Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxweylandt | Hacker News Reader

The article claims/repeats the claim that this cost valve $250 million, but I don't see how. If the leaked version wasn't very playable the damage can't come from lost sales

View on HN

yeah that is just "let's throw random numbers to victimize ourselves even more".

I don't think a lot of people downloaded the unfinished source code, compiled it, played the game and never bought the conplete game.

The worst that happened were people making memes with some 3d and graphics assets which didn't cost anyrhing to Valve. Quite the opposite it was free advertising.

The justice department has absurd ways of determining how much damages were caused by unauthorized access. Kevin Mitnick talks about it in his book "Ghost in the Wires", but he was accused of causing $1.5mil in damages to DEC or Sun or something because he copied code, printed it out on paper, and kept it for himself (he didn't distribute it to anyone else). Fortunately, he was ultimately only ordered to pay a few thousand in restitution.

Not that I can speak for this specific story, as I have no firsthand testimony, but Mitnick is a notorious embellisher, downplayer and (anecdotally) liar.

*was

I was unaware he passed. My apologies and condolences.

(Prize of actual secure software +1$)/NrOfPerpetraitors.

Makes perfect sense just has nothing to do with justice.

In around 10th grade a friend and I got the leak just as it came out and then used it to make the characters lips sync to our voices for a chemistry class project. The engine worked, the lips matching word tech was awesome, and people couldn’t believe what we pulled off.

Imagine that intro scene in HL2 where you walk through a trap door Pepsi vending machine and behind it there’s a lab - and instead of talking about HL2 stuff, Alyx and company talk about sampling and testing local natural water sources.

Props, my friends just played through the demos for the most part. Quickly we learned the e3 demo was scripted when it was ostensibly the enemy so reacting to the environment

But I did use it as inspiration for an 3D engine project at school, they had geometrical formulas I had trouble to find online, at least efficiently implemented. It helped a bit in reverse engineering their map format too so I could just display any sort of already made map.

I imagine that if I branched out in gaming it would have been a nice bonus, it's not everyday you get to see the competition's code. I suppose they lost in opportunity cost to license their thing, a bit ?

Hard to say - I don't think Valve was ever big on licensing their technology. Source was used for dozens of games in the end (https://vghe.net/source-engine.html) which isn't too bad, but Source 2 licensing isn't even offered.

> The game didn't run on my computer. I made some code changes to get it to run in a basic form without shaders or anything, but it wasn't fun.

Some people might have tried, but that doesn't sound like it was a great gaming experience. If it ran at all.

It was pretty fun, at least while waiting for the actual game to come out.

Pretty sure the leak also lead them to release the Source engine's code, which was wildly successful.

Valve has not released the source engine code beyond their partners.

It's literally on Github. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013

This is the SDK and some parts of the engine that make the SDK easier to use and grok. It is not the engine.

You cannot compile that and get a fully working engine.

It's a bit like claiming the Win32 API is the Windows NT kernel.

It's literally SDK, if you care to actually read your link. Not the engine itself: the game-specific logic DLLs (client.dll and server.dll in the game's folder) that hook into the engine, and can be modified to make mods. Valve started publishing those with the release of their first game in 1998.

You can read more about the modding workflow here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/My_First_Mod

If you are familiar with the latest version of Unreal, then it's like having access to the "Games" project in your solution and only some headers from the "Engine" project.

They started licensing their code before the leak, e.g. to Troika Games. They never released the code publicly.

Yeah, I remember gaming mags highlighting how VtM:B was using the "Half Life 2 engine".

I vaguely remember playing it. It was total garbage (the leaked copy). You could play maybe a few levels etc. Ultra buggy.

I think my buddy burned it to 3 CD-Rs and it spread around my gaming friends in HS pretty quickly.

Yeh I recall the leaked version quickly gained a poor reputation. I had zero interest in downloading or playing it. Not surprised that sales of the final release were unaffected.

That's not accurate at all, the beta was revolutionary - you could play with the physics, the gravity gun.

It wasn't a proper game yet for sure, but as a 2003 tech demo the beta was one of the best, you could recreate the legendary E3 demo [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ddJ1OKV63Q

Some of it may come from them rebuilding a lot of the game after the leak, but that was arguably an unnecessary exercise to protect their IP. Even then, not close to that figure. Federal agencies are keen to protect corporations' quarterly profits, even if it ruins people's lives. Nothing new about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com