There is a brief Source Engine Q&A on VERC, asking Valve programmer Yahn Bernier a few questions about the machinima capabilities of the engine powering Half-Life 2 and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.

There is a Q&A with Marc Laidlaw on Gaming Nexus, asking the Valve writer about Half-Life 2. Pretty much all questions are related to writing the story for the game.

If publisher Vivendi is to be believed, the recent Half-Life 2 source code steal has lead to additional delays for the game itself. In fact, it has been pushed back until at least April 2004. The extra time is needed to rewrite part of the code that was stolen, which of course is mostly related to the multiplayer side of things. Should Valve disagree with Vivendi's assessment I'm sure we'll hear soon enough.

The theft of part of its source code has delayed until April 2004 the launch of "Half Life II", the hotly anticipated alien-hunting game of Vivendi Universal Games, a company official said. "A third of the source code was stolen. It's serious because it forces us to delay the launch of the game by at least four months, that is to April 2004. Just the time to rewrite parts of the game," VU Games president of international operations Christophe Ramboz told daily Les Echos in its Tuesday edition.

The guys at Half-Life Source will be visiting Gabe Newell at the Valve offices soon, where they will ask him about Half-Life 2, the whole source code thing and more for broadcasting tonight. They are taking user submitted questions, you can post those here.

We've gotten some more details on the recent Half-Life 2 source leak from Gabe Newell for you guys to read here. I have verified that this is legit over the phone just to be safe. Here's the latest:

1) We've taken our network connection down to pretty much a minimum. We're still finding machines internally that have been compromised.

2) The suite of tools that the attacker was using included the modified version of RemotelyAnywhere (basically a Remote Desktop-style remote admin tool), Haxker Defender (a process, registry key and file hiding tool), the key logger, and various networking utilities that allowed them to transfer files (compressors, NetCat, and FTP). We also are pretty sure they were sniffing our network to gather passwords and other information. Haxker Defender includes a file system driver that allows an attacker to have stuff on your machine that is invisible, unless you do something like mount the drive under another OS that has NTFS support.

We have determined one way of detecting some infected machines, which is using a connection viewer to detect connections to anomalous hosts external to our network.

We still don't know their entry method.

3) In general, the community has been remarkably swift at tracking down the sources of the leak. What would be most helpful now are IP addresses of the people who were responsible for the intrusion or for the denial of service attacks.

4) Also, please continue to send in URLs of websites hosting the source code. We've been contacting people and asking them to take it down.

5) There's anecdotal evidence that other game developers have been targeted by whoever attacked us. This hasn't been confirmed. We've been providing other game developers with more detailed information about the exploits and evidence of infiltration.

6) We're running a little bit blind with our network shut down, but it seems like some of the press has picked up the story. I've been fielding calls from the mainstream non-games, non-technical press.all day. Hopefully they will get to report shortly what a mistake it is to piss off a whole bunch of gamers and get them hunting you around the Internet.

For any information related to this, please send it to helpvalve@valvesoftware.com, or you can always send to gaben@valvesoftware.com as well.

In case you hadnt heard, the source code for Valve Software's Half-Life 2 has been leaked. Here's a statement from Gabe Newell via HalfLife2.net

Ever have one of those weeks? This has just not been the best couple of days for me or for Valve.
Yes, the source code that has been posted is the HL-2 source code.
Here is what we know:
1) Starting around 9/11 of this year, someone other than me was accessing my email account. This has been determined by looking at traffic on our email server versus my travel schedule.
2) Shortly afterwards my machine started acting weird (right-clicking on executables would crash explorer). I was unable to find a virus or trojan on my machine, I reformatted my hard drive, and reinstalled.
3) For the next week, there appears to have been suspicious activity on my webmail account.
4) Around 9/19 someone made a copy of the HL-2 source tree.
5) At some point, keystroke recorders got installed on several machines at Valve. Our speculation is that these were done via a buffer overflow in Outlook's preview pane. This recorder is apparently a customized version of RemoteAnywhere created to infect Valve (at least it hasn't been seen anywhere else, and isn't detected by normal virus scanning tools).
6) Periodically for the last year we've been the subject of a variety of denial of service attacks targetted at our webservers and at Steam. We don't know if these are related or independent.

Well, this sucks.
What I'd appreciate is the assistance of the community in tracking this down. I have a special email address for people to send information to, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com. If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details. There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC, so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great.
We at Valve have always thought of ourselves as being part of a community, and I can't imagine a better group of people to help us take care of these problems than this community.

Gabe

Important: Just to be clear, it's ok to talk about the leak and the possible implications, however we'll nuke you and your family if you even make the most slight clever hint of where to download it or even screenshots of it.

There is a new Half-Life 2 interview on GameSpot, conducted at yesterday's Radeon 9800 XT launch event at Alcatraz. Questions are about pulling in gamers who haven't played Half-Life 1, the difference between the development process of the first game and the sequel, what really stands out in HL2, and the release date.

Since the hopefuls are still holding their breath today for some kind of miracle of Half-Life 2, yeah go ahead and exhale. I'll be attending the little ATI/Dell/Valve deal this evening showing off the new ATI 9800XT and rumor has it some new HL2 stuff. Will report back late tonight with what is up. Here's the latest PRs going:

- ATI and Valve Team up to Showcase the best of 3D Gaming
- ATI introduces RADEON 9800 XT and RADEON 9600 XT

The PR of course announced that Half-Life 2 is shipping with the 9800XT which really isnt very far from hitting the shelves. Will find out if the early cards will just carry coupons for a free copy of HL2 or if Valve really is just a smidge away from release. More late tonight! Unless of course they make me sign papers saying I cant. Doubtful though. You can find a review of the new 9800XT card on Tech-Report by the way.

Update by Maarten: Various press releases and this ATI page (thanks Conan) mention that Half-Life 2 wont be in the box, but will be shipped later. You can opt to download it through Steam as well.

We've managed to get an official statement from Valve Software on the release date of Half-Life 2 being pushed back. Here is word that I got directly from Doug Lombardi of Valve Software. Valve seems to have been having some mail issues so you may not see this on other sites, however we can confirm with absolute certainty that this is valid:

The previously announced September 30th release date for Half-Life 2 is being pushed back. We are currently targeting a holiday release, but do not have a specific "in-store" date to share at this time. We will release that information as soon as we have confirmed a new date.

As more information becomes available from Valve we'll have it here for you.

There is a new Half-Life 2 Q&A with Gabe Newell on Half-Life2.net today, with questions about the detail of City 17 and how mod makers can recreate that, the SDK release, AI, Steam distribution and a few other topics.

Tech-Report and AnandTech both have more in-depth articles taking a look at the performance of ATI and NVidia cards when it comes to Half-Life 2. As was shown a couple of days ago, the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro is the current winner but NVidia will be coming out with improved drivers soon which may or may not increase performance dramatically.

Normally, when you see benchmarks on TR with fancy graphs and the like, we have conducted the testing ourselves using test systems we've built and installed personally. That's not the case with these numbers, which were produced in a very controlled environment. ATI and Valve collaborated on the system setups, and my role in the process was reduced to specifying verbally which script should be run. A very protective ATI employee kept my hands off the keyboard and kicked off the scripts for me, so not even in that basic way can I claim these are "my" benchmark numbers.

Update: another article can be found on Gamers Depot which also has quite a few new screenshots.

Valve has released a new Bink video trailer, this time showing off the DirectX 9 specific effects possible with the Source engine, which is powering Half-Life 2. You'll see soft shadowing, bumpmapping and high-dynamic range rendering ("for rendering realistic outdoor scenes, produces glows and saturated colors in bright areas of the scene"). Missed any other videos? Here they are again

- Source DirectX 9.0 Effects Trailer
- Half-Life 2 Barricade Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Bugbait Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Tunnels Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Trap Town Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Kleiner's Lab Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Docks Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 G-Man Bink Video

Gamers Depot has posted NVidia's response to yesterday's Half-Life 2 benchmark day which was sponsored by ATI. They say newer drivers will show NVidia's products in a much better light when tested with Half-Life 2.

In addition to the developer efforts, our driver team has developed a next-generation automatic shader optimizer that vastly improves GeForce FX pixel shader performance across the board. The fruits of these efforts will be seen in our Rel.50 driver release. Many other improvements have also been included in Rel.50, and these were all created either in response to, or in anticipation of the first wave of shipping DirectX 9 titles, such as Half Life 2. ...

Gamers Depot has a story up, offering some performance/price comparisons for Half-Life 2 tested with several different ATI and NVidia cards. There's also a Q&A with Gabe Newell about DirectX and technology related subjects. AnandTech has a quick story with a few notes on performance as well.

- Half-Life 2 has a special NV3x codepath that was necessary to make NVIDIA's architecture perform reasonably under the game;
- Even with the special NV3x codepath, ATI is the clear performance leader under Half-Life 2 with the Radeon 9800 Pro hitting around 60 fps at 10x7. The 5900 ultra is noticeably slower with the special codepath and is horrendously slower under the default dx9 codepath;

Update: another article is available at Tech Report.

The latest HalfLife2.net forum thread has info from Valve's Gabe Newell on the three different versions of Half-Life 2 they plan to release. Apparently the plan is to release a single-player only mass market version ("sold mainly at the Costcos and Walmarts of the world"), a traditional single/multiplayer version for places like EB Games, and a collector edition's version ("with lots of cool bonus stuff for people who like cool bonus stuff"). In addition, Gabe reveals Steam pricing plans

In the Steam world, some people will want to buy it once, like the middle SKU above. Other people will want to buy the game on subscription (e.g. $9.95/month). The good news for the "buy it once" crowd is, well, they only have to pay once. The bad news is that when we come out with new content (expansion products, TF 2, and presumably other games) then they have to pay separately for those. We're pretty sure that the $9.95 guys are going to get the better value, as we've been pretty good over the years at generating a lot of content. ...

update: Since it seems people need it made a little more clear, here you go a nice translation from our local informative whore timm:

1: Retail box, singleplayer, no multiplayer - ONE TIME FEE!
2: Retail box, singleplayer and multiplayer - ONE TIME FEE!
3: Retail box, singleplayer, multiplayer and other unknown cool stuff (collectors edition) - ONE TIME FEE!
4: STEAM, singleplayer and multiplayer - ONE TIME FEE!
5: STEAM, subscription model. Pay a montly fee and have access to all Valve titles, including the stuff on STEAM now (HL, OpFor, CS, TFC, etc), Half-Life 2, all future stuff they put out, and so forth.

Second, patches (bugfixes, maintenance releases, etc) will be free no matter which of the six option you decide to go for.

Community-based mods will be free unless the authors want to charge for them. Free community based mods will/can be made available though STEAM free of charge.

The second part of the Computer & Video Games Half-Life 2 interview is now online. Doug Lombardi of Valve Software answers questions about the enemies, the inventory management, vehicles, getting mod teams started with Half-Life 2, how the game will run on minimum specs, and a couple of other things (though Doug isn't exactly forthcoming on most subjects).

Toward the end of the demo you've shown, there's a bit where Gordon discards his shotgun to pick up a rocket launcher. Does this mean there'll be a limit to what he can carry, or will it be a "carry all" inventory like in the original Half-Life?
- Lombardi: Actually, in Condition Zero we really looked at the idea of limiting the amount of weapons that you have and making choices, and that's really something that seems like it will be interesting, but turns out to be not a lot of fun. Some choices are cool, but having to constantly manage your inventory is tedious - at least, that's how I see it. I wouldn't go so far as to say the inventory in Half-Life 2 is completely unlimited, but I would say that inventory management is not fun so we're not going to place that onto the player.

Computer & Video Games has a new Half-Life 2 interview up, as they got to chat with Valve Software's Doug Lombardi at the ECTS game show. Part one of this interview (part two goes up tomorrow) deals with the current state of the game, the change of setting for the sequel, the AI and scripting. Here's a bit on what they're doing right now

- What are you focusing on in the game then at the moment, in terms of development?
Lombardi: Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting.
- So you're at the fine-tuning stage, then?
Lombardi: Yeah. In the prior generation of stuff, level designers were artists, in a sense, and what we've done is de-coupled the two processes and we've gone with the idea of an orange map, where we make a quite simple orange version of the level, and that's strictly for pathing and playtesting right off the bat. ...

Half-Life 2 Online is the latest site to feature a Q&A with Valve's Gabe Newell. The HL2O guys ask about the editing tools, shadowing effects, monsters returning from Half-Life 1, weather effects and a few other things. Thanks HomeLAN.

We've got another new Half-Life 2 video this afternoon to check out, Barricade is the title and this one showing off some interaction of Gordon and Barney v2.0 and some guns firing and all that fun..

- Half-Life 2 Barricade Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Bugbait Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Tunnels Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Trap Town Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Kleiner's Lab Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 Docks Bink Video
- Half-Life 2 G-Man Bink Video

If you care to get an account with them, Gamasutra has posted an article format interview with Marc Laidlaw, writer and game designer at Valve Software. The interview covers Marc's history as a novelist, his work on Half-Life and of course the work he's doing on Half-Life 2.