I wonder if this will allow for reviving old SRCDS (Source Dedicated Server) versions.
Older versions of popular titles like Counter-Strike: Source would still be playable on their original hardware if the old clients + servers were available. As it is now, these games are no longer playable on original early-mid 2000s hardware because Steam no longer supports Win2k/XP, and even if it did, the games themselves have been heavily patched and updated over the years and have higher system requirements. Old clients still exist (even prior to "teraleak"), but the SRCDS versions are gone as far as I can tell.
I just think it'd be fun to host retro LAN parties using the hardware and software we had back then, or even just to revisit what it was like to be a server OP in those days.
I think the most interesting thing I've seen from these leaks are the Portal 2 beta content videos. The temporary time-slow mechanic and the beta voice acting have been really interesting to see. The time slow mechanic in particular could have made the game a lot more accessible to gamers with slow reflexes and refocused the game on the puzzle elements.
What "fast reflexes" is will vary by person but keep in mind the average person (not necessarily the average gamer) struggles with moving the character/camera in the way they want when things are stationary with normal physics. Now try taking that to launching a portal while flying midair, maybe even on controller. I mean I got through it fine but it would have helped make 2 player a lot easier with my dad at the time.
My teenage self who was pretty good on the controller would disagree. Some of the puzzles required turning around midair or carefully timed shots. Also, they did use the slow-motion mechanic at the end of the game to prompt you to shoot the "killing portal"
I can't recall exactly which puzzles correspond to which game, but there are absolutely puzzles that require a decent amount of speed and dexterity. To the point where my wife got totally stuck on some because she's slow with a mouse.
Like firing portals while in midair, or catching a cube as you pass it during a jump.
Why does an optional, opt in easy mode take away the satisfaction of its target audience? You are not required to play it. It is like saying having a gluten free option on the menu takes away the enjoyment of a meal's target audience.
Imagine if there was a lift to the peak of Mt. Everest. That existing alone would undermine the achievement of having reached said peak.
Also, it's very hard to get multiple difficulty settings right. It's much better to have cheats available to make the experience easier and learn to get better at the game through those.
I would respectfully disagree that playing a video game is equivalent to climbing the world's tallest mountain peak. Sometimes I want to play a game to experience the story.
If they climbed it without a wheelchair, it was easy mode, so not a tru achievement. If there's an easy mode, there can be a hard mode too. I thought higher difficulty modes are interesting because they make an impression of a bigger work and provide a bigger dopamine reward. If the enemy survives longer it also mean a rich gameplay.
There are many, many mountains to climb. Some are harder than others. Each doesn't need to have an escalator so everyone can climb it.
Developers have limited time and all features, including accessibility features, take away from that time. There are many games I never beat because they were difficult.
> Why does an optional, opt in easy mode take away the satisfaction of its target audience?
It just does. Completing a challenge gives a feeling of achievement. That feeling is lessened if others get the reward of completion without the effort. The Mt. Everest comparison sibling is accurate. If a difficult game had a "skip this hard thing" button on the screen you could press whenever you want, that would be a big turnoff to a lot of players. Dark Souls would never have caught on if it had such a button.
Maybe you should base your sense of satisfaction on the overcoming of the challenge itself instead of the social aspect of other people not having it then.
And even if you want to feel superior to others, you can just count them as cheaters and not count their "achievements?" Many games already disable achievements if you turn cheats on already.
> Maybe you should base your sense of satisfaction on [...]
If senses like satisfaction were fully voluntarily controllable then arguably there would be no need for games in the first place. I feel there's generally more satisfaction from overcoming a well-designed concrete obstacle rather than self-hindering that accomplishes nothing in particular and that could've just been avoided. At the end of the day all challenges in games are artificial and avoidable, but some separation (like having to go into settings, enable cheats, then open dev console to enable godmode, rather than just having a godmode keybind) is good for tricking the brain.
That said, the challenge of the Portal games (outside of challenge modes) is almost entirely in the puzzles rather than fast reflexes, so I don't think a slow-mode would really take away from anything challenge-wise. I'd guess it was just a bit awkward with dialog, and simpler to design puzzles around not requiring fast reactions rather than introduce a new control. In comparison, something like yellow paint giving away the solution definitely would be detrimental, even if you could in theory ignore it.
Well unfortunately it's not the realm of Vulcan logicians. That's how it is, among most of the target audiences. If you want to see the story I'm sure you can find a playthrough on YouTube?
> It is like saying having a gluten free option on the menu takes away the enjoyment of a meal's target audience.
Having a gluten-free option takes away resources from other parts of the restaurant. Considering the fact that gluten allergy can be pretty serious, having gluten-free options means shitload of money spent on making sure there's no cross-contamination. Money that could be invested in better croissants for example.
Anyway, easy modes shift and break the game. It's very visible with GTA for example.
Savehouses in GTA III, VC and SA are very memorable because the game forced you to go there pretty much after every mission to save. In GTA IV we got autosave after each mission plus GPS which means we don't remember shit from what Liberty City looked like and especially we have zero emotional connection to savehouses. Technically you could go back to the savehouse just to save, but really, you didn't. You could turn off GPS in options, but really, you didn't.
There was this one fucking mission in GTA VC where you had to fly a toy aircraft but controls were fucked and after every fail you had to go through this over and over again. It was memorable because it was annoying. In GTA SA there was the famous line
> All we had to do, was follow the damn train, CJ!
As a result of a broken voiceline where Smoke told you to get closer while in fact you needed to get further away. The fact that after each fail we had to do the mission again from the start made it frustrating, but also memorable.
In GTA V we have mission checkpoints. All friction has been removed because general audience hates friction.
> A perfect game isn't a game that casts a wide net, a perfect game is a game that satisfies its target audience.
Maybe, but that's completely tangential to what the GP said.
And aside from that those games with a wide net do have a target audience, that's how they end up in that situation to begin with.
The game has both puzzle and platforming elements. A similar argument could be made "they could make puzzles easier for people who don't like puzzles" which is silly because one of the reasons why the game got so popular is that people liked the synergy of puzzles and platforming.
Either way, I really doubt that Portal 2 suffered from lack of recognition and further improvements were necessary in this area. You'd be way more likely to break something that works.
As someone who is firmly in Portal's "target audience"
I would have enjoyed the game immensely with such an adaptive feature. Just like I appreciate the amount of work that Valve has put into closed captioning for their games.
Tangential, but it's interesting to me that there are "Valve watchers", people who are big on social media for doing Valve analysis and kremlinology. Humans are so cool.
kremlinology is the term for any political intelligence gathering that's all second-order. In the canonical case of the Kremlin it's because it was very difficult to get inside data and even then there were so many moving parts that you needed an expert in just that area who had alot of data like who was having drinks with whom to predict who might be on the out and who might be ascendant.
There was one analyst reading Pravda who noticed a lot of people were suddenly being promoted into positions held by members of a certain large clique, with no notice about what was happening to the former appointees.
After one of the nuclear treaties was signed, there was a guy whose photo was published in Pravda, shaking hands with Gorbachev; a different fresh photo of him shaking hands with Gorbachev every day for an entire month. He turned out to be the head of the ministry of strategic deception.
kremlinology is an old pre-1989 term for people trying to observe and interpret the workings of a tightly sealed institution. Could be used for Vatican rumors and news, too, for example, or North Korea, etc.
Similar to that idea of trying to derive stuff from an indirect channel, but much more distant. (There is an obvious link between food consumption and building occupancy.)
Stuff like watching the order of names on public lists of attendees for dinner events, etc. If someone disappeared or moved off the top few names, perhaps they're in trouble or have been purged from the party ... or maybe they're just sick this week.
I did not know what to look for, so I looked at the list to see what is in there and had no idea what I was looking at. I am making a lot of assumptions and don't know how any of this works.
* It appears the dats_dates.txt file is a list of depot item contents string sorted by depo numeric identifier.
* It also appears the depo identifier is the first underscore separated value on a given line
* It seems the more popular artifacts are referenced multiple times in the list due to the quantity of contents and versions associated with a given depo
All of that could be wrong, but nonetheless I wrote a small 2minute Node.js script to analyze the list. It takes about 0.03 seconds to execute, on my machine anyways, and produces as output a list of depo identifiers sorted by the frequency in which those identifiers occur in the dats_date.txt file.
These identifiers do not always resolve to a game title using the steamdb.info site but several do. Because though because steamdb.info applies rate limiting and then a temporary IP address block.
This is one of the craziest "breach" stories I've come across recently, I feel like it's gone a little bit under the radar considering the size and scope.
If it will be really seeded forever that would be a great way of archiving for posterity!
btw interestingly from the leak homepage:
"To the operators of browsers/indexers: please look into caching or mirroring the blobs, as a large volume of requests at this point are coming from these, which seem to be impacting downloads for everyone. It's a 15 GB directory that would save the time of many people. Many people should have them all downloaded by now.
We are facing pretty severe link oversaturation. If you managed to download something please try seeding them on the torrent and/or sharing the original files on third party services to spare us some load. The more torrent seeds the faster and more viable it shall be."
I think there could be a market for distributed cloud storage: the client promises a coin payment for $X, in return for storing Y mb/GB of encrypted data. The way to prove it is still there is by sending periodic hash checks of random segments of the file. If the correct match comes back, a portion (rent) is paid to renew the storage. Upon retrieval, the final sum is paid.
Filecoin was really weird on top of the standard caveats. I couldn't even figure out how to directly use and earn it. And all the straightforward options to touch filecoin were brokers offering free storage based on incentive programs.
Storj is a much more straightforward implementation. So is Sia, I think.
A torrent is fine. Things will settle out and the torrent with it's seeds, just normal people with normal human motivations to do so, will still exist for a long time. No need to bring in money and ruin things.
It's still unrelated AFAIK. From what I remember, the owner refused to sell the domain, and then eventually asked Valve for a huge fee that they refused to pay. So now the domain is just unused.
Using a dictionary word for your project will never be easy, but what often happens now is to just not get the .com domain (Likely taken), or prefix with "get" and then later hope that you can time it right so that you can afford the clean .com domain...but not be famous enough that the buyer would want to get some crazy amount for it.
Parking domains and not using them is poor taste. Finders keepers is okay compared to pay to win but if someone has a better use for the domain, maybe release it for a reasonable price?
What incentivises the domain holder to do that? Under the UDRP, parking is only not allowed if it's obviously done to screw with someone's trademark, has no other purpose, and their trademark came first.
They could also choose to just get sued - they will lose, but the site will be up until that happens (possibly years) if they don't have trigger-happy hosting provider
welcome to terarelease - a as-complete-as-possible steam2 content server dump
extractor howto:
for the majority of depots you need to download blobs & dats for wanted version *as well as all past versions*
as the files are stored as deltas inside the dat files, HOWEVER IF you encounter a depot that has duplicate blobs & dats,
that means at some point in time valve did a full reset in which case you need to provide the CRC of the wanted
blob (3rd file name component) to the extractor using --blobcrc, source code for the extractor is also left in this
folder if you want to have a peek at it
examples:
extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 852 0 | for depots w/o reset
extract /mnt/big/blobs /mnt/big/dats 841 0 --blobcrc 83ced978 | for depots that did reset
win64 build is provided, for linux you have to build it yourself as any kind of binary compatibility is inexistent except for wine
(you are using linux, you should know how to build it yourself right? ...right?)
sharing:
you are very much encouraged to share and mirror/seed this release as possible
SHARING IS CARING
warm n good wishes to all hoarders who had stuff from this collection <3
My own gaming days are over, but I am very annoyed that the big corporations killed libgen effectively (it is not entirely gone, but the old content is nowhere near as it used to be, and Anna's archive is also nowhere near as good either, unfortunately).
I kind of have mixed feelings about this, because from one point of view we're fighting the corporations, but from another, Valve is a major force in pushing Linux gaming so that more gaming can be done outside of big corpo operating systems.
It seems to me that fighting with Valve is like fighting against what we would want to have.
Mind you Valve has done equal amount of bad as well by inventing the whole battle pass system and thus bringing even more FOMO to games, and making unregulated gambling available to millions which is still going strong and surprisingly no one cares about it. There are some lawsuits here and there but they focus on the lootbox gacha element and not the whole gambling market running on the Steam API
I guess a comparison would be: a megacorp invests in children in africa (schooling, money) so later they can hire them and make more money. Should we support this or resist?
If a false comparison in the first place but you/we already have a such megacorp! Sure, sure, benevolent dictator is judicially removed from the leadership for 30 years and no longer guides the megacorp in any meaningful way... but he does invest in kids in Africa.
You can have a whole one try to guess who is this.
And if you guess it right (I doubt you can answer wrong, lol) you would know a whole bunch of different reasons - including personal qualities of that "benevolent dictator" too.
NB honestly, if anything it's "his" OS what gave a lot of opportunities to the kids in the developing countries everywhere, not just Africa alone - just by providing the means to run the apps and games on almost anything. OLPC on the other hand provided an example how a specialized device made with the best intentions was a piece of shit.
Good question. Probably in a jurisdiction Valve can't touch, or they're just indexing stuff without hosting the actual files. Either way, it's risky. Valve's lawyers are definitely already on it
Might not be the most interesting game in the leak but old versions of live service games are almost impossible to come by
https://steamdb.info/app/20590/
Downloaded it to extract all the old assets but it still needs an encrypted depot key
>error!! -- extract: missing depot key!, pass --key if you know it though
Some people reported that "--key 0000000000000000" or "--key 0" works on some depots... well not here
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