News S.T.A.L.K.E.R ripping off Half-Life 2?

It's kinda sad when a good games rep. gets shot down because of a couple files.

Sad, really.

 

Sue them?? Condemn them to hell?!!?! People, please stop jumping to conclusions so quickly here! The textures from Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 are placeholders that were never completely removed, since THQ rushed the game. They were placeholders for the alphas and betas, and doing that is totally normal. Many game developers do that and it's totally legit as long as they aren't used in the final version. They're just being borrowed.

 

Have you actually looked at the comparison screenshots? It's not a couple of files, it's about 30. It's essentially every single pixel light shader file Doom 3 has (the "shape" of the light if you will, as oppose to a standard sphere).

Yeah... but what if they ARE being used in the final version? As their light shader files it's quite a bit harder to spot them in the game, you can't really say "ahh, I recognise that shadow!". Someone needs to crack open the Stalker map files or possibly the texture coding and have a look. They may well have just have been placeholders, but if they're not, and are still in the game, that's just plain cheeky. It's like stealing a riff from a good song and building something else around it.

"Yeah, I know that's the riff from smoke on the water, but it was just a placeholder before we came up with our own riff, and we just forgot to take it out, it's ok though right?"

 

The game was rushed, I'm sure many things were left in by accident. If you actually think about why they would risk getting in a hell of a lot of trouble and being sued by stealing content from other games, it doesn't make any sense at all. Nobody wants to get sued, and game companies wouldn't want to take a risk like that... it's WAY too dangerous. There doesn't seem to be much logic in this assumption everyone seems to like to have.

 

Laugh out loud.

 

I seriously doubt we're looking at a deliberate scam. I am going to have to agree with the placeholder-art idea.

 

MD5 hashes aren't the only ones out there - they're just widely used to make sure a particular file has not been modified. But if you want to see if a particular file is similar to another you just use a hash designed for that purpose. The fuzzy OCR plugin for Spamassassin uses a hash that can tell (some of the time, at least) if an image is similar to a previously OCR'd image to save on CPU time. It can spot if an image is pretty much the same even if the spammer puts those random dots and lines all over it.

 

Valve and ID probably don't care.

 

Hopefully they realize that making a stink about somthing pointless like this would do them more hard in the gaming community than good. Stalker has ben an anticipated title for, well, seems like forever. I don't think that Valve or ID want to be known as "The company that killed Stalker".

Now if it were EA on the other hand...

 

The Inq reports this nothing but a misunderstanding: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38945

 

..and the crowd goes silent.. good to know! thanks!

 

Ha, congrats everyone, you couldn't have been more wrong!

I give my self a pat on the back for not being and idiot and jumping to conclusions, as well as suggesting the actual outcome.

 

Have you ever heard "Back to life, Back to reality"?