Half Life Source Beta

[Eugene Aubry]

Sevenmonths earlier, on October 2, 2003, Valve Corporation director Gabe Newell awoke in Seattle to find that the source code for the game his company had been working on for almost five years had leaked onto the Internet. The game had been due for release a couple of weeks earlier, but the development team was almost a year behind schedule. Half-Life 2 , one of the most anticipated games of the year, was going to be late, and Newell had yet to admit to the public how late it would be. Such a leak was not only financially threatening, but also embarrassing.

After he had spent a few moments pondering these immediate concerns, an avalanche of questions tumbled through Newell's mind. How had this happened? Had the leak come from within Valve? Which member of his team, having given years of their life to building the game, would jeopardise the project in the final hour?

"I got into hacking by being infected myself," Gembe tells me. "It was a program that pretended to be a Warcraft 3 key generator and I was stupid enough to run it. It was an sdbot, a popular general-purpose malware at the time."

"At the time I couldn't a afford to buy games," he explains. "So I coded my own malware to steal CD keys in order to unlock the titles I wanted to play. It grew quickly to one of the most prominent malwares at the time, mostly because I started writing exploits for some unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows."

In Seattle, Newell's first thought was to go to the police. His second was to go to the players. At 11pm on October 2, 2003, Newell posted a thread on the official Half-Life 2 forum entitled, "I need the assistance of the community."

"Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code," he wrote in the post. Newell went on to outline the facts that Valve had been able to piece together so far. He explained that someone had gained access to his e-mail account about three weeks earlier. Not only that, but keystroke recorders had been installed on various machines at the company. According to Newell, these had been created specifically to target Valve, as they were not recognised by any virus-scanning applications.

Gembe's malware crimes, while undeniably exploitative and damaging, were crimes driven by a passion for games rather than profits. His favourite game of all was Half-Life. In 2002, like so many fans of the series, Gembe was eager for new details about the forthcoming sequel. That's when he had the idea: if he was able to hack into Valve's network, he might be able to find something out about the game nobody else knew yet. He would have his moment of glory but more than that, he would have the reassurance that the game's creators had everything under control.

Gembe scanned Valve's network to check for accessible Web servers where he believed information about the game might be held. "Valve's network was reasonably secure from the outside, but their name server allowed anonymous AXFRs, which gave me quite a bit of information."

AXFR stands for Asynchronous Full Zone Transfer, a tool used to synchronise servers. It's also a protocol used by hackers to peek at a website's data. By transferring this data, Gembe was able to discover the names of all the sub-domains of the company's Web directory.

"In the port scan logs, I found an interesting server which was in Valve's network range from another corporation named Tangis that specialised in wearable computing devices," he says. " Valve didn't firewall this server from its internal network."

Gembe had found an unguarded tunnel into the network on his first attempt. "The Valve PDC had a username 'build' with a blank password," he explains. "I was able to crack the passwords in no time. Once I had done that... well, basically I had the keys to the kingdom."

There's something about the secrets and codes that video-game developers leave in their games that allows players a kind of glimpse behind the curtain. For a moment, the game's fiction is broken and a player is able to see the cogs and workings behind the virtual world.

Arguably the earliest example of an "Easter egg" in a game was in the 1979 Atari 2600 game Adventure. The game was programmed by one of Atari's young employees, Warren Robinett. Like many of his colleagues, Robinett was disillusioned with his employer's policy of not crediting the game's designers and creators. He added a secret room to the game that, if discovered, revealed the text: "Created by Warren Robinett." It was a way to leave his own mark on the virtual world he created and, for players who first discovered the room (long after the designer left Atari), it was a link to an unseen creator.

Gembe began to search for information about the game. He found various design documents and notes about its creation, the kind of material he hoped he might find. As the weeks passed, Gembe realised that nobody at Valve had noticed he was inside the company's network. He began to push a little harder. That's when he found the ultimate prize: the source code for the game he had been waiting to play for so many years.

"Getting the source code was easy, but the game didn't run on my computer," he says. "I made some code changes to get it to run in a basic form, but it wasn't fun. Also, I only had the main development 'trunk' of the game. They had so many development branches that I couldn't even begin to check them all out."

The secret was too potent for Gembe to keep to himself. While he maintains that he was not the person who uploaded the source code to the Internet, he undoubtedly passed the code to the person who did.

On October 7th 2003, a twenty-one year old German computer hacker named Axel Gembe exploited vulnerabilities within Valve's internal network to gain access to servers hosting in-development game files for several noteworthy upcoming Valve projects. Amongst these were Half-Life 2, which was scheduled for release in the next year, and early builds of Counter-Strike Source and Team Fortress 2, amongst others.

The 2003 Leak gives a unique insight into the development process of Half-Life 2, as the files that were leaked span several development periods. Many of these periods contained recycled concepts, but several of them such as the Air Exchange had no direct influence on the final version of Half-Life 2.

The Source Engine's source code was the first of the Valve development files to leak, and it was arguably the most influential of them all. The files were not leaked by Gembe - instead, and individual associated the hacking group myg0t was given the files by Gembe. The individual stated that he had no intentions of sharing them, but the source code was quickly leaked onto torrent sites and on P2P download websites. As a result of the myg0t member leaking the files, Gembe decided to begin releasing the remainder of the Valve Software leaked files onto the Internet. It is theorised that if the myg0t team had not leaked the source code, Gembe would not have leaked the remainder of the files.

The source code that was leaked is highly unfinished, and is an earlier build of the Source Engine than exists on the compiled Half-Life 2 build from 2003. The source code requires -Visual Studio 6.0 from 1998, Service Pack 5 for VS6.0 and the Processor Pack 5 for VS6.0 to compile correctly. The Source Code also only support v35/36 models instead of the newer v37 model format found in the compiled Leak.

This patch is the only known patch released for the Half-Life 2 leak from Valve's internal servers. It is included within the anon-hl2 files, making downloading it unnecessary for modern Half-Life 2 Leak fans. It should only be downloaded as a curiosity, as installing it over the anon-hl2 files is redundant. The files range in date from the 24th of September 2003 at 12:45 AM to the 27th of September 2003 at 8:46 AM.

The files are also useful to infer what Valve added to Half-Life 2 during this period, such as the new 'Art' facemap, a texture for the Jeep's ammo box, and some citizen lines from the Coast gunship battle.

Anon releases the Detonater 52.13 drivers from Valve, ones claimed to increase performance. Not much else to discuss here.Gembe also released leaked drivers from Nvidia, name the Detonator 52.13 drivers. These drivers were designed to improve performance in 3D games, including Half-Life 2. Evidence exists across the Internet of individuals on forums such as neowin.net attempting to install these drivers onto their own Nvidia cards, to mixed results - some reported graphical glitches and card failures, and others reported moderate performance boosts.

HL1ports is a noteworthy leak that contained an unfinished but quite complete build of Half-Life Source, and a highly unfinished build of Counter-Strike Source. Both builds suffer from fairly severe glitches, and the Counter-Strike Source build includes mostly temporary and unfinished textures, in addition to very early models, sounds and maps.

The hl1ports leak also includes two player models from the "Invasion" stage of TF2 as placeholders. It can be assumed that the later "temp" CS player models contained within hl1ports had replaced the older TF2 models for a lengthy period of time, as the TF2 models used an obsolete model version.

In addition to the playermodels, the materials folder contains a large number of unused TF2 textures. They vary, ranging from earlier versions of the Alien Commando texture, to separated versions of the current Human Commando texture, to 2 separate sets of textures that were used on a playermodel that is currently not publicly available. It gives a good - albeit small - insight into the development process of Team Fortress 2.

The WC Mappack is one of the most noteworthy portions of Gembe's leaks. Over a thousand map sources in .vmf format were leaked and made available for download, ranging from tiny maps that were used to demonstrate features of bugs, all the way to complete storyline maps and fragments of maps that would eventually be discarded or make their way into the retail Half-Life 2 storyline. The .vmf files can be opened in the Half-Life 2 map editor Hammer and explored or fixed as necessary. Contrary to The WC Mappack does not contain every map from Half-Life 2's development, instead it only reportedly contains roughly a quarter of every .vmf source file that Valve made during Half-Life 2's development. Many of the maps rely on obsolete scripting or removed models and textures as these assets were removed as Half-Life 2 evolved, requiring fans to fix them to make them playable or aesthetically correct.

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