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Is Sierra going to publish Half-Life 2? I assume they are, and man are they in for a treat! I just downloaded the E3 presentation movie featured at FilePlanet, and watching it was like the equivalent of having seen only silent movies and being presented to Citizen Kane for the first time! And then I’m comparing this game to the latest 3D action games available today! This game will bring the whole media into a new dimension! It’s completely jaw-dropping, and the gorgeous graphics is just a part of the equation. I could go on forever about it, but then I’d waste time you could have spent downloading it instead of reading my description of it! I would be very surprised if this game didn’t break the all-time sales record for an action-game by far!
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(re: Sierra and Half-Life 2) I believe Sierra lost its contract with Value to Activision and athough I am not sure of this my information is from reliable sources. As for the game itself the plot will be the thing that drives it home; it’s garphics are sub Doom 3 and it physic aren’t anything spectalcular in comparison. It will be a good game, but probably not as revolutionary as the first Half-Life.
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(re: Sierra and Half-Life 2)
I saw the video on Fileplanet (the smaller one, i’m not a subscriber) and I was quite disapointed by it. I thought “This is IT? It took them 5-6 years and all they’ve come up with is this?”
Then I looked at doom 3 and thought “It took them 3 years to make this from scratch. HL2 better have a great storyline.”
Half_Life used to be my favorite FPS game until I got CnC Renegade.
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(re: re: Sierra and Half-Life 2)
Eh, I thought Half-Life 2 looked way better than Doom 3. Even if the graphics of Doom 3 will be more detailed, it will require the absolute latest in hardware to even run at a decent speed. Half-Life 2 is supposed to work even on a P700. Ok, it won’t look great, but it will run. Also, you should be aware that the short teaser movie doesn’t give the game justice by a longshot. You don’t get to see anything spectacular there. The long E3 demo gives you an impression of how the AI looks in the game, demonstrates all the graphic effects (subdivision surface bump-mapping, all sorts of water, glass and fire effects, HUGE outdoor environments etc. etc.) and the physics engine. There’s a nice part in the movie where they use a “gravity gun” to pick up a body (with limbs moving realistically in response to the action) and uses it to push a table full of stuff down into a pool of water. Things react completely realistically to this, and it shows just how good the physics engine is. The characters also look more alive than anything I’ve seen before in a game like this. They use research from the 70’s about the face musculature to make the characters’ faces show emotions and produce perfect lip-synch. I also think that the environments in Doom 3 looked pretty boring given the resources of the game engine, where Half-Life 2 produces a wide range of interesting sceneries.
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(re: re: Sierra and Half-Life 2) Some evil hackers stole the source code for Half-Life 2. It won’t be coming out until April at the most.
Posted by: skcll on 10/17/2003
This reminds me – there was a question here I forgot to answer, about what we used to do to protect our source code.
In this particular case, it would be fun to have more details. Something about it is strange. It’s tough to believe that someone both STOLE, and DELETED the source code for Half-Life 2, and that NO BACKUPS existed.
That said…. it did happen one time during my days running Sierra. One of our developers, John Harris, lost his source code to Frogger, and fell into such a funk over it that it took me MANY months to get him motivated to write the code over again. In those days (early 80’s) source code wasn’t on central servers – it was on a floppy. I think John lost it due to a floppy read error.
In modern times, source is usually stored in a source library, on a central server, and backed up every night. For someone to steal the source, they would have had to get past the firewall at Valve, figure out the password to the source archival system, download the source, and then delete it. Then, to really have an impact, they would need to find the backups, and delete all of them. Possible – but, not likely.
-Ken W -
(re: re: re: Sierra and Half-Life 2) Valve haven’t lost any source code (i.e. it has not been deleted). Valve have to slip the release date so they are able to rewrite the code to ensure the game is not compromised on release. The Half Life brand is a major cash cow for all companies involved and if it’s unplayable online (due to cheats/hacks) it will quickly die out and not generate the massive revenue that Half Life 1 has. Although HL1 has cheats/hacks – none are at the level of the source code and so (given a little time) are circumventable with a patch or other means. HL2 could have had cheats created at the engine level that would be nigh on impossible to identify/prevent running.
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(re: re: re: re: Sierra and Half-Life 2) Valve haven’t lost any source code (i.e. it has not been deleted). Valve have to slip the release date so they are able to rewrite the code to ensure the game is not compromised on release. The Half Life brand is a major cash cow for all companies involved and if it’s unplayable online (due to cheats/hacks) it will quickly die out and not generate the massive revenue that Half Life 1 has. Although HL1 has cheats/hacks – none are at the level of the source code and so (given a little time) are circumventable with a patch or other means. HL2 could have had cheats created at the engine level that would be nigh on impossible to identify/prevent running.
Posted by: Adam Hearn on 10/18/2003
Adam:
OK – that makes sense. I suspect you are right.
-Ken W -
(re: re: re: Sierra and Half-Life 2) Yeah, naturally Valve have backups of their work. But what is completely beyond me is why a software company with such a project actually had it accessible on a network directly conntected to the Internet, and in addition to that used Microsoft products like Outlook Express, which are known to be insecure and often hacked?! Shouldn’t they be more protective of their material, and work on it in a physically separated network? I mean, they are working on technology to distribute the game on the Internet and support online playing in the game, but shouldn’t they separate the basic product from the Internet as much as they could? At the very least, the programming team could have stored the source code in an internal, protected network. No use to have source code spread out over the whole net. As much as I hate the person/people who hacked Valve, I can only feel that they have themselves to blame.
And about Sierra: I’ve read about that Frogger incident. I also think I read somewhere about the security measures of Sierra in the late 80’s. I remember things about security access zones in the building and a vault with hardware that was not released on the market yet. Things like that. Does anyone know if TSN/INN ever had problems with people trying to sabotage things, or hackers breaking into the system somehow? -
(Half Life 2 Revisited) I have heard a rumor that although the source code was stolen, one of the major reasons that the game was pushed back was to refine some of the graphics because Doom 3 looks considerably better than expected and that Valve wanted to “beef” up the graphic potential of the game. Althought this is all a rumor, it does make a little bit of sense because looking the the game play videos of Doom 3, it does look better than HL2.
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(re: Half Life 2 Revisited)
Ken (if you’re still there, it says your user #999999 is no longer registered) would you of let Valve be in “development” of Team Fortress 2 and HL2 for this long(since HL1 was released Valve says)? It just seems like such a long time for basicly nothing to be released (not even a playable demo like id’s doom 3)
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