But it would appear we now have a similar mess on our hands. Read on!

Although as you may remember, back in early October 2003, German black-hat hacker Axel “Ago” Gembe (or as he would thereafter be known: “Osama Bin Leaker“) leaked the source code for Half-Life 2 and the Source engine, just several weeks after the game had received an infamous and indefinite delay a mere 14 days before the game was supposed to be released on the 30th of September. HL2 only dropped one year later, and by that point both the game and Source had been modified fairly extensively. But still, the repercussions of that incident were felt far and wide at the time, and, arguably, they can still be felt even to this day.

Valve has never freely released the full engine source codebase for the Source engine – not even its direct precursor, the “GoldSource” engine. In fact, they may never do so, and that’s understandable. It’s imperative that Source remain closed-source, due to its uniquely modular nature. It’s a shame, but it’s the way things have to be if we want Valve’s technology to be secure (especially within multiplayer games).

According to a detailed news story posted some hours ago on Interlopers, as well as a forum post on Facepunch, the full codebase for the 2007/Orange Box branch of the Source Engine has been leaked via a Russian anti-Steam website known as CSMania.

Supposedly, the leak originated from the network of a game development studio that had licensed the Source engine – this breach had nothing to do with Valve’s internal development network.

The original posting, which was made on CSMania, has since been made inaccessible. Here is that original posting, which we have translated into English as best and as directly as we could (we’ve taken the liberty of omitting those file links, which are no longer accessible anyway):

Everyone remembers adamix’s thread, right? I present you an archive containing a lot of source codes for different engines (act fast, may expire quickly, and I don’t know where to reupload this in the event of removal):

[redacted] And the shell:

[redacted] (A lot of interesting stuff lies right inside the root folder of the website and /storage folder, maybe even photographs and adamix’s other de-anon stuff, I didn’t check) If anyone wants to download the complete www and /storage folders, I won’t refuse, I’m very lazy, but there is a lot of interesting stuff in there. P.S. I didn’t upload the shell, I only found it there, don’t get caught with it, especially if you don’t know how the shell works. (just in case) P.S.S. Because this has reached the public after all, I want to make it clear that “the requisitioner” of this case is a friend of mine, whom adamix annoyed greatly apparently.

It would appear that this Adamix had gotten a hold of these files first, but someone else actually managed to get everything from right under his nose, after Adamix had ticked someone off. That’s about all we can gather directly from this whole situation.

I have gotten in touch with a few folks who have managed to get a hold of this elusive leak. They’ve told me that it dates from early 2008, and that it contains the entire source code library for the 2007 branch of the Source engine, as well as a number of Valve’s in-house resources (and as the original post stated, the leak also included source codes for other game engines: Unigine; Unreal Engine 3; and CryEngine 3).

It also contained source codebases for other Valve releases, including: Counter-Strike: Source; Day of Defeat: Source; Half-Life: Source; Half-Life 2; Half-Life 2: Deathmatch; Portal; Team Fortress 2; an early Source port of Team Fortress Classic; and one of TF2’s scrapped game iterations: “Invasion“.

There is even a folder for HL2: Episode Three, but strangely, all it contains is a single .cpp file for the mysterious “npc_surface“, a bizarre NPC entity which first surfaced (no pun intended) in the 2006 Source Particle Benchmark. It’s an odd entity (its model name is “Hydra.mdl“), composed out of some sort of globular, perhaps mercury-like fluid that constantly shifts and alters its shape in a single uniform mass – if the globules are split from the main body, they simply move back to it and resume their peculiar movement pattern.

It actually bears an uncanny resemblance to the Blobulator technology, developed during 2008’s Directed Design Experiments, later used to create Portal 2’s Mobility paint gels. But it certainly seems as though it was first created with Half-Life in mind, as far back as late 2006.

Interestingly, there’s a separate “Episode3” sub-folder within a different folder, “episodic“. In that sub-folder, there’s 3 .cpp files for what seem to be prototype game entities: “npc_combine_armored“; “npc_wpnscanner“; and “weapon_proto1“. The interesting thing is that these 3 entity files were first unintentionally released within the official Source SDK over 4 years ago, back in April of 2008.

That’s about all I’ve managed to gather. Word has it this thing is starting to spread, and I wouldn’t say that’s a good thing at all.

However, let’s not forget that Valve is no longer using this particular version of the 2007/Orange Box branch of the Source engine for any of their games. All of the games that previously used it have since switched onto newer and improved versions of the 2007/Orange Box variant, known generally as “Source 2009”. While this is a part of that very same engine family, and a direct descendant of that development lineage, the engine source code for this newer sub-branch has not been leaked.

In fact, it’s also worth mentioning that Valve has never actually released the gamecode for the Source 2009 sub-branch, which means modders have never actually been able to develop total conversion mods for the Valve games using it (i.e. all of them). They intended to do so at one point, but two years later… they still haven’t. What gives, Valve?

But in any case, while this is a significant leak, it doesn’t spell total doom for Valve’s games. Besides, Source has changed a lot in these past 5 years, and since we’re rapidly getting closer to Source 2, it’s about to change even more.

So not only is it not all that bad, but it could have simply been a lot worse. All is not lost!