7th October 2003, 1:38 PM
No, the way it was stolen was that someone hacked into the Valve e-mail system and stole the source code tree from Gabe Newell. Of course it wasn't the only code there. They just copied it.
They have to re-write everything that was stolen because with the source code anyone with decent enough knowledge of programming can copy or modify their entire game engine (including the amazing physics engine) and use it themselves or sell it to somebody else. To put this in perspective, id software has so far only released the source code for the early Doom games and Quake 1, and with that source code people have been able to make some really cool engines by modifying the source code. Somebody even recently modified the Quake 1 source code and made an engine that was able to do a lot of the stuff that Doom 3 can do. So this is a very huge deal. I really feel sorry for Valve now.
I'm not quite sure what re-writing the code will do since the near-final code is already out on the web, but they must have a very good reason to delay the game for this long.
They have to re-write everything that was stolen because with the source code anyone with decent enough knowledge of programming can copy or modify their entire game engine (including the amazing physics engine) and use it themselves or sell it to somebody else. To put this in perspective, id software has so far only released the source code for the early Doom games and Quake 1, and with that source code people have been able to make some really cool engines by modifying the source code. Somebody even recently modified the Quake 1 source code and made an engine that was able to do a lot of the stuff that Doom 3 can do. So this is a very huge deal. I really feel sorry for Valve now.
I'm not quite sure what re-writing the code will do since the near-final code is already out on the web, but they must have a very good reason to delay the game for this long.