Half-Life 2 Preloading from Steam

Nos. writes "For those of us using Valve Software's Steam platform, we can now begin 'preloading' Half-Life 2. The article explains that this will download an encrypted version of the game that you can unlock when you purchase it. They only say that purchase options will be available soon."

Comments

Bah, Steam

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped playing CS when Valve force-fed their DRM, buggy, memory-intensive heaping pile of poo they call "steam" onto their userbase.

With Doom 3 who needs them!

Already flooded, but.......

[MightyPez]

The download servers are already at max capacity, but I have a little hypothesis. Since Half-Life 2 is such an anticipated game, and since everyone and their cousins will be downloading it, Valve realized this will cost entirely too much in bandwidth, especialy on days like today. To compensate, they set a user/bandwidth limit.

What will happen is this. Currently, Steam acts as a peer to peer hub (remmeber Valve hiring Bram Cohen, Mr. Bit Torrent?). Anyone with a sizeable LAN Cafe will know this because empty chairs with a copy of Steam running kills their bandwidth. Once people have the preload completely downloaded, they will begin uploading it and add more bandwidth to the mix. The more people that have it, the more it becomes available. I get the feeling LAN Cafes get a little more sway in terms of firsties since they generally have better connections than Counter-Strike junkies at home.

Not that getting the pre-load at this point is a necessity. There will be waves of preloads with content. This first one just being some static art that won't be changed, like textures, voices, and some models.

Re:Already flooded, but.......

[asdfghjklqwertyuiop]

If Valve is worth their salt, they'll have to move to limit the information sent to players, giving them only what they should be able to observe and nothing more. Sending only the character positions you can directly observe would be one method, which would destroy wallhacks, but leaves aimbots unscathed. I think the only good way to counter aimbots longterm is to offload rendering to a server, but that's borderline insane. Both of these suggestions mean an increase in lag, but that's what we get for using a system where failures to transmit mean waiting for random milliseconds.

This strategy is frequently discussed w.r.t. cheating, moving more stuff onto the server side, but that's impractical for performance reasons. Performance (network in particular) is pretty important in games.

When I first started playing the Steam versions of Valve's games, I thought this 'security module' was a big, critical piece of the game's code, and you had to download it all the time because Valve changed it frequently to stay one step ahead of the reverse-engineers and there were many versions in rotation at once. But apparently that's not how it works.

A shame too, that method might actually work. You can't prevent people from reverse engineering code running on their own computer, but reverse engineering takes time. If someone on the other side is releasing new versions faster than they can be reverse engineered, then they've effectively thwarted the reverse engineers. I don't think there will ever be a machine which can prevent a human from reverse engineering itself. But if there's another human constantly changing the machine, working against the reverse engineer, they might succeed. It would just be a question of which human can work faster. I doubt we'll ever see this from a video game company though. That would require they have programmers employed to do this. They'd rather just sell the game and be done with it.

Pre-Releasing DnD Games

[Landaras]

OK, this isn't on Half-Life 2, but it is on the concept of pre-loading / pre-releasing aspects of a game.

One thing I've never understood is why the publishers of highly anticipated role-playing games (I'm thinking Baldur's Gate and NeverWinter Nights here) don't pre-release the character generator.

By the time a specific release date has been set, the character formats should be firmly decided. Allowing players (or potential players!) to pre-create their characters is only going to create buzz and give people a reason to want to put those characters to use. It's a realizable benefit for the publisher without a significant financial cost.

But alas, I have never seen this happen.

- Neil Wehneman

Re:Hrmmn

[eliza_effect]

Incidentally, I think there's a good chance that they won't knock off a few bucks for an online purchase. AFAIK the boxing/duping/printing outlay is done by the publisher and in the end is removed from the profits of the studio. I think Valve may see this as a very good way to make back what the publisher takes. I remeber Sierra not being to happy when plans for Steam were announced, and now it's obvious why.

Re:QCrack.exe

[Xepo]

I dunno what everyone's worried about. I mean, it says encryption...not like, product key and verification crap. If Valve was actually worried about it, then they would have put some 128-bit, maybe even 256-bit single-key encryption in there, stuff which would never feasibly be broken. Now of course, that assumes the scheme only has one working key, which if they did do it like a product key thing, wouldn't work.

But, at least, if I was valve...encrypt a seperate copy for each player, with an id to identify which key valve needs to give that player when they buy the game. ::shrug:: Practically unbreakable. I don't know if that's feasible under steam either, but my point is that all it takes is some easily found strong encryption (gnupg stuff, even) to make this practically uncrackable until the game is released.

steam = SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason Valve is getting away with this steam crap is because of Counter-Strike. They've made it so you MUST download Steam in order to play CS because they shutdown WON last month. Any other game in the world and the gamers would have said "fuck you Valve", but becuause it's CS we have to put up with it.

I don't want to run your crappy Stream POS in the background all the time. I don't want to be required to play the newest version all the time. I want to be able to play the game I BOUGHT on a LAN without authenticating over the net. I JUST WANT TO PLAY THE GODDAMN GAME I BOUGHT. But Valve can't let me do that, they have to push their crap on me. Valve, you can suck my dick you bitches.

Re:Don't bother trying

[NotAnotherReboot]

I wouldn't exactly call it a slashdotting.

If you look at their status page,
http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.h tml
you will see that they have plenty of bandwidth available. The 'available' bandwidth is actually pretty accurate from what I've seen. They can pump out more than they're doing right now.

It asked you to try again long before it came onto slashdot.

They are intentionally throttling the number of downloaders for it because there is no great rush to make sure everyone has it right now (it won't be coming out for a few weeks at the very least, many retailers are speculating Nov. 1st, but I wouldn't hold much weight in their dates). They are throttling them because they don't want to degrade the quality of service for games already released on Steam (HL series of games).

Try again in a few days, and you'll be no worse off.

Re:eh, this could be bad for Valve

[Lord Kano]

Two words

"Steam Authentication"

I misplaced my Half-Life CD case when I needed to freshly install WinXP. I used a key gen to get the game to work. WON's server wouldn't authenticate my bogus key. I was left not playing for about two weeks when I finally found my CD case and put in a legit serial number.

I don't think that Valve is going to use a more lax authentication regimen for HL-2, especially after the "source theft" that happened last year.

LK

Re:More Valve Bulls***

[MedHead]

Actually, they have managed to use an engine that is easily modified, and let the users keep the game alive. If it wasn't for the user interest, Valve would have dropped the game long ago.

Valve is far far far from intelligent. The WON patches, source code leak, a release date that is overdue one year, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, content servers that authenticate, run the main website, and deliver content, and the Half-Life 2 plot leak (rumor) all point toward a company that has trouble keeping both of its brain cells in working order. It's far from a smart company. It's a very, very, very lucky company, who was fortunate enough to hit a goldmine of a game. A goldmine only kept alive with the mods that users produce.

Re:Hrmmn

[abandonment]

valve had a 50/50 deal with sierra for distribution of half-life 1, and while i'm sure that they have come up with some kind of deal about what expenses are deducted from the gross before this split, i highly doubt that valve is going to offer the game for any cheaper than the game is in stores.

couple of reasons for this:

1) sierra probably forced them to keep the price similar enough so that it's worthwhile for them to sell the game at retail.

2) half-life1 continues to sell for near-full price (30+$ here in canada) almost 6 years after it was released. i don't consider bundling 2 mods that valve didn't have to pay for development (and that can be downloaded for free) exactly worthwhile of a full-priced game...

whether gamers fall for it (ie buy the game online for the same price as retail) remains to be seen.

i personally think this is the stupidest thing that valve could ever do - how long will it be before their 'encryption' is hacked and hl2 becomes a pirate version (potentially) long before retail.

as well, why the HELL would anyone download a game that they can't play? steam is brutal in it's management of system resources and bandwidth as it is, let alone having it download endless games that you can't play...

Re:Boo friggin yah!

[thrash242]

How do you know your CD and Key will be around next year? If Steam is still running you're covered for as long as Steam is running.

Uh, I don't know about you, but my CDs don't go disappearing too terribly often. Things like networks, servers, companies, etc do. You answered your own question: "as long as Steam is running". I'd rather go with "as long as a CD exists", which is probably a lot longer, barring my house burning down, being subjected to a nuclear blast, or being broken into by a particularly thorough burlar.

And frankly, I trust Steam to be running much longer than I could keep a CD in good shape and not lose the key.

Sorry, but that sounds like your problem. Keep it in the case and don't use it as a frisbee or coaster (AOL CDs excepted), and you should be fine. I have CDs (both audio and data) that are over 10 years old that are in very good if not mint condition. It's not hard.

It's silliness to trust whatever this Steam thing is to continue rather than trust physical media. If it does, great, if not, you have a CD.

Re:I actually like Steam.

[frostbane]

Favorites list (don't remember if original CS allowed this. I used to write down the IP of a good server to play there)

Using Half-Life's in-game server management did allow you to toggle a server as a favorite and even allowed you to browse favorites only. The only problem was that it seemed buggy as hell and would frequently "forget" your favorites from another session (which can really piss you off), but it was there.

With Steam, all that business is managed automatically. It's heaven. As for buggy or memory intensive, I encountered one bug so far (input lag playing havoc with my keyboard) and that lasted only a few days.

Steam had way to many problems on release. It was no where near ready for release and shouldn't have been implemented. I didn't use steam for a long time (pissed off at Valve for buying out (ruining) HL mods), but I know plenty of CS players who were left without playing their precious game for days at a time because problems with content delivery and detection. If you know some young CS players, you know it can be more addiction than heroin for them. It pissed the shit out of them. I can remember hearing, "Steam sucks" every five minutes. At the moment Steam seems to have settled down and most of the bugs are worked out, but there are still problems. A month (or two) ago I was locked out for a week because Steam forgot to remove/update a file. While the system might seem to a nice way to update a game I still prefer just downloading updates off mirrors like the old days. Unfortunately as more games go to Steam (especially since Valve took down WON), less and less use their own sites and mirrors for downloading their mods.

Can you say "Paper launch"?

[twbecker]

So let me get this straight: Valve is allowing you to grace your hard drive with a huge pile of useless encrypted bits that will lay there undisturbed until the still unknown release date of HL2, at which point you'll have to download still more shit (This isn't the whole game they're preloading), or just go buy the game on CD. What a joke. This sounds like just a big paper launch to combat the notion that HL2 is vaporware.

Re:Boo friggin yah!

[WNight]

Not really. Society is paying to maintain your copyright, if you don't keep providing the work for us we're going to assume you no longer need us to enforce copyright... Seems like it'd be perfectly fair to me.