GTA 5 source code leaks online
sportskeeda.com
sportskeeda.com
> Apparently there are 3 leaks in circulation:
> 3.3 gigs, src only
> 17 gigs, src + partial assets
> 1 TB, src + full assets
I really wish more games shared the source, even if it's under a restrictive license. It's just interesting to get a peak under the hood.
It makes me wish that copyright lasted less time and that submitting source code was a requirement for software projects to receive protection. Then once copyright expires the source can be in the public domain, and we don't have to waste time reverse engineering to reconstruct what was already done. Admittedly, it's a pipe dream. But it makes me sad how much software is destined to be lost to time because of copyright law.
A lot of people love GTA5 online, and hopefully this leak contains everything needed to create a private server should Rockstar decide to take down the service.
Maybe it is a bit more complicated with assets rights, that's what a couple game devs told me.
https://youtube.com/watch?si=8txvgqH6mqerinkZ&v=nT-TGvYOBpI&...
EDIT: Okay, I guess if it also include revision control then that makes more sense. Still, that is huge.
Would have been so interesting to see.
Also:
"The disc in question allegedly contains the source code to the original StarCraft game that GameSpot reported as being lost back in 2000 -- it forced Blizzard to start from scratch on its massively popular real-time strategy game."
What does this mean? StarCraft came out in 1998. Also losing one copy doesn't mean you lose all the other copies. And I can't find this supposed article from 2000. I have so many questions...
Some places have (or had) a business process of escrowing both the release and the source used to build it. Escrowing just the source used to build the release can require significantly less storage than escrowing the whole version control system. It also avoids the problem “we have the entire revision history, but we aren’t sure which commit was used to build these binaries”
If you lose everything-a colleague told me the story of a company whose offices were in WTC, luckily all the staff got out alive on 9/11, but they forgot to make offsite backups of the source code-the source code to the release(s) shipped to customers is most important, because you need it to make patches. The rest of the revision history, while valuable, is less essential.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamecollecting/comments/640iem/foun...
Here it is: https://web.archive.org/web/20170505105616/https://imgur.com...
There's also an argument to be made that the code itself does not infringe on their IP, as this was the lost source code from the old edition of StarCraft (from how I'm reading it in the news). Losing this code specifically made Blizzard restart the project, so it's not even the same project nor a commercially released product.
The former argument is pretty black and white. The latter very tenuous.
That’s not how IP works.
Blizzard didn’t forfeit their rights to the IP at any point. Even selling them a grab bag of stuff that unintentionally included a copy of the source code doesn’t mean the recipient actually received a legal license to the IP.
You can make all the arguments you want, but in the court of law you’re not going to get away with anything that involves giving away another company’s IP, even if they accidentally let you see a copy of it. “Finders keepers” doesn’t work with IP.
I said the code they have does not infringe on the commercially released product called StarCraft as it is not a portion thereof. I even stated that releasing it or otherwise making it available is tenuous at best. So I'm not even sure what you're arguing.
> “Finders keepers” doesn’t work with IP.
He didn't "find" it, they willingly transferred it to him along with a bunch of other things they randomly grabbed from their warehouse.
And if you don't make an online post about it you could even anonymously leak it to archive.org or something so at least that game won't be yet another that's lost forever thanks to DRM.
Congrats catching that ball that could be worth more than a hundred thousand dollars, would you like a grab bag of team merchandises instead?
He was an interesting fellow. He tried to teach me the value of self awareness, a lesson I was too young to internalize. I see now it was because he spent many years trying to break his raging habit.
The full source tree is at https://github.com/shawwn/hon by the way. There’s a lot of server side components and installer misc that were eluded from NoH, but you might like browsing.
> All code and assets are MIT licensed, to the extent that I'm authorized to do so. Which is to say, not at all. But nobody cares at this point
Kudos! I guess you know the people will enough to know they won't go after you?
Don't underestimate that software patents play a role in that. For instance, the source code release of Doom 3 had to be modified to remove a rendering technique under patent by Creative - even though John Carmack invented the technique simultaneously and independently of Creative[0]
[0]: https://www.theverge.com/gaming/2011/11/17/2569394/john-carm...
The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't
release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used
(wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I
honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did
to windows.It's probably different these days with much lrger teams and engines like Unreal, but still.
technically true, but the risk of tainting FOSS projects to the point they can be killed by corporate lawyers could be too high. What if a FOSS developer implements in perfect good faith an algorithm that shares some resemblance to a proprietary shared source piece of code they just studied two months before? Could whoever owns that code have enough grounds to send a c&d to stop any development if not attempting to take ownership of the project? Not sure if I'd like to test that. As much as I deeply dislike closed source, I'm convinced that having a firm distinction between open and closed helps to avoid some dangerous grey areas.
peek
[0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/rockstar-thanks-gta-online-player-wh...
Nothing on that site about this one, which I can't talk about :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/3ylmm4/comment/cyet...
bigfoot's biggest achievement was masking his cry as the sound of an empty stomach
Except a source code leak is basically the worst thing that could happen with this goal in mind.
It's a far cry from reverse engineering or a company open sourcing it. Most people aren't even going to touch it beyond the curiousity.
No competitor can think there's anything there worth their money and effort.
But I pretty sure everyone in modding community would be really happy.
GTA 5 hasn’t been licensed to you and you are absolutely not entitled to read it, even if you managed to get hold of it due to a theft. By reading it as an app developer you taint your knowledge with stolen intellectual property and stolen trade secrets, potentially exposing yourself and any game you work on (including for an employer) to criminal and civil penalties.
That’s the immense value of open source and Linux in specific. You are allowed to read it, improve it, rip out bits that are useful (as compliant with the license), and use the concepts as fully licensed intellectual property without trade secret encumbrance.
I am personally really interested in reading the source and see how they do things. I’m certain there’s fascinating bits of tech in there. But I wouldn’t underestimate the risk I would put myself, my family, and my employer at and the willingness of corporations to crush the small guy. See the pain inflicted by downloading mp3s, and the marginal value of copying an mp3 is infinitesimal compared to the source code of a AAA game to the studio.
Yes
How stupid. What a stupid waste
Got to love capitalism
Aren't former employees allowed to learn from their experience working on GTA V and develop products based on that knowledge, just as Rockstar programmers have used prior knowledge to develop GTA V?
Usually though it’s really hard to establish this unless you were a key person behind some key technology. But it’s very common in high finance (high end hedge funds, etc) that they go after people for bringing some algorithm or technique to a competitor.
But there is a huge difference between knowledge gained in employment, which is protected by employment law and common sense, and knowledge gained in the furtherance of a crime. Copying, distributing, studying, and replicating trade secrets from stolen source code is ABSOLUTELY not protected under any squinting at the law.
In isolation, all beautifully simple concepts, but there has been an awful lot built on top over several decades, stretching and outgrowing the simplicity. The complexity of modern technology has to live somewhere, though.
But speedrunners might be able to realize new exploits to reduce time that aren't apparent from the decomp.
I just don’t understand why would anyone do that but I am software dev working remotely it doesn’t make sense in „my world” - it most likely makes sense in someone’s else world.
But I didn’t want to spell out specific examples for stealing source code as the same for bikes to leave it up for readers.
I would treat the source code as radioactive toxic waste to be handled at your own peril.
Oh? I will allow it.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/teen-hacked-grand-th...
That being said travelodge Wi-Fi is so bad, maybe the only way would've been actually doing the job.
2) Hackers exfiltrate data from the target (this could be source code, database dumps, employee records, emails, or any combination of the above - basically anything that could be seen that has value to the company staying private.
3) Depending on the model used, the hackers either privately or publicly informs entity they have their data and unless a payment of X if made the data will get leaked or sold to the highest bidder.
Or are we really supposed to believe these criminals would follow some sort of made up honor code?
There isn't any measure of morality or honor involved like you are suggesting.
However the hackers also want to get paid, as soon as they go back on their word no one else will ever pay them.
But there is another "maybe" to consider (OP did ask for a brief explanation so I didn't go into all possibilities), did they encrypt the data? If they did and entity no longer has access to it they then have two options 1) restore the data from backup (if they had them and can restore service in a reasonable amount of time) / write off any data loss 2) pay up for the keys.
The hackers are the real victims here
These arm-chair game theory arguments tend to fall apart instantly as soon as you assume multiple rounds are played.
this will just serve as yet another feather in the cap for the exploit/hacking/modding community; and a lot of THOSE people make cash by selling exploits.
If rockstar cared about cheating ( they don't ) this would throw a big monkey wrench into that effort, obfuscation is half the battle in a game where book-keeping like an MMO would be performance prohibitive.
2. GTA online brings at least half a billion a year in microtransactions.
[0]: https://fivem.net/
Granted, it is all for utilities and automation external to the game itself, but it's definitely not a common language in 2023.
No game created from it could ever be legally released though.
Finding this would be pretty trivial depending on how much was stolen. And proving this would be more of a matter for Rockstar lawyers
Video games sit in this really weird place in software engineering where 'security' in the traditional sense doesn't necessarily apply.
Games are either single-player and don't really make any sense to exploit, or are multiplayer and have weird kernel-level DRM and anti-cheat, and on the server side, mainly host multiplayer matchmaking and servers.
Even if games have been exploited maliciously, users would have to go out of their way to find a malware-laden version on a shady BitTorrent website, and in that case the BitTorrent protocol is the real vector, not the video game itself.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying video game RCEs aren't security a problem—but they have fairly extensive positive implications that might not be usually considered.
I'm not sure I see the correlation? unless you explicitly mean online modding, which I'm not sure it happens that often.
I've been modding games for a few years and it's mostly interacting with Windows API and its capability to access other processes in the same user space by injecting DLLs. I've never looked for vulns inside the game itself.
If you refer to online modding, usually while they're local some games allow it, but as soon as it affects gameplay they're very rarely what I would say they're wide enough 'to thrive'.
It is true that the term of security doesn't apply that often to offline games, though.
Oh wait, Rockstar are going the multiplayer plus gacha route. A leak may hurt because the players may not need the gacha.
For single player games, I see no problem.
And for those hoping more games release source code, I don’t think the source for commercial games is in a state where you can learn from it :)
Putting a mechanic into your game where you spend real world money to gamble for skins and stuff. Game companies realized they can make a lot of money selling what modders used to be able to do for free. It's apparently a well known thing that there exist "whales" that spend huge amounts of money on these things. Probably a decent number are addicts being abused.
Edit: GTA6 code and a testing build were supposedly also taken in the Rockstar hack, but none of that has been publicly leaked as of today.
Alternately, appreciate the hard work by making interesting mods for the game. GTA5 has already had an extensive modding scene for the 10 years it’s been out, but now I assume mods will become easier to make and more powerful, benefiting Rockstar’s customers who paid for the game. And who is hurt? Not pirates, who could obtain the game starting shortly after release. Potentially people playing against cheaters online, except I’ve heard they’ve had free rein for a long time.
Companies should release their own games’ source code. Other software too.
Alternatively, you could LGPL the building blocks, still allow the end products to not need to be GPLd, but require development on the building blocks to be open sourced.
Copyright assignment + gpl so you can charge for a different licence too only works if nobody wants to fork. Doubt that’s the case for this sort of thing.
from the POV of management, a leak of the source might prevent a future re-release, which cuts into future potential profits!
It does cut on future dumb re releases :)
> from the POV of management, a leak of the source might prevent a future re-release, which cuts into future potential profits!
In the aftermath of the backlash from their shoddy legal engineering project, they decided to not remaster other games: https://kotaku.com/gta-iv-remastered-red-dead-redemption-can...
EDIT: I misinterpreted the comment as saying that old games weren't P2P, sorry.
If the matchmaking server isn't getting requests, you can put it on a potato VM for $5/month or whatever. Likewise at least old games could run with 64 players on much weaker CPUs than we have today. Surely a small VM could keep a handful of 16 player servers around.
https://www.polygon.com/22898895/dark-souls-pvp-exploit-mult...
Same deal with people talking about windows requiring new hardware really: for most people the answer should be "good, it'll stop rebooting to update now". Almost everyone is behind a firewall that doesn't allow incoming connections (it can't by default because of NAT). The only point of entry is the browser, and if you stay off the seedier parts of the web and have an adblocker, that's not really an issue either. Your bank or Spotify presumably aren't going to be dropping malware on your machine via old browser exploits.
You can't do that kind of thing if you're under some auditing regime, but they're not, right?
You need, at a very minimum:
— login system that also works with consoles
— persistence for users stats (maybe not for some kinds of games)
— matchmaking service (which really wants a persistence system for SBMM)
— make sure your systems aren't actively being exploited (you don't want to accidentally run a botnet)
— make sure nobody is "hacking" or modding the game (what's the point of keeping the severs up if they're filled with aimhacking bots)
— monitor the services to make sure they're up
— potentially patch the games on multiple platforms if you need to make a backwards-compatible change to fulfill any of the above.
— also potentially update your games if the console vendors make changes to their stacks
I agree that it sucks that the services are being shut down without any alternatives being provided, and I wish there was a way to force the publishers to support them for longer or provide an OSS servers options; but it is definitely not "free" or "easy" to provide these services for years.
Basically, unless someone takes control of your servers or other players, if the alternative is to shut it down, why not just leave as-is and not maintain/support it? If an impactful exploit is found, then shut it down. Preemptively shutting it down because the experience might degrade is silly; shutting it down will definitely break it.
You also want users to contact the the OS devs when their old, unmanaged, not updated game no longer works? Or you want the users not to install important security updates because they want to play one old game?
None of what you've said really makes sense in the the enterprise IT world. AS it's already been previously stated to you, you can't just spin up a VM and host your game on it, it just doesn't work like that. There are plenty of valid reasons for that in the thread already.
> Or you want the users not to install important security updates because they want to play one old game?
If the OS vendor is releasing patches that break user programs, then yes. This anti-customer attitude of move fast and break (other people's) things (without their consent) needs to die.
Historically, games were designed so that you very much could just spin up a VM and host it. Has that competence been lost? I'm not seeing why things aren't designed to continue working. It's not difficult to do.
You also now want the current login severs to continue to support the old game logins and handle auth for them? So we're still supporting the old game, still maintaining it.
These old unmaintained, unmanaged servers you want to run get hacked they distribute malware to your users. Whoops, the hosting provider finds out, the business account gets locked, now nothing works.
They get hacked a different way, they start mining bitcoin, your hosting provider finds out and locks the business account, whoops, now nothing works.
They get hacked a different way, they intercept the api calls to the auth servers. They use the auth tokens to break into people's main accounts, use that for phishing attacks, steal millions of dollars. Whoops.
>it's not difficult to do.
That's the point you don't get. It is difficult. Standards change, security changes, things NEED updating or things go wrong, people lose confidence in you, you dont make any money and you go out of business.
Spin up an old version of minecaft on an old version of Linux, see how long it lasts before it all goes wrong.
It is really cool that Id keeps the ET master server online from like 2003. There is more than one nowadays, but most servers only ping the old master. I occasionally work on ETL btw, nice to meet a fellow ET player!
For a large company, that money could've been a few micropennies back to the investors, so obviously it's silly to imagine. Also, if they really cared, they'd release the server code so others could run it.
Afaik most of Ubisoft games were offline singles. Even the game that sparked always online debate AC2 has been offline playable for very long time.
There are ofc online games that were shut down - that's a problem of whole industry.
46ffb7f65944d4aaf97fd1eb8718be2dcd1ede71d38228bf126d25cf4f100e7b 3.31GB no_pass_gtav_source.zip
76f50dd98da88ec574b6c2800193f3579e588073fd05f18190313af2cfbb6bf3 4.33GB GTAVSP.7z (Pass: Mi76#b>9mRed)
// DON'T FUCK WITH THIS UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING!
I've been told it's a pretty good game as well, in spite of the ranting comments.
Cache misses are one thing but here it's virtual memory and page tables!?
TLB = Translation Lookaside Buffer