Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's been pre-Slashdotted. You get an error saying their servers are already too busy doing preloads and to try again in a few hours. If you want to see the in-steam announcement though, go here.
"Yup!"
"Boy, I can't wait til next year when we can play it"
I felt my heart jump, just from the word soon. A tear came to my eye too, but that's because my eyes hurt from staring at a monitor too long.
RArr!
I wonder how long it will be till hackers find away to spoof half life 2's pre-loading authenticiation and users can play hl2 without actually buying it.
Now if i could only find that damn ati coupon thing, *looks at desk*, shakes head.
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!
Interesting...does anybody here remember the a vaguely-similar route taken with id for the Quake shareware release? An encypted version of that game (and essentially every past Id game) was on the shareware CD, and could be unlocked when purchased. And then along came QCrack.
Valve's distribution idea is interesting, but I hope for their sake that the security's very strong, requiring all sorts of authorizations and whatnots. If not, Doom III's slightly-premature leaking to the internet might seem like a far more ideal scenario than a Valve-aided distribution of compromised content.
So this will be the cause of the big internet blackout, not cyber-terrorist but gamers downloading HL2. :-D
I knew it when Valve delayed the preload.
I just got it to start pre-loading despite failing during earlier attempts. I can't wait to start not playing it.
...one, zero: http://www.filerush.com/torrents/Half-Life%202%20P reload%20Cache.torrent
Word up dude. Valve makes one game 6 years ago, and now is somehow living (leeching) on the mod community for more content to their aging quake 1 engine. Fuck them, fuck them up their stupid asses.
Last year Bittorrent's creator Brahm Cohen was hired by Valve to improve Steam's content distribution system.
Also in terms of overloading servers, slashdot has nothing over the hordes of counter-strike players.
Valve should get the war for The Game Company That Managed To Torture Its Fans By Having Code Stolen, More Release Dates Than Jerry Seinfeld Had GirlFriends, Leaked The Plot, And Gave You A Game You Could Download But Not Play Until They Let You Award. Wonder what the award would look like...probaly a figure of Duke Nukem.
Already on it.
I got the game to boot using a kernel debugger and a little trial and error. SoftICE revealed the installer makes a call to something in _vis.dll, which in turn checks to see if hl2_acf.nfo exists within the steam install directory.
Decompiled _vis.dll with DisC, replaced the function call to a new function that always returns true. Recompiled _vis with Visual C++, nogo, then tried with Borland and the game booted.
Posting a crack tonight.
M
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Always read sigs for important words like syyyyke.
I call shenanigans. DisC was specifically written for taking apart Turbo C dos executables. If you were genuinely following a trace like this, you would have almost certainly just intercepted the outgoing call to "_vis.dll" and loaded the truth value inline - not like you wouldn't have had enough room to work in.
This should be modded "Funny" since the poster makes it clear this is a joke by his usage of "syke" in his signature. Being syked is the 80's equivalent of the aughts being punk'd.
-AC
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.
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.