Half-Life 2 Source Code Leaked!!!

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The Kernel
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Post by The Kernel »

Indeed I do know what I am talking about. This may surprise you, but the ATI/HL2 benchmark fiasco took a lot of people in Santa Clara by surprise. I know about a couple of people at nVidia and they tell me that they had no idea anything like this was going on.

What the source code shows is that ATI has been working with Valve to enhance its performance for ATI cards. If you think otherwise given the availible data then you are looking very hard. Did you notice that in the Doom III benchmarks, nVidia cards did better than their ATI counterparts? Have you read Anand's article today about DX9 cards and their performance? GeForce 5900 and Radeon 9800 are on roughly equal footing in everything BUT HL2. Sounds fishy to me.
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Post by Hamel »

Almost every benchmarker and hardware guru has been through this

There is no conspiracy between ATI and Valve~

And to further cement this, Carmack said that you could expect the same performance anomalies in other games
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Post by aronkerkhof »

Let me go so far as to say who gives a fuck anyway? If a card company wants to pony up dough and program expertise to give their card an edge in a particular game, so what? So long as Valve doesn't penalize another card's performance, (think if(!$CARD_TYPE = "ATI") {do mickey mouse code}) what's the big deal? I can see people getting upset about benchmarks being rigged, but come on. Why the outrage, unless you happen to be a video card fan boy, which you have to admit is pretty far down the pathetic geek scale.
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Post by phongn »

The Kernel wrote:Hmmm...okay, but how about the fact that Gabe and co. seem to be fucking the consumer in the ass for business reasons. Don't believe me? You really should read this:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11923
Screw the Inq. You'll have to give a better source than that, and that article is nonsense, anyways.

Valve spent three times as long trying to get HL2 running well on nVidia hardware than ATI hardware. The ATI path is nothing more than the bog-standard ARB2 path while they had to write a ton of custom stuff for the NV path. There's no conspiracy here.
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Post by phongn »

The Kernel wrote:What the source code shows is that ATI has been working with Valve to enhance its performance for ATI cards. If you think otherwise given the availible data then you are looking very hard. Did you notice that in the Doom III benchmarks, nVidia cards did better than their ATI counterparts? Have you read Anand's article today about DX9 cards and their performance? GeForce 5900 and Radeon 9800 are on roughly equal footing in everything BUT HL2. Sounds fishy to me.
The latest article I see is a 1 October report comparing the NV38 and the R360. I don't see the R350 or NV35 being compared here.

Furthermore, the 50-series Detonators have been shown to blatantly cheat. I'm not taking Valve's accusation here merely at face value; the Tech-Report did their own analyses on those drivers and noted significant image quality reduction in an effort to boost framerates. These same drivers also attempt to boost image quality when screenshots taken to mask these problems.

There is no conspiracy on the part of ATI and Valve; OTOH, I'd argue that nVidia is dishonestly trying to compete in the 'benchmark game.' Furthermore, at least ATI fessed up and changed their ways after the infamous "Quack 3" incident; nVidia simply admits no wrongdoing in the case of the 50-series Detonators and shoves more cash under 3DMark's nose when they get caught.
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Post by phongn »

MKSheppard wrote:
Lagmonster wrote:This would be a good time to say that if you know something about this, or find something out, USE the helpvalve@valvesoftware.com addy they set up. Crime shall not go unpunished, and all that.
Yeah right. They tried to shove that Steam crap down our throats. They
can go fuck themselves.
Right, because five years of work and millions of dollars in cash have been stolen it's All Right because of Steam. :roll:

Waagh! Shep doesn't like Steam, so go hackers for ripping off Valve!
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Post by phongn »

aronkerkhof wrote:Let me go so far as to say who gives a fuck anyway? If a card company wants to pony up dough and program expertise to give their card an edge in a particular game, so what? So long as Valve doesn't penalize another card's performance, (think if(!$CARD_TYPE = "ATI") {do mickey mouse code}) what's the big deal? I can see people getting upset about benchmarks being rigged, but come on. Why the outrage, unless you happen to be a video card fan boy, which you have to admit is pretty far down the pathetic geek scale.
In fact, no such thing has been done. ATI cards use the industry-standard codepath with nVidia cards use a specialized, optimized codepath.
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Post by Crazy_Vasey »

The Kernel wrote:Hmmm...okay, but how about the fact that Gabe and co. seem to be fucking the consumer in the ass for business reasons. Don't believe me? You really should read this:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11923.
This is... totally unsurprising. I've heard of graphics card companies helping out game developers with optimising their graphics code several times before.
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Post by aronkerkhof »

phongn wrote:
aronkerkhof wrote:Let me go so far as to say who gives a fuck anyway? If a card company wants to pony up dough and program expertise to give their card an edge in a particular game, so what? So long as Valve doesn't penalize another card's performance, (think if(!$CARD_TYPE = "ATI") {do mickey mouse code}) what's the big deal? I can see people getting upset about benchmarks being rigged, but come on. Why the outrage, unless you happen to be a video card fan boy, which you have to admit is pretty far down the pathetic geek scale.
In fact, no such thing has been done. ATI cards use the industry-standard codepath with nVidia cards use a specialized, optimized codepath.
Right, I'm just saying why should anyone care if it *does* happen? Whoohoo, better performance for the guys who buy the participating card.
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Post by Arthur_Tuxedo »

Several good things will come of this I think:

1. Someone will make a patch so you can play it without Steam (woot!)

2. The mods will be better, and can actually improve the game and its engine.

3. Porting potential to other platforms (although, as Phong pointed out, they'd need to be DX9 compliant first).

Bad for Valve, good for us?
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Post by Hotfoot »

Problem is that anyone using the stolen source code could probably be tracked down pretty fast, and thus be shut down quickly by Valve. Any servers hosting it will be targetted with legal actions. The only real way to then distribute the modified source and such will be through filesharing services like Kazaa, which is inherantly dangerous for the users, since there is no garuantee that the modified source code you're downloading is the specific modified source code you want, and you could wind up downloading one nasty as fuck virus/trojan/worm/whatever.
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Post by phongn »

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Several good things will come of this I think:

1. Someone will make a patch so you can play it without Steam (woot!)
I doubt that will work, and Valve has noted that Steam will only be required for MP after two weeks or so. The Steam/SP requirement will be removed shortly after release.

As for online play on Valve's servers without Steam, I doubt that'd work. If Valve has implemented some sort of cryptographic public-key infrastructure, no-one's breaking that.
2. The mods will be better, and can actually improve the game and its engine.
The SDK will allow you to write your own shaders anyways! It's quite complete.
3. Porting potential to other platforms (although, as Phong pointed out, they'd need to be DX9 compliant first).
Which is highly unlikely. DX9 is not yet functional on Linux and I'm not sure if the MacDX team will get DX9 working anytime soon.
Bad for Valve, good for us?
Valve could implement even more draconian policies after this to keep out those who are using the stolen source.
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Post by MKSheppard »

phongn wrote: Waagh! Shep doesn't like Steam, so go hackers for ripping off Valve!
Phong, they've been trying to shove that thing down our throats, with the
latest CS releases, and while I no longer play HL or it's mods, I've heard
horror stories, and quite frankly, I don't think having us be required to be
connected to the internet to play Single Player HL is fair. What of those
people who do not have always-on connections or crappy internet connections?

Before I got broadband, I could never manage to stay online more than 10~
minutes at a time. And to be blunt, Valve had it coming for piss poor security.

This is like a diamond seller buying an el cheepo alarm system instead
of a midrange system, and making the damn code on the alarm 12345.

Sure, a crime was committed, but it wouldn't have happened if Valve
hadn't been so stupid in the first place. There's stupid, and then
abmysally stupid, so stupid you have to see to believe it....like
putting a shit firewall on the damn network that contains five
years and millions of dollars' worth of source code...
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Post by phongn »

True enough, their network security seemed pretty bad, but you made it sound like for Steam alone they deserved to have their code lifted.
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Post by SirNitram »

phongn wrote:True enough, their network security seemed pretty bad, but you made it sound like for Steam alone they deserved to have their code lifted.
Well, if they were really using Outlook Express, that's kinda the equivalent of pasting giant targets on your stuff. It's hard to have sympathy, but I'm not cheering anyone on here. This reeks of causing alot more draconian efforts by Valve, and thus probably fucking the mod community up the ass with a rusty chainsaw.
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Post by Hamel »

Some people are saying that this will be Falcon 4.0 all over again, and people will be making improvements out of the goodness of their hearts

They seriously overestimate the maturity of the largest FPS demographic
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Post by phongn »

They were using Outlook, not OE, probably linked to MS Exchange for all those collaboration features.

And yeah, the F4 community is probably a lot more mature than the general HL2 community will be.
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Post by SirNitram »

phongn wrote:They were using Outlook, not OE, probably linked to MS Exchange for all those collaboration features.
That's not as bad, then. I can now have some sympathy for them; having your hard work stolen by some highschool kid who was 'bored' isn't fun.
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Post by phongn »

This is unlikely to be the work of bored high schoolers; this attack was rather sophisticated.
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Post by Colonel Olrik »

OK, I don't get it.
He said that someone had accessed his e-mail account in September.

Soon after this, he started having problems with his computer but he was unable to find any virus or worm. Nevertheless reformatted the hard drive and reinstalled Windows.
Alright. There's a plug, you see. That connects the computer to the internet. If you suspect someone is tinkering with your computer, pull the freaking plug. Game over. If you hold vital information and know someone's messing with your computer, then only the worst kind of moron doesn't take appropriate measures. By the look of it, he had weeks of forewarning. I don't understand, I'm no expert and I'm pretty sure this wouldn't happen to me.
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Post by lukexcom »

The Kernel wrote:Actually something similar DID happen with Falcon 4.0, and if I remember correctly, the mod community was able to tinker with the engine and improve the game in ways that buggered the imagination. Not entirely sure of the exact details, but at least it shows that it is POSSIBLE that some good will come of this.
Not exactly...As of yesterday, G2i are giving out cease-and-desist orders to ALL community work on Falcon 4.

See http://www.frugalsworld.com for details, click on forums, then Falcon 4 (at top of the list). This is one big FUBAR, IMO. It's acutally quite bad now at the forums. The shit is really flying now over there.
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Post by lukexcom »

I wouldn't call the F4 community *that* mature. Sure, compared to script-kiddies on the various FPS games the F4 community looks like a gentleman's club, but when the going gets even a wee bit rough...well, just go onto the forums in the link above and take a look...

"I hate G2i for what they're doing and I will pirate their work!" is just a sample of the stuff there.
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Post by aronkerkhof »

Colonel Olrik wrote: Alright. There's a plug, you see. That connects the computer to the internet. If you suspect someone is tinkering with your computer, pull the freaking plug. Game over. If you hold vital information and know someone's messing with your computer, then only the worst kind of moron doesn't take appropriate measures. By the look of it, he had weeks of forewarning. I don't understand, I'm no expert and I'm pretty sure this wouldn't happen to me.
Of course it wouldn't happen to you, who the hell wants anything off your computer? So, Gabe unplugs his network cable, and then what, never plugs it in again? That's stupid.

The guy had a problem, he tried to find it, and when he didn't, he reformatted his hard drive. The problem is that if you're connected to the internet, and someone wants in bad enough, they are going to get in, and there is dick all you can do about it to stop it. You can make it harder, but not impossible. Here, people using custom exploits and keyloggers and who knows what else, they evidently wanted in *bad*.
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Post by MKSheppard »

lukexcom wrote: "I hate G2i for what they're doing and I will pirate their work!" is just a sample of the stuff there.
I'd do the same goddamned thing too if I spent a lot of fucking time
working on modding Falcon 4, and some fucktwat company walked in
and said I had to turn EVERYTHING over to them or face legal action simply
because they want to resell a 6 year old game as a "gold" edition. :roll:
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Post by Hotfoot »

MKSheppard wrote:
lukexcom wrote: "I hate G2i for what they're doing and I will pirate their work!" is just a sample of the stuff there.
I'd do the same goddamned thing too if I spent a lot of fucking time
working on modding Falcon 4, and some fucktwat company walked in
and said I had to turn EVERYTHING over to them or face legal action simply
because they want to resell a 6 year old game as a "gold" edition. :roll:
They want the data because the modders broke their contract. Try reading the linked thread to where G2i explains why they're doing this. The modder's contract ended summer of last year, after which point they were to stop modding and hand over their files.
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