In explaining why the Half-Life
2 source leak is so damaging (apart from
the potential theft of Valve's IP), some helpful people on slashdot
explain how unscrupulous (or just plain teenage) players might
exploit
the code to cheat. In particular, one poster mentions some of the
Starseige:Tribes
cheats floating around:
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.
It also completely stinks that such a community-friendly
company like Valve has had this done to them. The have a long track-record of
helping out people who want to release free extension to their games - and
HL2 is to be accompanied by a Software Development Kit and tools.
At least some of
the community has responded
well though - one person who confirmed that the code is indeed theirs
said:
I feel for Valve about now. This sucks.
I'm deleting the source just out of respect.
Fortunately, it appears that
the code is about a month old and as such will contain a bunch of bugs
(many people have assumed this given the pushing back of the release date)
that will be obvious to Valve employees if they see them present in other
games.
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