some interesting comments @ /. (circa 2003)

“I got wind of this earlier this morning. There’s a big thread on it. So far, those looking at it believe it’s most likely a heavily-modified HL1 SDK, or something. Not sure if it’s a hoax yet. Of course, they’re gamers, not coders.

Thread here [halflife2.net].

Be interesting to see what the verdict of the Slashdot code gurus is.”

“Ok… It’s real. It looks very incomplete, pretty old, but real nonetheless. There’s functional code for things that never existed in HL1. (I bumume to be functional at least, obviously I can’t compile it but if this is a joke played by someone who just wrote a bunch of code to try to make it look real then they spent a LOT of time doing it.)

Now however, I have come to the conclusion that this IS an SDK, and not the full source of their engine.

Err, I take that back. Its the engine. Just found the occlusion system and the node management.

I feel for Valve about now. This sucks.

I’m deleting the source just out of respect. Log in to see images!”

“In the dlls directory is pretty much all of the equivalant stuff thats in the HL1 SDK. I thought it was fake at first after looking in there, then I started to look through all the physics code. All of the ragdoll type stuff that there’s no way is in HL1 and the code isn’t faked. Then I checked out the engine directory. Like I said in a post futher down, the full occlusion system and node management is all there, I didn’t have time to check for the actual rendering code because I had to get back to work. But I’m thoroughly convinced that it’s real. I even feel bad for downloading it now because I know if someone stole my code I’d be way more than ****ed about it. Let em steal a binary all day, but when they have the code it’s a whole new level. This is corporate espionage at its finest.”

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/02/1547218