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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.
It was Myg0t that got it, and Hitman, an ex-member of Myg0t, that released it.
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
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.
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
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
Since VU is operating at a substantial lost, they are prime to be saved by Bill Gate's wallet. Since Half Life2 [neoseeker.com] and Xbox2 [arstechnica.com] 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!"
One big problem:
VU doesn't own Valve. VU owns Sierra, and Sierra is the publisher for Half-Life (and currently for HL2), but Valve owns Half-Life 2 and is self-funded. Gabe Newell formed Valve with his own money (gotten from being a well-payed Microsoft employee) and funded Half-Life without Sierra's (or VU) help. This is why Valve was able to delay Half-Life for a year in the first place. This is why Valve can push back HL2 without VU forcing it out when VU is operating at a loss. VU has no say in when the game is released unless their own QA finds problems with the final code and sends it back to Valve for more work (in other words, Sierra can delay HL2, but they can't force it to be released early).
Microsoft could probably buy Valve if they wanted HL2 bad enough, but I think it would be more than it's worth, since Valve is privately owned, self-funded, and making money hand over fist off the best-selling FPS of all time.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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.)