The Big Honkin' Half-Life 2 Thread

[Buk]

Originally posted by Mr.Deflok
If I were a mod I'd ban you for that comment alone.

Good thing you aren't a mod then, it takes alot more than a backhanded comment to get banned. Warning maybe...

I do think that comment didnt belong on this thread, they asked a very valid question.

[Mr.Deflok]

I just don't find that kind of comment acceptable, to downplay someone hopes like that, it's just like buying a kid a bicycle he wanted for christmas then running over it with a truck while the kid watches.

But anyway, back on topic.

[Mr.Deflok]

Did anyone here upgrade their PC for HL2's projected September 30 release only to be let down?

[Hanabal]

i was actually revieved it got delayed a little as i need a new computer to play it but i wont have the money till xmas

[Sleepyjack]

i recall that the source engine allows a high degree of scalability,so even lower spec computers should run it ok, although it won't look or play as half as good as it should.

[CyN1caL]

Originally posted by Mr.Deflok
Did anyone here upgrade their PC for HL2's projected September 30 release only to be let down?

I convinced my friends to save up a bit more and only upgrade for when Doom 3 comes out (March) as it's going to be more important to updgrade for that than it will be for HL2.

[CyN1caL]

Originally posted by Mr.Deflok
I was looking at the graphics for HL2 on that 600MB e3 video today and thought to myself, "wow, that shit looks like bullshit, they should've released it five months ago."

The psychics engine is what really wows people, as well as myself. It's damn near as close to life as they can get.

[irseg]

Originally posted by Mr.Deflok
I just don't find that kind of comment acceptable, to downplay someone hopes like that, it's just like buying a kid a bicycle he wanted for christmas then running over it with a truck while the kid watches.

I suck at art. I have no aesthetic talent whatsoever. Let's say I was thinking about being a painter and asking for advice, but demonstrated a significant lack of knowledge/ability.

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have people say "That's really not your thing, find something else." rather than have people get my hopes up by saying BS like "You're doing great! You'll learn everything about it in no time!", and then go on to be a failure.

I think he mentioned being 20 or so. If you want to go into a computer related field and don't know what source code is by that age, good luck getting a degree and far more importantly, finding a job while competing with people who have been computer geeks all their lives. By all means he should keep playing with computers as a hobby and learn as much as possible, but it's foolish to expect to be competitive in such a demanding field, and it's even worse to disillusion him into thinking he could pull it off at this point in time.

[Mr.Deflok]

Originally posted by CyN1caL
The psychics engine is what really wows people, as well as myself. It's damn near as close to life as they can get.

I wasn't being serious there man, I was referring to what Matrix2023 said two posts before my one

HL2's physics are damned amazing, the AI appears to be too, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. appears to have fantastic physics too.

[hawkeye]

from ShackNews
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/28619

Here's a statement from Gabe Newell via HalfLife2.net

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.
Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:
1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.
What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.
We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe

+

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/28641/

We've gotten some more details on the recent Half-Life 2 source leak from Gabe Newell for you guys to read here. I have verified that this is legit over the phone just to be safe. Here's the latest:

1) We've taken our network connection down to pretty much a minimum. We're still finding machines internally that have been compromised.

2) The suite of tools that the attacker was using included the modified version of RemotelyAnywhere (basically a Remote Desktop-style remote admin tool), Haxker Defender (a process, registry key and file hiding tool), the key logger, and various networking utilities that allowed them to transfer files (compressors, NetCat, and FTP). We also are pretty sure they were sniffing our network to gather passwords and other information. Haxker Defender includes a file system driver that allows an attacker to have stuff on your machine that is invisible, unless you do something like mount the drive under another OS that has NTFS support.

We have determined one way of detecting some infected machines, which is using a connection viewer to detect connections to anomalous hosts external to our network.

We still don't know their entry method.

3) In general, the community has been remarkably swift at tracking down the sources of the leak. What would be most helpful now are IP addresses of the people who were responsible for the intrusion or for the denial of service attacks.

4) Also, please continue to send in URLs of websites hosting the source code. We've been contacting people and asking them to take it down.

5) There's anecdotal evidence that other game developers have been targeted by whoever attacked us. This hasn't been confirmed. We've been providing other game developers with more detailed information about the exploits and evidence of infiltration.

6) We're running a little bit blind with our network shut down, but it seems like some of the press has picked up the story. I've been fielding calls from the mainstream non-games, non-technical press.all day. Hopefully they will get to report shortly what a mistake it is to piss off a whole bunch of gamers and get them hunting you around the Internet.

For any information related to this, please send it to helpvalve@valvesoftware.com, or you can always send to gaben@valvesoftware.com as well.

God Fucking Damn it. It's people like this who give hackers a bad name. I will admit, I am impressed by the sheer amount of work and skill that this took, but at the same time, these sons of bitches should be killed. slowly. with forks.
they are stealing, they are adding one more point against legit hackers, and they are fucking up the game for all of us.

[Mr.Deflok]

Originally posted by irseg
...I don't know about you, but I'd rather have people say "That's really not your thing, find something else." rather than have people get my hopes up by saying BS like "You're doing great! You'll learn everything about it in no time!", and then go on to be a failure...

I agree, but would you rather someone say "Oh my god, you're terrible at art, Jesus man... what the fuck are you smoking!?!" or "You don't really have the knack for art, it just doesn't seem to flow freely from you, your ideas are bungled and your composition is off-kilter." The second is a much nicer way to say it.

But once again, back to the topic at hand.

[mrquackers]

Here's some bad news relating to the topic. *Real* bad news...

Vivendi's "Half Life II" game delayed by code theft
PARIS, Oct 7 (Reuters) - The theft of part of its source code has delayed until April 2004 the launch of "Half Life II", the hotly anticipated alien-hunting game of Vivendi Universal Games, a company official said...

http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/031007/tech_...i_games_2.html

[The_Dude]

I heard that a bug in IE had something to do with this. not too sure.

[Caphreak]

Bug in outlook actually, a buffer overflow in the preview pane, but it certainly does suck for all of us. I think it would be better for them to rewrite most of the code that was stolen, so people find it much harder to write hacks/exploits, instead of trying to appease the community and push for an earlier release date. Imagine what cs1.5 wouldve been like with no one cheating....

[methangel]

Well, guess what everyone ... it has been postponed until April due to the source leak. Go figure.

I swear, people NEED to keep their developmental machines isolated from the network. Period.

[Hanabal]

this is what i thought would happen.

Valve would delay the game too fix the possible hack routes.
So the hackers that base the hack off their code doesnt work becuase valve changed the code.

End product. The game gets delayed for everybody. Nice job guys.

Also I do believe that its not just a plot to give valve time to fix the game, valve would just be honest and say it wasnt done yet, as in what they did with HL1.

Yes maybe having outlook on the net with the code was stupid but as the great bumper sticker once said "Shit happens".

[charliex]

sometimes we need access to the machines and source code from different physical locations, so the source tree needs to be on a server somewhere, and due to connection difficulties , speeds, etc, the internet is the best solution.

i don't know any games company that doesn't have source code or source code control, available over the internet, either via vpn or some other way.

[MontanaXVI]

Originally posted by nothingx
I guess the thing that worries me most about this is that Valve will be leasing their HL2 engine to third-party developers. I guess now, some renegade programming team could hack together a graphically kick ass game without paying a dime to Valve using the stolen source. I'm sure Valve has been shitting bricks over this one...

... can't wait to get my hands on it and see how it works. heheheh.

i think that is one of if not the biggest actual concern for them and noth has hit it right on the head with the aboce comments

[AlCap0wn]

Yes, it's real.
Yes, it's actual executables.
No, I'm not telling you where to get it.

Edit - Debate as to whether it's an Alpha or Beta.

[AlCap0wn]

You think leaking the source was bad?

[DaveTheLurker]

To have all the eye candy, you will want to run it on at least a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. The Nvidia cards can't do DX9 very well at all.

[a1t3r3g0]

I've heard that the AI is disabled in it, but have no way of confirming.

[The_Dude]

the game is going to be out in a few months. what's up with leakin the alpha?

[AlCap0wn]

Originally posted by The_Dude
the game is going to be out in a few months. what's up with leakin the alpha?

It's been pushed back to April 2004.

Edit - Hmm. The Inquirer says otherwise ... but we'll have to wait for Valve's official statement on the leak. Hopefully it's still a happy holiday season for us all.

[AlCap0wn]

And for those who missed it the first time around:

No, I'm not telling you where to get it.

[AntHackerX]

Have you gotten the whole thing and played with it yet?

[jhericurl21]

so uhh, where do u get it


i also heard that some guys released maps and textures to work with the stolen source code, but its just to see the engine at work, just runnin and jumpin

[a1t3r3g0]

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/07/comm...ming/index.htm

[IckUber]

yeah, i heard it was out too, im looking for it now, so when i find out, ill let you know.

[NeverBorn]

I think its meant to run good on a 700

[mr sticky]

HALF LIFE2 DELAYED DUE TO STOLEN CODE!!!!!

Some hacker-ass stole a third of the code to HL2, causing a major delay. I hope someone finds him and break his fingers!

[Lasereth]

Originally posted by DaveTheLurker
To have all the eye candy, you will want to run it on at least a ATI Radeon 9600 Pro. The Nvidia cards can't do DX9 very well at all.

That bullcrap is still based on the infamous Tom's Hardware using the 32.35 drivers instead of the 50.54 drivers that were designed for the FX cards with HL2. Wait until the game comes out, or a test comes out using the actual correct drivers, then we can make those conclusions.

-Lasereth

[The_Dude]

I've found both the code and the beta version (yes, it is beta), but I dont wanna install anything beta on my system.

[Vilkata]

I'm not sure if I found the beta that I'd install it. Who's to say the hacking group that stole the source and beta from Valve havn't made any "adjustments"(read: keyloggers, viruses, etc) themselves before releasing it? I mean seriously, they got a hold of the source by using viruses and keyloggers that were undetectable by anti-virus software. Who's to say they havn't "added" anything to the beta?

[jhericurl21]

damn, CNN says theres places who have ingame screens, where are they................

[flamingpeach]

Originally posted by mr sticky
HALF LIFE2 DELAYED DUE TO STOLEN CODE!!!!!

Some hacker-ass stole a third of the code to HL2, causing a major delay. I hope someone finds him and break his fingers!

It was totally inevitable

[Mr.Deflok]

Next thing you know everyone will be getting mailed a full working copy of HL2.

[CyN1caL]

When you get the beta, you don't install anything.

You just run the exe file and play on maps.

It's pretty fun showing of the game, and it runs excellent on my AIW 9700 Pro.

Though, I would really hate to be Valve now. I checked this out because I was curious, and I have not been disapointed. I'm going to delete it and still buy HL2, whenever it is they manage to put it out...

[degarg]

Sucks

I really hoped that this would be released on the 30th of sept.

[AlCap0wn]

Originally posted by jhericurl21
damn, CNN says theres places who have ingame screens, where are they................

http://www.neowin.net/staff/creamhackered/halflife2/