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Hellgate London Code Stolen?
The Gamers With Jobs Press Pass is reporting on a rumour that the code for Hellgate:London has been stolen. 'Reliable sources' indicate that Flagship Studios' servers have been taken down (and hopefully secured) in the wake of the incident. From the article: "My source indicates that the virtual break-in was conducted by a Chinese individual who is currently attempting to sell the code from a personal website. For those of you who don't know, Hellgate: London is the first project by ex-Blizzard developer Bill Roper and his new studio, the game has been at the last two E3's and looks to be shaping up very nicely."
I hope they get it back, I was looking forward to that game.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
If ((CodeLate==TRUE) && hacker.holding( yourcode ))
{
Panic();
}
liqbase
The code is probably no where near finished so whats the point of stealing it other than to piss people off? Sure it might help if someone wants to make their own games, but wouldn't it be obvious to the original author if someone did this and if a major Game mob did this they would have their pants sued off
Admiral Trigger Happy
So... The source code for an FPS that isn't even close enough to release to set a release date was stolen.
Why not just download Quake's source and be done?? An engine with no data is nearly useless in today's FPS scene. The only possible use it could have would be to crack the game before it even comes out, but as it is so unfinished, even that is pointless.
"Ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking."
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
... it's not stealing, it's copyright infringement!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
There are a lot of bad open source games out there that aren't worthy of being stolen. Besides, if he could just download the code there'd be no glory in it.
I thought Don't Connect Your Development Enviroment To The Internet was in game design 101 since Half-life 2?
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
You'd "take the risk" if you hired some incompetent IT guy to maintain your servers, and didn't police it carefully. There are a lot of good reasons that not every box in your shop should be able to hit the Internet. And that the ones that do are well maintained and secured in some real fashion.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I fear a theft will cause a huge release delay. The game is slated to have a major multiplayer aspect with massively multiplayer staging areas and instanced group mission areas. If the code was stolen there is a significant risk of cheaters ruining the game for everyone. To be fair, this has happened in pretty much every Bill Roper game since he makes earning stats so tantilizing, but in the past it was (presumably) done without access to the source.
The big variables here are whether games will be served by the company or by players, what the pricing scheme will be (thus the urgency to fix the game), and, of course, how complete the stolen code was. For reference, the code to every single id Software game was leaked before release, and those games did just fine technically and commercially. No one could reuse stolen code commercially without getting caught, and the publisher could instate whatever crazy engine licensing agreement they want in that case.
Regardless, I adore Roper's games and I can't wait for the release of Hellgate: London. I hope I don't have to wait much longer to play it!
When it happened to Valve with Half Life 2 the attack was pretty well executed. The code was never put on a live server but it got stolen just the same.
Gabe Newell noticed one day that his computer was acting slowly. He scanned for viruses but found nothing so he formatted and reinstalled. A few days later an admin noticed that someone had accessed Gabe's email, and further investigation revealed that the code tree had been accessed and large portions had been copied. The attacker somehow got a keylogger and backdoor tunnel installed on Valve's internal machines which provided a relay to the internal-only servers.
You don't have to do anything activily to have copyrights. It's something you attain when you produce it, not by filling in an application. applications (not computer) are for trademarks and patents.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
WTH, flame bait? For pointing out the idiocy of the headline? I figured this post would get nailed as redundant for preaching to the choir if anything, but flame bait?!?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Thanks for the correction, I know I have heard that before, but it completely slipped my mind when I was posting.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Nowadays Slashdot's been taken over by the "ZOMG /. SUCKS STOP TEH EVIL PIRATE LINUX FREAK GROUPTHINK!!!11!1!!!one!!!" crowd.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
"We wouldn't have this problem! People wouldn't steal, they could just download the code."
Well, I guess you've got a point. I mean, if murder was made legal, crime would go down.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"Steal" is not a legal term, while "theft" is. The two aren't aliases of each other. "To steal" is an everyday English term that happens to largely include the legal definition of "theft", but also anything else that it comes under it in the public usage. It's perfectly reasonable to refer to the unlawful breaking and entering of a computer system and the copying of secret source code as "stealing" it.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Who even assumes this is true. This is a big news story for a game most people would ignore.
PR 101.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Give away the engine, sell content.
Sometimes the engine is the most important part of the content. It can be the result of untold thousands of hours of work, and recouping that investment is essential - because if you can't, then you can't risk employing all of those people to build it in the first place.
If made-by-volunteers/hobbyists engines were even close to as viable as those that get millions of dollars of focused investment, we'd see them out there being better than the professionally built ones. But we don't, because they're not. There is no free lunch, and there especially is no free high-end rendering engine, physics engine, driver integration, etc. Once a company is comfortable that their risk and investment has paid off, they might very well consider getting more people into their camp by making their now-established system more open or freely licensable... but they've got to pay the bills, and enabling other (competing) content developers to use a newly built (and paid for) engine for free just doesn't path the math test.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Gabe Newell used this excuse when Half-Life 2 slipped behind schedule
Put down the tinfoil-covered keyboard/mouse, and step away.
Gabe got his desktop hacked. Simple (and dumb) as that. But when you're not planning on giving away your expensively paid-for code to your competition, you don't really think of it as an OSS project - so comparing the two is completely pointless, and you pretending there were no vulnerabilities to sweat under the circumstances just shows how ignorant you are.
Speaking of which, why do you care? You obviously have great contempt for Valve, and wouldn't pay for their products, so why do you care whether they're later than they'd like (or why they are) in delivering their own product? Delivering it is how they repay their investors and write paychecks to their staff - and if you dislike the company so much, you should be pleased that they had a harder time generating the game's revenue than they would have preferred.
Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The sad thing is, so many companies have developed so many engines, all starting from scratch. A lot of redundant effort has been wasted here. This is an area where open source should be doing well, you'd expect an open-source engine with the quality of last-generation's commercial engine, but for some reason this just hasn't happened.
Kudos to ID for open-sourcing the Quake and Quake 2 engines, but of course those were of commercial origin. Where's the home-grown open source engine that tops the Quake 2 engine? Anyone?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
maybe he's a troll but it's so true. Turn on a ssh server and monitor your /var/log/secure over a weeks time and perform a whois on the attackers. Also install snort and check the logs for that. It's amazing what a large percentage of the attacks come from china, japan, and poland.
Not exactly open source... but have you looked at the Torque Engine, from GarageGames.com? Commercial engine, for $100.
Bill Roper and the crew now working at Flagship Studios are the same people who brought us Diablo, Diablo II, D2:LoD, Starcraft, and Battle.net.
Diablo, which was released January of 1997, debuted at number one in the United States. The game has sold in excess of 2.5 million copies worldwide and was honored as the number-one selling computer role-playing game in 1997 as well as being named Game of the Year by Computer Gaming World.
In July of 2000, Diablo II was announced as being the fastest selling computer game in history. It dominated PC game charts with sales of over 4 million copies worldwide. The game has also been awarded several accolades including Computer Game of the Year, Computer Role Playing Game of the Year and Game of the Year for 2001 by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences.
Blizzard announced in August of 2001 that Diablo II: Lord of Destruction had surpassed 1 million units sold worldwide, with Over two million units of the game having been shipped to retail. It was the fastest selling expansion set in PC game history. In its first week alone, the game captured a record 17.7% percent of total U.S. PC game market share
StarCraft was released in March of 1998. It was the company's third number-one selling game and was named the best-selling game of 1998 by PC Data.
Yeah, I'm sure their next project will tank.
TPJ - Founder, The Amazon Basin
The sad thing is, so many companies have developed so many engines, all starting from scratch. A lot of redundant effort has been wasted here. This is an area where open source should be doing well, you'd expect an open-source engine with the quality of last-generation's commercial engine, but for some reason this just hasn't happened.
You're kidding, right? If there's one thing that OSS is famous for it's reinventing the wheel, sometimes many times over.
In any case, it hasn't happened because writing engines (and content), even one generation behind, require massive amounts of time and energy. Take a look at the Quake and Quake2 engine codes. Now think about how much time went into research *before* that code was complete, how much time it took to write and debug the code, and how much time it took to QA all of it. They were massive undertakings that required specialized knowledge in physics, graphics, and gameplay in order to create. A wordprocessor, in contrast, would seem to be fairly simple in comparison.
Another thing that may be interesting is how much "beta" debugging will happen with games as opposed to tools in OSS. Where tools are needed and people who need to use them will report issues in the hopes they get fixed, how many people will do the same for games? I'm betting that there will be more people who download a game, get an error, and just delete it for now, maybe coming back in a few months for a look to see if the bug(s) that were found before are then gone.
MMO's often get around this by doing all the computing on the servers and making the graphical view irrelevant. It don't matter if you can view the enemy, it matters if the server allows you to target the enemy. Since few MMO's are about tactics like hiding (you can usually target anything in a certain radius around you no matter how hidden they are by terrain).
In a FPS this does not work. Unless you move all the computing to the server and on this central server determine what the player can't or can't see in an absolute fashion then you can cheat.
Cheat by making the world simpler to intertrept. Image a FPS were a player has 360 vision, high contrast world, a popup over enemies telling you there stats (health, weapon) vs a normal player. Would that be cheating?
It ain't a bug and there is nothing that many eyes can solve.
The problem is that a FPS game will send more data to a client then the client should b able to see. Opensource by definition can't deal with this and it is the reason you can not ever have truly opensource DRM. (at least not in the ways it exist now)
Your mistake it is simple. You think cheaters rely on bugs. Yes they often do but the most constant threat is people playing with a different client seeing more then they should be able too. Good luck suprising someone with 360 degree x-ray vision.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Even your comments are copyrighted. There *are* ways to register your copyright of a given piece of content, but they exist solely to help you *prove* that you produced it originally, and carry no weight other than that.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Not exactly. While I have found no loops in my family tree, it was my brother who is the more traditional conservative hick/redneck. Myself, I am more of the liberal goth type with a healthy balance of pessimism and hope.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Speaking as a game developer, I must say that there is almost no fear of giving away your expensively paid-for code to your competition . Why? Because it's useless to others. Most games I have worked on were without documentation, without a sane amount of comments - and having looked at the hl-2 leaked code, no difference there - a huge mess.
What can you steal?
-> You can't steal the technology ( because it's unreleased and probably buggy, written in haste and therefore uncomprehensible ) - it would be faster to implement the technology yourself.
-> You can't just use it and make your own game around it. Even a script-kiddie could find out that you used a "popular" engine by comparing strings in the executable/dlls.
-> You can't steal the assets ( batteries not included )
So you stole yourself some worthless pile of source-code. Wow. Beats me. I'ld place a bet that this "source-leaking" is a PR gig of some sort.
Why was this modded troll? Ask any sysop, or anyone who runs a server. My SSH logs were packed with root attempts from Asian subnets, until I blocked the entire region. Hack attempts dropped to almost nothing.
FYI: It's spelled "fuck", not "fudge".
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
I suppose you didn't read my post.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe Open Frag? Haven't tried it initially because there's no Mac version and I'm still playing with my new MacBook. :)