Half Life 2 Source Code Leaked

Pyroman[FO] writes "Gamers with Jobs is reporting that the Half Life 2 source code is floating around the net right now. It looks to be about a month old. There's no official word from Valve on the source code leak yet. Unfortunately those who want to use it to cheat already have it, we need to get the word to legitimate customers to educate them about the situation." Update: 10/02 21:51 GMT by S : Valve's Gabe Newell has an official statement, via ShackNews/HalfLife2.net, indicating "infiltration of our network" and appealing for information on the culprits.

Look on the bright side

We can start making mods sooner!

Re:Look on the bright side

I'm not so sure it's an SDK.

It's pretty complete, and weighs in at 100 megs unpacked, for this to be _not_ the source, I'd have to say it's a pretty damn good hoax.

There is also the complete source to worldcraft in there.

Most interesting thing though, is the presence of a linux/, *gets his hopes up*

Completely legit, response from Valve

GABE NEWELL RESPONDS:

From HalfLife2.net [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, [e-mail]. 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

Re:Completely legit, response from Valve

Yeah, funny that a company developing a FPS game for Windows would use the most common MS applications. "Oh, I'm sorry, Half-Life 2 doesn't run on a machine with Outlook installed; you'll need to switch to Mozilla, the open-source browser/email client."

"Uh, what?"

Right. "Hi, I'd like to return this game, it doesn't run on my computer."

Outlook !== BAD *if* you have good sysadmins and keep up on your patches. The buffer exploits in the preview pane have been patched for some time. Thanks for the typical Slashdot attitude, though. MS fucks up plenty, but don't blame them when the fix is readily available.

Re:Look on the bright side

To hell with modding it, why doesn't someone finish the damn game and release it already??

Re:Open Source now?

Not a bad idea. By allowing other people to port the code to different OSes they could get some instant karma, save themselves some effort and get a bigger potential market all in one go. After all, people would still have to buy the game to get the datafiles.
The only problem is if the code contains third-party stuff like sound modules, physics engines etc.

Re:Open Source now?

After all, people would still have to buy the game to get the datafiles.

Yes, because afterall, there's absolutely no way to share binary files amongst a large group of people semi-anonymously around the Internet now is there? ;-)

One Word:

Wow.

That's quite a big deal to have leaked. Unfortunately the article is down to I can't RTFA, but is this just the SDK source code or the whole friggin thing?

If it's the whole thing think of how much jeopardy that puts them in with the people they've licensed technology from (such as the Havok physics engine, etc).
Again I say, Wow.

Re:One Word:

I got wind of this earlier this morning. There's a big thread on it. So far, those looking at it believe it's most likely a heavily-modified HL1 SDK, or something. Not sure if it's a hoax yet. Of course, they're gamers, not coders.

Thread here [halflife2.net].

Be interesting to see what the verdict of the Slashdot code gurus is.

Re:One Word:

Ok... It's real. It looks very incomplete, pretty old, but real nonetheless. There's functional code for things that never existed in HL1. (I assume to be functional at least, obviously I can't compile it but if this is a joke played by someone who just wrote a bunch of code to try to make it look real then they spent a LOT of time doing it.)

Now however, I have come to the conclusion that this IS an SDK, and not the full source of their engine.

Err, I take that back. Its the engine. Just found the occlusion system and the node management.

I feel for Valve about now. This sucks.
I'm deleting the source just out of respect. :(

Re:One Word:

Now however, I have come to the conclusion that this IS an SDK, and not the full source of their engine.

Err, I take that back. Its the engine. Just found the occlusion system and the node management.

What is your address? I am sending you a keyboard with a "Backspace" key for Christmas.

Re:One Word:

In the dlls directory is pretty much all of the equivalant stuff thats in the HL1 SDK. I thought it was fake at first after looking in there, then I started to look through all the physics code. All of the ragdoll type stuff that there's no way is in HL1 and the code isn't faked. Then I checked out the engine directory. Like I said in a post futher down, the full occlusion system and node management is all there, I didn't have time to check for the actual rendering code because I had to get back to work. But I'm thoroughly convinced that it's real. I even feel bad for downloading it now because I know if someone stole my code I'd be way more than pissed about it. Let em steal a binary all day, but when they have the code it's a whole new level. This is corporate espionage at its finest.

Re:Slashdot double standards

There's no idealists rushing in because this isn't a case of "copying" versus "stealing." Regardless of what you label it, the unauthorized distribution of source code that the creator intends to keep secret is wrong because it divides control of the creative process. It's not about who has to pay for the product, it's about who gets to create the product in the first place. This phenomenon has little parallel in music.

Sharing music online is equivalent to warez binaries, and ripping a cd you own is equivalent to making a backup copy of a game you own. Mixing existing music DJ style would be like taking screen captures and level designs from one game and using them in another. Downloading the source gives you the same level of control that the artists have; it is equivalent to copying the recording studio while the artists were in it.

However, it is worth noting that leaked albums are indefensible under my assumptions: they take control of the creative process away from the artist by removing their ability to decide when the album is done and how the public will be exposed to the music. This is equivalent to the leak of the alpha doom 3 a while ago-still less threatening than a source code leak.

Another factor in the severity of a source leak is security. Knowledge of the source will allow cheaters to exploit the game and ruin online play-once again, a phenomenon we do not see in music. Music pirates cannot degrade the quality of the music legitimate buyers listen to, but online cheaters can ruin the multiplayer experience. It would be like going to a concert and blowing a bullhorn repeatedly. Doing that in a concert is not considered an intellectual property offense, so it is inappropriate to think of a source leak's potential for cheating as an intellectual property issue. It is a security/espionage problem.

That said, those who would delete the source after downloading it and verifying its authenticity are very misguided. Unless their computers are public access and could be used to futher distribute the source, deletion helps noone and limits your opportunity for education. Of course, if you are going to work on a competing product it would be dangerous to expose yourself to the source, but as a disinterested party or potential valve customer there is much to learn and little damage to do.
After all, the real danger of a source leak is in the actions that can be taken by those who acquired it illicitly. Hackers and competitors can dilute the creators' control over the software, but an unabused copy of the source is harmless. So, go ahead-download the source, read it, figure out how it works and learn from it. Unless you're getting a job at id or epic, or creating your own software directly related to hl2, your copy of the code is no worse than sheet music. Of course, if you upload too much on bittorrent, it could be argued that you're helping to distribute it. Although you're only one link in a large chain, it's like voting-if enough people make the same decision it really will change things. So, go download all the stolen half life source you want, just dont use bittorrent or write hl2 cheats. After all, aren't all "bad" acts bad because of their consequences? Think about it-no matter what you do, if nobody is worse of for it, how could there possibly be anything wrong with it? Throw away the anachronistic, irrelevant "moral" codes of a repressed past-its not about what some people think, it's about what's ethical in the strictest definition of the word. So go eat pork, masturbate, and download hl2. Yeah!

Programmers will never feel like mp3-pirated musicians when source code is stolen. They will feel like a musician whose beat and backup were stolen, combined with someone else's voice, and sold as a new release. This has happened in the music world, and though it is not an exact parallel of the source code situation, the uproar was just as severe.

Why is the parallel off? All music is by definition open source-hearing the notes allows you to reconstruct the sheet

Re:Slashdot double standards

Most people who have a shred of ethics in them have long left slashdot.

I see you're still here.

Pascal

Hopefully this will put to rest the controversy over Pascal. Now the world can see that you CAN write a production quality game in Pascal.

Moderators, Moderators

Moderators, you should not mod this poster up, but its parent... Jeez... do you do everything somebody says to you? OK, mod me up too :-)

Re:Pascal

strong typing, consistent syntax, specific to borland (I'm not talking about old school pascal here, but) BASM really makes meshing asm and pascal easy and consistent.

C# is basically pascal with curly braces instead of begin/end (along with all the ++=/-=**%^ inconsistencies that make it suck). I work in C# and obj pascal everyday (obj. pascal for optimization critical code, c# for high level BS) and I prefer obj pascal over C# or C++. Aside from java, I don't have experience with those "other" languages mainly because I develope for windows and unix (where do all these froto,grox,dipschil,etc languages come from anyways???)

and of course, the top 10 reasons [pascal-central.com]

...and in other news...

Valve Software are sueing Linux Kernel creator Linux Torvalds, on suspect that leaked Half-Life 2 source code is present in Linux operating system.

Re:...and in other news...

That would be funnier if it was SCO suing valve for using System V Unix Code in Half Life 2.

Re:...and in other news...

I can just see all the Valve Software guys in a circle around a SCO executive, pushing him around going...
"Whadda gonna do huh? Revoke out Unix license!"

Re:...and in other news...

Oh shit! You mean I shouldn't put it in there?!? Damn! I was making one hell of a framebuffer splash screen to display during the boot process. I was almost done too, just ready to check it in to CVS. You ruined my day.

Thanks ATI!

I knew ATI wouldn't let us down!

"use it to cheat?"

Aren't we past security through obscurity by now? Or is that just applied to Microsoft.

Re:"use it to cheat?"

Most people don't think like that. They think "You have the source, you can make whatever cheats you want!" They're gamers, not coders, and most don't have a clue what they're talking about. I trust that Valve is professional enough to write tight code.

The most damage is the loss of company secrets (Source engine techniques, anyone?) and the potential damage to engine licensing opportunities, I think.

Re:"use it to avoid licensing?"

Well, that's really what I meant. No serious studio is going to use a pirated version of the engine to create a game, but HL2 is obviously using some cutting-edge techniques to achieve the results that they have demonstrated. The availability of the code means that such techniques could be analyzed and incorporated into other engines, diluting the exclusivity of the Source engine, and making it a lot easier for developers looking for a next gen engine to roll their own, or buy one a bit cheaper than Source.

Re:"use it to cheat?"

If this is legit, this all applies. If not, then obviously it's not worth anyone's time to debate.

Valve will not lose any licenses due to the code being available. Nobody is going to not license the engine because they can get the source. You'd get your ass sued to oblivion to commit largescale copyright infringement on a major retail product. The first thing anyone asks when you're working on a game is "what engine are you using?". You can't hide your engine - knowledable people can easily tell what engine it is by running it.

The real risk is cheating, which could very well have a real impact on sales (why buy HL2 to play the new CS when the new CS has at least as many cheats as the old one?). Plus if cheating is rampant, it could scare away licensees.

So they could lose real sales and licensees, but only because of cheating, not because they don't need to pay for the source because they can get it for free :)

Jon (Slothy)
Programmer, S2 Games

Re:"use it to cheat?"

Aren't we past security through obscurity by now?

Not with games, especially first-person shooters. It's a problem of distributing the workload with limited server resources and limited bandwidth / high latency between nodes. To make the game playable, the clients have to know things and be trusted to do calculations that from a security standpoint they should not.

This really is unfortunate. It means you really can't stop cheating with this sort of game. It's especially easy when the source code is available, though it's still possible otherwise.

Re:"use it to cheat?"

Mod this man up, I wasn't talking about the latest OpenSSH release getting leaked, it's Half Life 2. The latency problems mean you can't really have secure netcode, however obscurity goes a long way to help.

The CDKey and Steam authentication systems are also supposedly included, so any security control they had before goes out the window, you can't trust the CD Keys or Steam anymore. Not that they were perfect before, but this is going from "wait a bit while the crackers figure out this new authentication system, then it's changed in a patch, repeat" to "here it is on a silver platter, before it's released"

Not always a problem

A lot of that has to do with the particular game, as well as the design of the prediction in that game.

For instance, in Starsiege:Tribes, since the rendering engine has been successfully hacked, people have been able to write some clever and EXTREMELY extensive cheats -- you can customize the visibility of the terrain, of individual objects (like buildings -- make them partially transparent to see people around corners), remove fog from maps, have pointers to the person with the flag, and most infamously, change the model for the flag into a twenty-story-tall red and green stick figure with a gigantic smiley face. This cheat is known as 'Happy Flag', and it makes it pretty much impossible to confuse the enemy team as to the location of your flag.

Now, in any other game, with the graphics engine compromised to that extent, the game would be over. It would be trivial to write auto-aim functionality that centers your view on a particular model type and fires the weapon.

But thanks both to the use of actual projectiles instead of instant (or 'hitscan') weapons, as well as a server-client model that DOES NOT TRUST CLIENT EVENTS (which you might think would make the game much more apparently laggy, but which in reality makes the game much less stuttery and much smoother for those on slower connctions; you just have to predict your shots more. But, since you have to do that anyways by design . . .).

The stability of this system is such that even with one of the most rabid fanbases in gaming, the only cheats available are primarily informational in nature. A cheater can see mines better, can know where the flag is, can see people clearly that would be mostly obscured by fog otherwise.

But this gives him very little actual advantage. The only hitscan weapon in the game is not a one-hit kill even on the lightest armor, and it needs to recharge, and the method used in both Tribes 1 and the Torque engine of the server not trusting the player for jack shit is actually EASIER on the server, since it processes client actions essentially as it receives them. Moreover, thanks to 'skiing' and the jetpacks and the visibility of laser rifle attacks, any advantage is quickly whittled down to a simple nuisance.

Now, at the other end of the spectrum is Red Faction. :D I'm not much of a cheater normally, but the most fun I have ever had was back in the day before everyone was cheating, when the careful task was to cleverly design cheats that are almost undetectable -- like a specially powerful jump to get you out of difficult situations, etc. The most fun I had was giving my player ninjalike abilities by modifying the scripts myself, and reducing my fall damage, and limiting myself to the pistol. It's all about the mobility, baby!

It wasn't 'leaked'...

...it was FREED!!

Re:It wasn't 'leaked'...

The proper term is "liberated".

You know you're on Slashdot when...

... cheating is considered the 'big threat' of a source code leak, rather than the huge impending theft of intellectual property ;-)

Please

That's the lame excuse offered by lazy people who don't want to learn their own language.

Re:You know you're on Slashdot when...

... cheating is considered the 'big threat' of a source code leak, rather than the huge impending theft of intellectual property ;-)

I'm currently taking bets on the surprise release of Duke Nukem Forever.. (Which surprisingly, looks like Half Life 2)

Re:You know you're on Slashdot when...

There are two possible widespread problems that come with the release of the source. 1. is making it easier for people to produce cheats, 2. is that people can reverse engineer cd-keys, that will lead to piracy.

But source code and source code alone does not a great game make. There are models, textures, maps, config files and myriad other items that the finished product contains that the source archive will not.

You're not going to see people rolling their own pirate releases of HL2 just because of this code, but it could help people to rip off the full version, once it's available.

LK

Don't forget the value to competitors

Another worry with the leaked source is that it's possible for competitors to rip off Valve's fancy new game engine. Any proprietary techniques in the code aren't secret any more.

IP?

Intellectual Property, like flying pigs, cannot be found in nature.

That's the net for you...

Great... The article is Slashdotted... But the leaked code is mirrored everywhere!

Full text of linked article

Full article from:
http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/modules.php?o p=modlo ad&name=News&file=article&sid=665

Half-Life 2 Source Code Leaked, Seriously
Posted by: Pyroman[FO] on Thursday, October 02, 2003 - 11:02 AM EST

So I know what you're thinking. "Yeah right Pyro, it's really just more suprise gay porn" but its the real deal. The source code for Valve's Half-Life 2 has been leaked to the net. An anonymous GWJ reader has verified this is real.

I can confirm that this is indeed no fake ... The thing is available as a torrent download on the net. I don't know how much action they will take against people downloading this. ... The last edits are from a month ago (in the files). If this is fake, it is a damn good one. It looks very coherent. Over 100 megs unpacked source

There's still no official word from Valve and I haven't seen any other sites pick it up. There isn't any word on who leaked it either and from what I have heard the source doesn't give it away. Hopefully when this gets out in the open Valve can work with its partners to figure out who did this. Let's also hope it doesn't delay Half-Life 2 any further.

One things for sure, this can't be ignored. Those in the know already have it and they're probably working on their first cheat right now. Legitimate customers are the ones who need to know about this as they are the ones that will get their machine potentially broken into when they go online. You can't warez with month old source code, all it's good for is exploiting others in multiplayer and allowing crackers to make better cracks. Customers need to know that there are cheaters out there right now with the full Half Life 2 source code, if this is true.