Half-Life 2 Code Stolen

Toshira · Post by **Toshira** » October 7, 2003, 12:57 pm

Reason for the delay?

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technol ... acked.html

vn_Tanc · Post by **vn_Tanc** » October 7, 2003, 1:47 pm

The US release hasn't been delayed AFAIK only the rest of the world.

So I'm calling bullshit. They were going to slip past xmas trying to ship everywhere and now they have a handy excuse for letting it slip without looking like twats.
So they get the US holiday revenues, stiff the rest of the world but expect us to be mollified by their tale of woe. Pah I say!

noel · Post by **noel** » October 7, 2003, 2:46 pm

Delayed here too, mate. April 2004.

Another article here:
http://news.com.com/2100-7349_3-5087698 ... g=nefd_top

On the one hand, I feel bad for Valve. Theft of any kind sucks, but theft of intellectual property in the information age can absolutely kill you.

On the other hand. Their network admin staff should be shot and killed. Whomever hacked them had ridiculous amounts of access, and a good security guy would never have let this sort of thing happen. It's like my sig says.

Skogen · Post by **Skogen** » October 7, 2003, 4:43 pm

Call of Duty will be out next month. No worries )

noel · Post by **noel** » October 7, 2003, 4:57 pm

Call of duty will be a game to check out, but it will not hold a candle to HL2.

I wonder how many times they're going to repackage Medal of Honor and have me kill ze Germans.

Fattyfat · Post by **Fattyfat** » October 7, 2003, 5:27 pm

backdoor trojans r0x

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » October 7, 2003, 5:44 pm

Aranuil wrote: On the other hand. Their network admin staff should be shot and killed. Whomever hacked them had ridiculous amounts of access, and a good security guy would never have let this sort of thing happen. It's like my sig says.

Have you ever worked network security?

Try being a contractor to secure a government network that you're not allowed to look at, from either side.

Try securing a network with these features:
- there are laptops which connect to multiple domains and teh intarnet via an ISP.
- the boss insists on having administrator access on his machine because he installs every piece of shareware crap that arrives in his inbox, and has a tendancy to moan at you because the machine is unstable (and I shit you not, I once saw more than 20 individual shareware titles in add/remove programs list)
- same boss runs *every* attachment sent to him, regardless or general or specific warnings.
- access on *every* outgoing port is required so that other vendors games, messenging services, IRC chats, streaming media, anything can be accessed, from any desktop.
- the staff, who also require and are granted local admin rights, regularly disable their virus scanning software because it slows compile times to a crawl.

In short, you can't, it's completely impossible. Best you can do is throw up a firewall and hope that the trojan isn't capable of one-way instruction. I would bet my left testical that most/all of the above applies to Valve, it's common practice, especially in an industry as full of techies and egos as the games industry.

Skogen · Post by **Skogen** » October 7, 2003, 6:08 pm

Aranuil wrote:Call of duty will be a game to check out, but it will not hold a candle to HL2.

I wonder how many times they're going to repackage Medal of Honor and have me kill ze Germans.

bleah fuck Half-Life 2. All I have seen on it so far is some pretty graphics. Pretty graphics will never gloss over gameplay!

and why is a WWII 3d shooter a re-packaged Medal of Honor...based on a demo?

Sartori · Post by **Sartori** » October 7, 2003, 10:34 pm

Wow really? I thought the gameplay looked impressive. It looks way better than the first one, and that was a great game in itself for it's day. Did you actually watch any of the gameplay or just the engine demo?

Janx · Post by **Janx** » October 8, 2003, 12:57 am

Yeah I agree, I think they have the gameplay to back it up as well.

noel · Post by **noel** » October 8, 2003, 1:42 am

Yes as a matter of fact, I work with network security every day. That amount of source code does not just walk out of your network without you noticing it. I'm not saying the job isn't hard, but they were so compromised it wasn't even funny. I never meant to give the impression that it wasn't difficult. Additionally, security for Valve would be nowhere near as complex as security for a Gov. installation.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » October 8, 2003, 2:00 am

The examples of how hard it can be to be allowed to implement security in a games company were all from real world, personal experience.. and if the data transfer was done overnight...

Scary part I thought was the post from the Valve guy said he was *obviously* compromised and yet he didn't shut down the net link until it could be tracked down... that's not network admin's fault, that's just retarded!

Sionistic · Post by **Sionistic** » October 8, 2003, 12:45 pm

I saw HL2 gameplay from Steam (back when i was still on cable

) and it looked VERY nice. Environments were very interactive and the water effects looked really nice. I hope you can scale the game down a lot or my pc wont have a hope of running it.
ps. bugs rock!

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » October 9, 2003, 2:33 pm

Sionistic wrote:I saw HL2 gameplay from Steam (back when i was still on cable ) and it looked VERY nice. Environments were very interactive and the water effects looked really nice. I hope you can scale the game down a lot or my pc wont have a hope of running it.
ps. bugs rock!

The HL2 beta has been running on old G4 4200 cards with 1.6GHz CPUs. It may not look as nice as the higher and cards but it will run.

I checked it out last night some and experimented myself in the same zones you see in the 600mb HL2 movie from E3. The game rocks. The physics are incredible. I was running on 3.2GHz, ATI 9700 Pro, 1 GB Memory.

AI is kinda cool.

I shot one of my in-game co-workers in the face. He was all bloody and ran away cowardly but came back saying he was injured and needed medical attention. I then blew open his chest with a shotgun blast. He didn't say anything after that

The gravity gun is amazing. Almost everything is interractive. You can use the gun to grab ahold of items and depending on their weight, move them fast/slow or higher. You can stack things. The second function of the gravity gun is welding. You target two items and mark an area with a red blob, then use the gravity gun to move the two items together. The red marks will weld themselves together.

The whole environment is far better than anything you've seen before. The water is mentioned a lot but the fire effect is also extremely realistic. It's jaw dropping stuff from the character models, physics, textures, AI, vehicles, sounds (although Doom3 wins for creepy sounds), weapon animations, etc.

Details such as NPC eyes following and tracking your movements is much more detailed and realistic than past games.

I drove around for awhile on the beach in a dune buggy with a laser gun on a turret in the front blasting bugs until I rolled the buggy : ), my next attempt I got the tire stuck in part of the pier (not a bug, my bad driving). Pulling out a machine gun, the bugs attacking me reminded me of Starship Troopers with blood splattering all over the place.

This leaked beta will do nothing but make people want this game even more. It's not finished, tons of things are missing but does allow you to test various things out like any demo would. It's a rare insight into the development of a game.

Fattyfat · Post by **Fattyfat** » October 9, 2003, 6:36 pm

CS : condition zero was released.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » October 9, 2003, 7:54 pm

A roughly 120mb patch for the leaked beta was released by same Anon guy updating models and textures missing from the original release.

I hear CS-2 looks great. Haven't seen it yet.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » October 10, 2003, 6:45 pm

here's a thread with some nice screen shots from HL2:

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=106822

Skogen · Post by **Skogen** » October 10, 2003, 6:57 pm

Winnow wrote:here's a thread with some nice screen shots from HL2:

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=106822

hrm. I still don't see what all the fuss is over. Some of the character models look, well, aweful (15.jpg in particular), the enviorment looks nice I guess.
*shrug*

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » October 10, 2003, 7:15 pm

Yeah, hard to demonstrate it's greatness in still pictures. All I can suggest legally is to download the 600+ mb demo movie from E3 to see the HL2 engine in action.

I think fileplanet has it although it's a PITA to get.