, Blender got over $100K in donation funding - and they are not a high use, high priority project. Could you imagine if KDE, GNOME, Mozilla, or Linus Torvalds himself asked the community to donate for their respective projects, and set up goals, financial progress reports, and really pushed it? I'm sure they could bring in a lot if they really wanted to/tried.
In other news, Elbonian hacker group "l33tgr0up" announced the imminent release of their previously unnanounced "ground-breaking" new FPS game, "h4lfl1f3 II".
In your online poker example you can have a central trusted server that insures that nobody is cheating (at least technically).
There is no way to do that with FPS's (not yet at least). The amount of info that would be needed to be passed between the client and the server in FPS games would be cripling if you expected the server to be the final arbitrator of all actions.
The only way FPS games can maintain the required speed is by offloading the majority of processing to the individual clients. In order to do this you have to trust the client. One of the key ways to trust the client is to obfuscate it. Not perfect, but at least it's one level more of protection than you would have if somebody has your source.
Really, the only way to protect the code is to build in some kind of self sanity check (i.e. return some kind of checksum to the server which verifies the client). This is only as good as the verification routine though. Once the method of verification is determined you're back to square one. You can improve upon this by constantly supplying new verification code to the client but it still comes down to security through obscurity.
When you need to trust your client but you don't have control over it this is about all you can do.
HAND, asshole!
On the other hand, maybe Valve will stop using Outlook. Installing Outlook is essentially installing a package of random security holes.
Searched the web for "Outlook exploit". Results 1 - 10 of about 246,000. Search took 0.20 seconds.
The company I work for has all developers on a separate "clean" network. they have two machines, and two LANS at their desks. The ports are restricted via MAC address so that noone can slip their "clean" machine onto the internet.
Works great, no security holes. This company does develop intrusion detection software and systems., so maybe we are a bit more paranoid than the game world. Even with this security mindset, it was deemed wise to go with the expense of an extra locked down LAN.
We played with KVMs but since there was a clean email and an external email system, the developers themselves prefered two keyboards/monitors.
Valve isn't a serious game company. The way they handled the whole thing (from early delays to stolen code) is absolutely poor imho. I'm not going to spend hard-earned money on a game made by such a company. I'm gonna turn my attention to something else. (some great games are coming out for the holidays anyway). I'm growing tired of all this source code leak advertising campaign. (respect is something you can't buy with ads/marketing money) bye bye fellow /.ers
I ordered HL2 a while back on Amazon so it would be a surprise when it arrived. I went and checked the order and it still says Nov. 8th delivery. I hope it isn't delayed but that's ok if it is, I just noticed that HALO for the PC is waiting for me tonight.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
Does this mean more was stolen?
http://www.warezxinc.com/hl2/
Cause I betcha that a small part of that 26% drop in valuation would have paid for one HELL of a security admin. I mean, hell, I'll admit straight out I'm not the one for that job, but for 250k-500k a year you could probably have Foyder or one of the l0pht guys, or someone equally skilled/famous standing guard over your network and this shit WOULD NOT happen. Security is a process, and a process requires people, people cost money and in this case, the money was there.
I betcha now they wish they had spent it.
( damn..that post is good..wish I signed up for an acct so I could put some points to it so someone would actually read it )
He's talking about security as in GnuPG or OpenSSH. Yea, OpenSSH had one bug in it recently, but generally it is very secure. Both open and closed source programs can contain bugs, but the advantage of the open source is that you can verify that the algorithm itself is secure. In other words we know that RSA encryption itself is secure and that SSL, the algorithm, is secure.
In relation to games that means not relying on obscurity to hide important game data, but rather not sending it to begin with. Yea, I know about optimization for speed, etc. Still, I do think it's possible to create a secure protocol game network protocol that wouldn't need to rely on obscurity, but could be verifiably secure barring implementation bugs.
>>Puts on tinfoil hat<<
I guess this gives nVidia time to release nv40 before the HL2 launch. Now their crappy DX9 inplementation in nv30+ will not matter. Seems like this has worked out perfectly for them
>>Removes tinfoil hat<<
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
doc brown did it, he 0wn3d joo guise!!!!11!!!
Or were you just itching to say "security through obscurity"?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Now it's all exposed. People were going to give their credit card numbers to this thing. Now it's open for all to see and anyone can exploit/spoof it.
Yes, just like Mozilla, PGP, and lots of other secure software. There are lots of instances of open source software that is secure.
But you are missing the point: the real reason these people have to delay the launch is not because someone knows their source code but because someone may have planted something. They now have to go through their code with a fine toothed comb to see whether anybody has installed anything.
And the real reason not to type your credit card number at this thing is not that the source code is known, but that it was written by people whose many million dollar source code was stolen through a bug in Outlook Express. I mean, how incompetent can they get? Obviously, these guys have no idea what they are doing in terms of security. Given their history, you have to assume that HL2 will be full of security holes and backdoors.
In fact, you are a fool if you install any kind of networked game on a machine you use for anything important: game programmers are unlikely to be attuned to security, and your bank account will be just as drained whether people break into your MS Money software through IE or through HL2.
Yes--contrary to the Slashbot idealist mindset--there are cases where security through obscurity is the best method. You have to look at each situation inviduallly and logically (instead of covering everything with a veil of ideology).
When people like you have trouble with inconvenient facts of life, you try to shut up people by labeling them as "idealism" and "ideology". Sorry, but that's just covering up incompetence. And incompetence in the area of security is apparently rampant at Valve; what shows that is not the hypothesis that they may have been achieving security-through-obscurity, but the fact that someone managed to break in and install a keyboard logger on one of their developers machines.
From what I've read they're going to be rewriting the multiplayer sections of the code. This could be a bonus because if they're rewriting the network code, they already have the experience of writing it the first time fresh in their minds. Since they should already know what the limitations and tradeoffs that were present in the original code were, they should be able to rewrite it this time around to be even more secure and reliable when compared to the original.
Shh.
[offtopic]
In your sig, the filename should be "-rf *", the 'f' is for force, it will help to take care of anyone who removes that 'w' bit from their files when they have archived something.
[/offtopic]
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
The source code was NOT "leaked", that would imply a Valve employee was involved, it was stolen - GET IT RIGHT.
But could they have made such a great mod without having something to start with? I don't think so. How many from scratch, free, quality games do you see?
Will someone please explain the 64 million in lost revenue? And how this at all effects the release date?
http://threetechguys.info Come, discuss Technology. Got a technology question? Come ask!
They just wanted a good excuse to delay anyway...
Better blame it on someone else.
Bzflag, frozen-bubble, etc. There are some good games that are GPL'd.
My other car is first.
Perhaps Value was already running late, behind schedule, and over budget. They or some evil PHB come up with this source/game "leak" as an elaborate scheme to justify delaying the release of the game to some later time. Hey...it could happen...I mean look at California. FerretFrottage
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I had never heard of those games but I googled for them. They look interesting and I will try atleast bzflag as soon as I finished my latest game (halo on the PC...which isn't nearly as good as XBOX'rs said it was). However, I don't think those can compare to HL, CS or HL2.
considering the financial situation of the company, it would be bad PR to just say that HL2 is being delayed becuase of the development timeline. but to say it was due to outside sources, this is "good" PR - HL2 gets some free pub and the company is vindicated for the delay.
you have to wonder though about the lie of the email backdoor. you'd think that there would be some virus protection running that would catch this. hence, this is either a so-so lie or among the stupidest things i've ever heard.
imagine having to tell your boss, "I just lost half of code that we've been developing for years because I downloaded a backdoor." My guess is 80% of us get canned on the spot. My wife's network admin accidentally emailed her company's entire email password list to the everyone on the email directory and was fired.
and Outlook. Who the hell uses that piece of shit anymore?
... An enormous waste of time. I bet most companies lose 5-10% of their daily productivity to workers using email (not to mention slashdot).
Email is a fucking joke. Spam, viruses, stupid ass coworkers emailing bullshit,
Yes, I know 3d engines and level editors don't write themselves, but id has been very gracious in GPL'ing their last generation Quake source. You won't get cutting edge graphics working with an old engine, but who cares about eye candy if the gameplay is crap?
I can feel sympathetic for any programmer who lose his hard worked code some way, but this whole deal seems too convenient.
For starters I cant believe a hacker could enter valve workstations and got hold of: drumrolls please: the code for the game! instead of the latest beta. I mean what the ? they had better security for ART and levels than the code? thats just fishy.
2nd as far as I understand the code as it is, is mostly useless not only it cant run without the art and scripts (which are not there), most of the "leaked" code comes from quakegl (which is gpl) havok (gpl as well) and the halflife sdk which is free and is pretty similat to the quake2 source (ehich is GPL), the only part thats worth a look is the dx9 rendering engine (which as far as I know is not completely functional yet) and the network engine (which is not functional either) some people thought the steam code was there too, but it turns out IS NOT!
And now they announce the delay, great! what for? the leaked code is suposed to be one month old (although considering all the TODO tags it was a lot older), the game was due in december that means they had 3 months to work on it, more than enough time to fill the security gap (I mean ANY code that they change in the net code, will make the Leaked and new version games NOT sync!) any change they could make in the BSP or model structure will render the leaked code unusable! now they say they are releasing it in february? how convenient!
Here is the real reason why this may be happening: Halo 2 ATA February 2004, Doom3 ATA March 2004, Half life 2 ATA April 2004, what do you know! they will be released just a few months away from each other! and THEIR xbox/ PC versions!. Max payne 2 is being released this month (we hope) and just 2 months later the XBOX version will be out, could it be PC publishers are holding up their release dates to match the XBOX versions release? if not it certainly seems convenient all of them (except MP2 apparently) will be released AFTER Halo 2! is MS bags of cash behind this delays?
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
the fact that its only source code. Games needs models textures and maps to work.
Lol! :)
Thanks for the heads-up, FroMan!
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
Ok, I decided to see what all the fuss about Halflife was about, got it for PS2.
My friend points out that I'm probably not going to see what ALL the fuss was about, simply because that doesn't include Counter Strike.
Anyway, I'm totally stuck in the level with all the conveyor belts in a big room. I ride around, finally end up over a big machine looking thing with two conveyor belts, one heading in, the other out. If I ride the one heading in, I go back to to just below where I entered the room (having ducked some mashers there). The one heading out just dead-ends. All the other conveyor belts head to dead ends (just have meat parts dropping in) and one time I fell to the floor, climbed stairs, and managed to get...back to the conveyor belts.
Anyone know what I was doing wrong? What do I do next?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
There is one other possibility: Valve Software may have gotten the code for an incremental release to DirectX 9.0 (DirectX 9.1?) and possibility they are on the beta program for Windows Longhorn, the successor to Windows XP.
Maybe when Half-Life 2 is finally released in possibly June-July 2004 it will support the features of the next incremental release of DirectX, and possibly the program code will be easily be able to run under Longhorn when that is released some time afterwards?
There IS such a thing as an intranet that is physically separated from the internet.. internal servers completely inaccessable from the commercial 'net.. KVM switches so all machines are accessable from one workstation.. completely internal secure shell, telnet, ftp, whatever. A setup like that is totally realistic and desirable for a production and/or testbed environment.
Of course, this eliminates the ability of a coder to work from home or do things like surf the internet and check e-mail from the same box they code on.. But if you don't want your code leaked, don't put it on a box that's in any accessable from the commercial internet.
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
Almost makes you wonder if they were going to miss the deadline anyway, so rather then get the bad publicity, they set this up.
Just a thought. Still sucks though halflife rocks.
If HL2 is the same or better than HL, then there is no question: People will buy it when it comes out.
However, it's mind-bending that their Outlook weren't patched(it's a very old exploit) and that he uses the preview pane in Outlook, on his work related computer. I know that they are backed by Microsoft, and thus probably gets all the MS toys, but they still forgot to patch them.
I find it more mind-bending that they are still using outlook. Proprietary hard-to-port mail format, tons of bug, too integrated into the OS... it's also a little disconcerting to see that they used it on a machine with a available net connection and available production code. This isn't one mistake, it's a bunch of little silly silly things that add up to one big oops.
Realistically, they could have had their production machine live if they needed email, but done the following:
Proxy www requests, with password validation (no sneaking through port 80)
Restrict SMTP/POP ports to communication with their mail server(s) only (why would they need elsewhere)
Block all other unneeded ports.
In a properly configured network, even getting infected with a trojen isn't the end of the world if it has no way to escape. While many may sneak by on known ports, simply restricting them to appropriate hosts and/or proxying them with passwords (not saving the password in winblows) would help a lot.
...now my new computer is gonna be a waste of money for the next 1/2 year :(
Anyone feel like taking the HL2 code and making a linux port?
Up until five months ago, HL2 wasn't on anyones radar. It came out at E3 and blew everyone away. Even if it comes out in April, we've only waited a year since it's first announcement. I do believe this leak caused a significant delay. Any change at this stage of development is at least a full day task. Any change made has the potential to ripple through god knows how many other modules and affecting their operation. So even minor changes are viewed with scrutiny. When you talk about overhauling huge pieces like the network or STEAM, I can easily see that taking weeks or months. Just remember, a game is only late until it's released, but a bad game is bad forever.
Outcast
Does it have a multiplayer mode then?
it is worried about its competitors. The leaked code is much more dangerous in the hands of an organization than it is in the hands of habbists. Instead of forking out hundreds of thousands of dollars for a license to the source engine, the competitors *might* be able to modify the existing code enough to get away with it. This should cost valve a lot of money if it does happen.
Now I only wish someone would do this to Microsoft. Hack the gibson!
Give me a break...
Valve claims the hacker(s) gained access to the source code via Gabe's email account...wink, wink.
I think Valve is having serious second thoughts about Steam and their whole game strategy regarding Steam.
I've seen the Steam BETA in action and I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to run their games remotely or in any way tied to this brutal piece of code.
Valve was looking for an excuse... however lame!
And the one they decided to use is BEYOND lame!
It's clear that Vivendi had extremely poor security. At a MINIMUM, they should have had both a central hardware firewall AND a good software firewall like Zone Alarm installed locally on each machine. Not only would ZA have probably kept the trojan out in the first place, but it would have alerted them to the outgoing traffic generated by the key logger.
Their IT people should probably be fired, unless the policy was to run software firewalls and the president shut his off.
There's one and only one cause of stuff like this incident: PEOPLE not taking security seriously. Maybe it was the IT people at Vivendi, or maybe it was the users. In any case, this was perfectly preventable if real security measures had been in place and people had been following them. Unforgivable in this day and age to let a trojan slip through. There are a thousand tools to prevent exactly that, and clearly they were not using one.
I thought this as soon as I saw the words "delay" and "leaked" in the same sentence a week ago. What if Valve leaked the code themselves to explain a delay? It's a perfect answer to the question, "How the hell do we explain a delay when we said as early as the first week in September that it was coming out September 30th?"
I think publishers need to start penalizing developers for missing release dates. I know, I know, it will result in subpar work. My assertion is that only at first. You can't possibly tell me that creating HL2 is any less complicated or involved than creating a $250 Billion dollar film, and yet when was the last time you heard of a movie getting pushed back within a month of its release date?
All this date pushing reveals is how disorganized and rabbled the game industry truly is, on both the developer and publisher side.
It's also not that gamers need to somehow communicate with their wallets that release dates need to be both accurate and stable. A game that's been pushed back too much loses
"steam" (no pun intended) and can eventually backfire (the most obvious example being DNF). Most industries and corporations work with deadlines every day, and while they do slip, there are certain penalties and ramifications of slipping.
Basically: if you give a release date as certain as Valve did, you better be hauling ass and anticpating crap like this. Call me merciless, but in any other job if I gave a deadline to a client you better believe I'll have it done by then. So why aren't gamers being treated as clients?
Dang...I was gonna try to pick it up off the street in Thailand this November...
Three months is a lot of time. And back in '93, in around five months Doom matured from a animationless buggy 3D *engine* (0.5) into a high quality *game* (0.99). Sure, it took some time to reach 1.9 but around 1.666 it was mostly bugless already. And most of the bugs were mostly harmless.
If everyone started asking for donations then there would be even less than there is now to go around.
Companies are lucky to make money on a game at all let alone make a killing. HL is an exceptional product so it's likely to make a lot of money but "trusting" your users not to freely distribute your product without reimbursement is just foolishness.
We need to actually hear from VALVE on this - not the Euro publisher. The only thing that matters here is VALVE's decision to go forward.
I believe that they must go forward anyway. I fired off an email to ATi to remind them that the only reason why I was interested in upgrading my Radeon 8500 was because of games like HL2. If HL2 isn't coming, I have no real reason to upgrade.
With 6 million dollars on the line and the chance that NVIDIA might actually get their act together in 4 months time (NV40 by then), VALVE will be under mucho pressure by ATi and it's partners to get this out NOW. They do have some options however:
1) There was talk of a mini-game prequel to HL2, a kind of HL 1.5 to be shipped with the ATi cards initially. Perhaps this will be front burnered again.
2) No initial multiplayer support. This could happen. They could release the game in it's current form minus the multiplayer until its re-written.
3) Wait until April. Forget the fans, this will piss off a lot of vendors - although it may bring a major sigh of relief to NIVIDA who is clearly not ready for DX9 gaming yet. Conspiracy theories might suggest that this was the plan all along...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I'd like to thank the jerks that stole the source code. Also, to those that say it's Valve's fault does that mean if you forget to lock your car doors that I have the right to steal your CD player, cell phone and CDs?
>Having a seperate machine on a seperate physical network would be more secure, but would cost much more than the VMWare approach.
Sure, until a "29% fall in revenue and an operating loss of $61.36 million this year" results when the code is stolen via some previously undiscovered exploit or plain old carelessness. Physical separation from the Internet is the solution. Everything else is a compromise with varying levels of risk.
Besides, what's a half-dozen development machines, a server, and some cables cost? Under 50k easy. Seems like reasonable insurance, to me, given the risks of losing control over intellectual property.
This sucks. I'm waiting to buy a new PC and top of the line video card for when HL2 comes out. I want the new PC for other reasons, too, but timing is basically dictated by HL2. I may buy the PC now and get the video card later now--too bad for ATI.
Time to invest in aluminum futures?
anyone else thinking this game is slowly spiraling towards its doom? If I was a developer at Valve I would definately be pissed off. An probably more than a little burned out. Now some jackass using IE gets 1/3 of the source code stolen and the boss says we have to re-write it and delays the ship date again. That would suck. Hopefully the game will do well even after the delays. Too bad All of the source tree wasnt stolen. Then we could build it and start playing now! They should just release it now, add a patch in a few months to kill the cheats and call it a day. Thats what I would have done, but then, I'm just a lowly senior programmer. I'm not smart enough to make Business decisions..
See, even non open source developers can benefit from using Linux as a development platform. They can test their code on windows as well, but there would be no need to have people using Outlook, IE, Word or SourceSafe (eek.) or even have windows machines connected to the internet. Actually when I need to test some code on windows, I fire it up in Wine or Virtual PC..
TallGreen CMS hosting
It's already in place and seems to function.
It's called paying for the damn game.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
October + 4 months = January. Where do they get April? That would be like 7 months.
Late Sept, news breaks halflife won't be available on Sept 30th. Rumors fly about early 2004, investors freak out about no Xmas, Valve stutters maybe by the holiday season.
Early Oct, source leaked. Why? Hacked? Maybe, maybe a developers was calling BS on the holiday season estimate.
Now, we get word its delayed til April 2004. So, rather then being done in time for XMAS, its now a full 4 months late.
Hmm... smells like "Cover my ass". Some Director was able to sell to the upper brass this lame excuse.
Or
It might be retribution against the hacker. "Hey, we were going to notify we're late, why don't we just blame the hacker as well. See how popular that hacker's going to be with the public when he's the cause of the delay?"
Just my thoughts..
>> for truly critical (read millions of dollars) work, you're best off having the production machines OFFLINE.
... just a straight route to source control servers and that is ALL. What else do you need except one-way copying of binaries to a code-drop machine??
...Because, working in IT, we know bring critical of Microsoft can get you fired (@ Stake). I stand behind my opinions , but don't necessarily want them viewed with prejudice on a background check. :-)
>Pain in the ass?? Try impossible. How do you think game programming works, anyway?
I think you are -- deliberately -- twisting his assertion that development systems are intended for WORK, turning it into an allegation that development is single-man work, and then attacking that much weaker position. That, or you got emotional and lost sight of the comments.
Surely your Development, QA & R&D departments have CLOSED networks for testing... how else would you EVER get meaningful performance statistics?
Surely you have an *Administrative* PC for "work" tasks such as Microsoft Office/Outlook, etc. and all the admin boxes are firewalled from the development systems since you're most likely to get trojaned on a development system.
Surely your "work" system is WORK-ONLY -- no Administrative rights.
If this isn't the case, well, it's your "right" to gamble. I only hope you are not a public company and I happen to own stock. If you ARE this carefree and you DO get hacked and *I* lose money for trusting you... expect a lawsuit.
Being hacked is NEVER excusable... even if it is an "inside" job, which in this case it is not clear that is the case.
Note the person in the story experienced "strange Explorer crashes"... No moron with Kazaa and "unregistered", trojaned pirate software should be allowed to compromise the company mission. Or whatever careless act was committed to get a back door in.. the result is the same.
Hire an experienced IT person older than 31, and get with the program.
-Nameless
- Anonymously post some non-critical source code someplace public
- Claim you were hacked
- Push back release date four months
Gotta remember that one for future reference.[Disclaimer: JOKING! Heh heh! Ehh.]
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Hmm.
So, a third of the source code was stolen, and a game that was already delayed until somewhere around Christmas is now delayed until april 2004?
Is nobody's BS filter going off here?
Any company this large has all kinds of backups. Any company this large that can be set back four months by a 'loss' of one-third of the source code, which at worst should be one day's loss of work (to the most recent backup) is asking for trouble.
We'll get complicated techincal and/or BS explanations for it, but in the end, they don't want to look like a bunch of losers for having to push their game out another few months.
Look at Thief 3. That was supposed to come out last fall, and it's now not due till next year sometime.
The 'terrorist' scares we're so used to now and the propaganda we're used to hearing might make this kind of excuse seem probable to most- I don't buy it. Bunk economy, pipe-dream graphics performance, why not push it out to next fall? Shall we start a betting pool?
From the article:
"Half-Life II" stars Gordon Freeman, a scientist battling aliens from the planet Xen in a mysterious European locale known only as City 17.
Surely this isn't the same Xen that gave us multiple virtual machines running on a single x86 chip? Would be quite funny if it was though. Imagine a first person shooter in which you kill multiple Linux distributions from all running at the same time on a single chip. Wonder if Billy Boy would be the first buyer?
/<en
The only reason a person would rewrite code, is if the code lost was part of the networking subsystem(which would cause lotso cheats to be created).
Erhm... according to this article the code stolen was mostly related to the multiplayer aspect. Nice theory though
having to rewrite the part that was lost
;)
You do know that when people say "stolen" now they just mean "illegally copied". Valve still has all the code.
And just for clarification, the "part that was lost" is the entire source tree for Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Steam, and all the dev-tools/utilities (map editor, 3dsmax plugins, etc). Which would probably take them another 5 years to rewrite if they chose to take that route.
Or TO them. Relax.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Just imagine what would happen if the same thing happened within Redmond and someone stole the source code to say, Office.
Maybe that would make MSFT give notice and finally make a true effort of fixing the problems within their software products.
How fabulous would it be for us if those funky Office file formats were exposed because someone stole the source code through an Outlook exploit. Forget those cream pies, this is the kind of egg in your face humiliation that MSFT needs in order to be serious.
Could it be...
Valve knew the code would not be ready for a holiday release and rather than suffer the humiliation of another delay, they engineered the "leak" and used it as an excuse for another four months of development.
That way they get public support behind them without having to answer all the tough questions regarding missed timelines.
Just something to chew on until April.
>>How many from scratch, free, quality games do you see?
>Bzflag, frozen-bubble, etc. There are some good games that are GPL'd.
I'm not deriding these games in any way - in fact, they're both superb.. I've wasted many a night playing BzFlag.. but it's no Half Life 2 or Doom 3, is it?
There are many superb freeware/shareware/open source games out there, but when did you last see an amature game with the same quality as a commercial title? (I mean, not just gameplay wise, but graphics, sound, engine, etc)
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
chat log of myg0t member talking about hacking valve and stealing the code
http://gtwy.hl2arena.com/big_log.txt
and an email myg0t "recieved" that was sent internally at valve
remember, valve was hacked using an outlook virus and gabe talked about them knowing people where in his email
http://www.myg0t.com/ChrisNewcombe-PR.txt
Next you will tell me that XP is so full of holes because someone "stole" it's source code before M$ sold it to China and the former KGB. That's almost as good as them swearing that revealing the source code to Windoze would be a national security disaster. Give me a break, will you?
Warez only needs to hack a binary copy.
Cheats only need to watch their traffic.
None of this makes a difference if the system is well made to begin with. This is why OpenSSH is a secure system despite open publication of it's source code.
This is just more anti-open and anti-free FUD. Shame on VU for using Outlook and M$ for anything they wanted to keep to themselves. Shame on them for blaming software and the philosophy behind it for their own failures and shame on them for not being able to get their shit together. ID games rules, VU drools under Bill Gates thumb.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A friend of mine is currently about 4 months from completion of a 3d game that vaguely resembles Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights. All he needs(pretty muich, anyways) is a graphics engine that isn't proprietary; he's too busy to write a graphics engine. That, and he doesn't know how. I'm already helping him with the levels. In conslusion, if a freind of mine can write a good 3d game, imagine what a dedicated group of people can do.
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
I snagged this from the IRC chat the night that the story broke on /.
From: Chris Newcombe
Subject: Potential PR issue: I just got suckered by a social engineering a ttack
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003
Boy do I feel like an ass...
I hope I did the right thing damage-control wise (I asked him politely
not to publish/share any of this, and he agreed).
The Friends session below started 20 seconds after I approved
'lombardi@valvesoftware.com' as a friend, so I assumed it was Doug.
When you see the subject the irony will kill you (or me, more likely).
> Doug says:
> hello mate
> chris says:
> Hi
> Doug says:
> http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=& threadid=10021 Any
thoughts on that? :) I can't see to get a response from anyone at the
moment
> chris says:
> That happened to gabe - someone created an account in his name when we
reset the database. I had to reset the account password so Gabe could
use it.
> chris says:
> We had planned (and started work) on an email verification system but
it was one of the features that Rick cut when Muru left.
> chris says:
> I certainly agree that the downside is horrendous -- most of the email
addresses in our database are useless or obscene or both.
> Doug says:
> Do you know if this will be sorted in the future?
> chris says:
> We do plan to address this later, but I wouldn't hold your breath.
Right now the crippling problem is lack of bandwidth. I've been causing
an (unpopular) stir on that, saying that we should add peer-to-peer now
not later (as we had planned). Gabe seems to agree and wants to see an
immediate plan to do that. It's a huge amount of work and will occupy
the team for a long time -- IMO we _really_ need it for HL-2 launch to
succeed on Steam.
> Doug says:
> So is Steam one of the major reasons Half-Life 2 was delayed? Also
will we be seeing peer-to-peer in the future?
Obviously I got totally suspicious right here. So I sent Doug an email
with the exchange so far, asking to confirm if it was him. Then VPN and
wemail died _right_ after I sent the email, so I couldn't check for a
response (I just found I got an out-of-office auto-reply).
So, unable to check email and fearing the worst...
chris says:
Did you get my email?
Doug says:
Nope
Doug says:
try again at munro@halflife2.net please?
[me: Aaaarrrrgghhhhh! Oh Nooooooooooooooooooooo!]
Doug says:
something meant to be coming through?
Doug says:
Come on Chris you can't leave me like this :)
chris says:
OK, so I realize that you are not actually Doug. Nice stunt :) I'm
asking you to _not_ share the comments which I made here in good faith
(believing that you were Doug). They are matters internal to Valve. I
think you've proved your point very nicely, and I'd appreciate your help
with this.
Doug says:
ah damn
Doug says:
all this juicy info and I can't do anything with it ;(
chris says:
You've just succeeded in making an excellent point directly too a Steam
developer -- I hope that would make you happy :)
Doug says:
Sorry I thought you realised I was the thread starter and that Doug
didn't have an account here :[
chris says:
No, I'm simply not allowed to make public comments -- you'll have to
talk to the real Doug Lombardi for that. Obviously I'll be sharing
this with him -- please email him at... wel you know the address :)
Doug says:
Heh so I'll get a very harsh slap if I should publish on the web then?
chris says:
That would not be helpful -- please take it as read that you have made
the point you intended to make. Please don't publish anything from this
exchange.
Doug says:
I had the perfect exclusive then :)
Doug says:
Any chance you could speak to the real Doug or Gabe or someone and get
them to send me some kind of info I can publish?
Doug says:
You sure I can't publish this? :)
chris says:
I'll certainly ask them -- and they'll s
Just tell them to download the source code from SCO's site and compile it themselves. They did a code audit and found that Half Life is really an inferior copy of BSD Games, which they own since they purchased the System V copyrights. Though they are in the process of issuing cease and dissists letters, they still host the source code and are drawing up licensing plans, "just to be safe".
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I'm not sure if this is a torrent day, or a torrent free day. So, I'll disregard tact and post this.
Not to nitpick, but if he doesn't have a graphics engine, how does anything else work?
As for an engine, the source for Quake2 is released. Could he use that?
it's entirely reasonable that this source code leak would delay the release of the game. however, i also think it's simply a good excuse to spend more time on it.
the original Half-Life missed its release-date by a year (gamasutra.com had a nice article on it by Ken Birdwell). they produced one of the best games ever, so the delay was a good thing! i'm excited about HL2 and i for one do not mind waiting another year for it -- if that's what it takes.
finally, i'd like to say that i would be thrilled to have the opportunity to study the source code for valve's engine. i'd prefer to see it legitimately (as with id's GPL releases) of course, but still...
http://www.bittorrentmovies.de/newphp/htmls/d569.h tml#BETA
Yep, I had the same thing happen to me when I was working for a Nuclear Generating station 18 months ago. A porn spam jumped out of the preview pane, launching several full screen instances of M$IE directed at porn sites, while the hard disk spun furiously. Exactly what it did, God and the sender only know. I hit the off switch.
IT was no help at all. They thought I was worried about being fired for browsing porn and opend an investigation into my web browsing habits. The clueless exchange admin remoted into my machine while I was away from my desktop and ran it to completion. She did not have the patience to watch events unfold and disconected. She then had the nerve to tell me that things cant run from the preview pane and tell me I had clicked something. I insisted and made her watch it. Even after seeing it she did not get it. When I asked her if she though that arbitrary code from anywhere on the internet being run on my computer was a bad idea, she told me that it was "a normal part of advertising" and that she got several such spams a day.
It makes sense that crackers would target admin on any windoze network.
Corporate networks that use M$ are so owned it's not even funny. The stupid, arrogant and brainwashed M$ fanboys they have running them have no clue. M$ partners forever, baby yeah! 2003 and eXPensive software will solve your every click and drool need. Tthththpthpththht-tit!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I forgot to mention, he liscensed a proprietary engine for now, but he won't distribute it until a good open-source engine comes out. He wants really good graphics; his target is 4000 polygons in the main char
"73% of quotes on the Internet are made up" -Ben Franklin
Maybe this is a publicity stunt/unity of users appeal/excuse for delaying their game mix.
Trust me. The company is in lockdown as far as the internet goes. This is not made up.
Looks likes VALVe seems to think other wise.
As someone has stated, "it's like VU and Valve has a war between them or somthing."
Lets lynch this menace. String him up boys! This kind of behavior is unacceptable. Even if the filthy maggot didn't steal the code, he helped traffick it. Someone please post this guys physical address, email address, phone number, etc.
Brian
Are you a Candy Addict?
I just checked out the planned release date for Duke Nukem Forever for xbox in Neoseeker: dec 2003
(The date when half life 2 PC was going to be released)
OH crap, I guess now they will have to delay that one too.
Go ahead MOD my day!
More opinions here
Remember the collection to buy out the source from those whom bought NAN..
100K was the figure if i remember right...
thats not exactally pocket change for most of us around here.
I doubt its millions made ( NET $$ ) off some stupid game as well.. id like to see proof of that.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
When a game gets delayed, the distributors are the first to hear about it. Once the distributors know, their customers, or at least their big ones are the second to know. If you had gone to any Gamestop or EB store in the past month and a half and asked what the release date for Half Life 2 was, they would have checked thier computer system and told you right out "It's April 2004." I know, because I work in such a store -- and was quite dissapointed when I checked one day and discovered it had been pushed back.
These dates are not random guesses, I've seen "official" street dates listed as the release dates for games in our computer system while the game companies say "there is no release date". It never fails, 2-3 weeks later, the game company will announce the street date as the date in our computer system thats been there for weeks.
For instance, I remember the release date for Warcraft 3 was pegged exactly in our computer system for about a month before Blizzard officially announced that day as the release day. Meanwhile, the entire month, Blizzard kept insisting publicly that there "was no release date".
In other words, I can tell you this from previous experience: If our computer systems said April 2004 over a month ago (and it did) that was NOT just a guess, that was based on information coming (albeit indirectly) from Valve.
So, long story short, Valve is lying. They had decided on the April 2004 release date long before any source code was made public. This just provides an easy excuse to be late.
...and those who now have it and are looking at it...
Thanks from all of us who were waiting eagerly for this one to come out. We appreciate your contribution of the additional four month wait.
assholes.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
I just noticed that DNF or Duke Nukem Forever can also be seen as Did Not Finish
:)
Fun stuff
rofl
Doesn't seem to be working... timed out.
When people realize that when one slashdot user speaks, he doesn't speak for all slashdot users.
Unless he's the Lorax! He speaks for the geeks!
Or maybe he speaks for something else. Can't remember.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
How can the leak possibly cause a schedule delay? There's no point in delaying the schedule unless they want to do so for other unrelated reasons. And there's no cause for lost revenue unless they delay. It's just another lame excuse they're putting out to draw attention away from whatever their real problems are.
Shesh, has there been any OFFICIAL word from valve regarding the delay, or is all this just a rumor manifesting it way through the news sites as fact? I think I'll take all these rumorous reports with a grain of salt until something more firm is given by the source of the game.
P.S., How the hell does cnn friggin money have the scoop on whether or not there is a playable version of HL2 floating around!?! I think I'll take that with a truckload of salt...
At the time this felt a little ext ream, but I can see the logic in it now.
When you put "pirating" in quotes, I knew your post would be worthless.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Here's the NFO (sans ascii art and special chars to get around the lameness filter):
And yes, testing stuff like Steam will require reimaging machines over and over when they're done doing it. Like I said, if you want the resources of the internet, then keep it on a seperate machine. It's just stupid to have someone get your lives work just because you want to check your email on the same damn machine or work at home. Never take those compromises.
To those who leaked this code:
f**k you.
Sorry, but I've been longing to play this game ever since I saw the E3 demo video.
Well, now it's free, and this is what you get.
I believe crackers should be beheaded in the public square.
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
If you absolutely have to have a connection to the net from the network, why not install a tar pit on the download side?
What I mean is if you try to download something that is 100MB + on a 33.6kbps downpipe, would it not make a sloooow process allowing any network admin time to turn around and say ; "HMMMM what's this?"
Eitheir a thin pipe (14.4 or 33.6) or a verrrrry slow machine would stall such a caper, no?
To catch a rat, put a glue trap!
Just my thought...
According to Half-Life Source Community ;-) ]: that most binaries (although some believe all except setup binaries) are built but the game doesn't run beyond the "Loading..." screen. Apparantly, there are no textures, prefabbed models, maps, and game configuration files to put the icing on the cake. These graphical resources alone should probably account for most of the source's size. At least for those lucky enough to get the incomplete source, they can get a good idea how a premier 3d first-person-shooter is written and maybe have a better idea of what is causing errors in the game when they write modifications.
and Half Life 2 Source Code Resource Page, Gabe Newell and Valve Software reported that the source code stolen wasn't enough to compile a complete game and was only a small amount of the source. They said that even though it compiles, it isn't enough to be usable. This goes along with information from those that have tried building it [I'm not saying whether or not I have tried
Also, word is that Valve will be making modifications to the game so that binaries built from the stolen code will be inoperable with the releases they have delayed. Word is they are also close to finding the identity of the hackers. I wonder if they will sue Microsoft for the security issue in Outlook Express that allowed the hackers to get in. We can only hope.
Volunteer Mozilla developer, RPI Student.
of the male bovine variety.
Maybe I'm just a little too paranoid, but is it possible that Valve allowed an early alpha version of their code to leak so that they'd have an excuse when they didn't ship this game on time?
Sure, they can take advantage of this time to rewrite some things and prevent cheaters from exploiting the available code, but is the money that they'll lose by not releasing on time less than the money they'll lose when cheaters cause people not to buy the game? I don't think so.
I suspect that the game was going to be late anyway and this is just a convienent excuse.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
need to reboot to un write protect the files
/dev/hdxx /dev/hdxx /mountpoint.
wtf? somehow, i'm not convinced. 1) I'd like to know how you turned your system off. 2) the fact that a robust linux system can be distributed on a floppy and yet there's no room on a 40mb hdd for a 21kb binary needed to shutdown? Even if the program was staticly compiled, it shouldn't take any more than 200kb. But I know you couldn't statically link since you were low on space (hence the intended purpose of dynamic linking) and did not have gcc. 3) How did you get apache work without libraries?
Bzzzt! Thanks for playing, mr. troll.
Since you apparently need to restart the system to "un-write protect" the files, how about something quicker:
$root:>umount
$root:>mount -t filesystem
And how does this machine work so "perfectly" if it exhausts all 8megs of RAM for every printjob and boots users off on every print job? And what the hell are you using apache for on a print server?
Businesses (and people in general) are always looking for a fall guy that can be blamed for their own short sightedness, delayed production, lost income, or workers that have been laid off.
"We had to lay off 1,000 people here in Nowheresville, Canada because of the devastating impact of 9/11 on our 'fake dog poop' manufacturing plant."
"The Internet is to blame for lost income in the music industry, not our high prices or poor quality of musicians."
"Video games, television, radio, and books are to blame for poor academic achievement and violence in our schools."
Valve was going to delay it either way, but they would much rather have someone to place the blame on rather than admitting their own shortcomings.
torrent
According to the inquirer (www.theinquirer.net?article=11984), this may be in error:
Reports of Half Life further delay mistaken?
It will ship at Yuletide, it appears
By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 07 October 2003, 19:24
SOURCES CLOSE to Valve Software tell us that despite wires - including us - picking up a Les Echos report that Half Life is delayed, it won't be. And it isn't.
Apparently Valve is close to issuing a statement about all of this - and our sources maintain that it's still going to ship in the "holiday" period - Yuletide to you and me.
What a fascinating tale this is all becoming.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
http://underground.infinity.net.pl/halflife2/
screenshots ahoy.
here.
How it works is detailed here.
I'm suprised if this isn't already present in the game. The games I play (Enemy Territory and America's Army) have been a pleasure to play compared to back when cheats where prevalent (in America's Army at least).
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
Maybe this is a naive question, but I don't understand why the theft of some of the source code forces them to rewrite the game. Was the game going to be late anyway and this is just a handy excuse? Or am I just clueless?
Being pretty frustrated and seeing how many people feel similarly, I wonder if there's anything we can do to help. Perhaps Valve would let those who have the code patch up any of the faults they find in the less harmful parts. Of course this would be extremely hard to organize. The primary goal is that I wish I could contribute somehow. Merely sending Valve money won't really do much and I can't exactly join them (I wouldn't be much help anyway). Any thoughts?
Look it's a joke about my sig IN MY SIG! LOL!
I already bought a brand new radeo 9800 pro 128 mb just to play hl2 and my brother just dropped almost $1k on a new system mostly for playing hl2... There are also quite a few people who have pre-orders both for the game and for the bundles w/ the video cards. I'm sure I'm not alone here and hell maybe they figure it's good for them cause now they have some of the pressure off to amke the game work better w/ existing cards while ATI/NVidia get some breathing room to plot and scheme and hold off on releasing hteir next line until the games that can actually use them are available... everyone in the industry wins from this situation because it's a given that the game will go platinum as soon as it touches the stoes regardless of any delays and thes ame came be said for Doom3.. the only people who lose are We the consumers; once again left holding the empty bag of hope...
I see people arguing back and forth about separate networks and security holes, but how about the fact that they said 1/3 of the code was stolen. So do they mean it as in taken, gone, or deleted? So where is the back-up to the code? Don't tell me these geniuses actually trusted their entire and only copy of the code that was worth millions of dollars, without a single DAILY back up somewhere separate. The whole projetct could have been backed up on a daily basis on less than $2 worth of optical media and put in a safe. Sounds kind of weird to me that they wouldn't do something like that.
WHAT THE FUCK, you cock-smoking little bitches! I'm gonna find where you live and sodomize each of you with a fucking broken JOYSTICK, you little fuckfaces! I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD!!
- http://pakman.sytes.net/
Who would do such a thing and ruin such a perfect game release... it's like kicking a dog and driving to Alaska and never paying for gas at self-serve's and clubbing a baby seal... I for one, will buy a clean legal valve bred and released official copy of half life 2 no matter what. I hope the leaker is found and cast out from society.. he types like a little kid with gun. I think I'll hate this guy more then the RIAA if he goes on... THE RIAA!