Steam tease: "Unlocking Half-Life 2 game files"?!

[RepoMan]

Every couple of days, for the last week or so, whenever I boot up my main gaming system onto which I've preloaded Half-Life 2 (silver Steam edition), Steam comes up with a dialog saying:

"Unlocking Half-Life 2 game content"

Needless to say this spikes my heart rate involuntarily. But every time, there seems to be no discernible change in anything except the file dates of the SteamApps .gcf files.

Anyone have any idea what the hell this means???

Cheers!
Rob

[Jason McMaster]

it means you need to stop trying to h4x0r the files. I'm emailing gabe right now.

[Kevin Grey]

Evidently it just means its updating files. It effectively "unlocks" HL2, makes its updates, and relocks it. I believe the recent changes have been CS:S fixes but I could be wrong on that score.

[ExecutionerFive]

With all these people whove had HL2 preloaded onto their systems, have there been reports of anyone hacking Steam to get the downloaded HL2 to play? Would have thought some hacker would have tried it.

[nutsak]

They'll probably try, as of yet I haven't seen anything about it.

[Mattc0m]

I'm pretty sure it has to do with CS: Source updates. Whenever I get one of those "Unlocked HL2 Files" windows, I check the news and that same day (or a day since I've opened Steam) that theres some sort of update on CS: Source.

[DaveC]

Is anyone else stalled at 88%? Is this because I haven't opted in for any of the pacakages?

[nutsak]

I think one of the .gcf files stuffs up and you have to reget that one, plus the new update.

It'd be nice if someone could put up the files on torrents or something.

[shift6]

With all these people whove had HL2 preloaded onto their systems, have there been reports of anyone hacking Steam to get the downloaded HL2 to play? Would have thought some hacker would have tried it.
It is an essentially unknown format which has not yet been released in a playable (known plaintext) state. There's not much I imagine anyone could do right now with it, hacker or otherwise. Even the most basic compression/encryption scheme will defeat an attacker of the caliber of game crackers when they don't have a "live" version to tinker with. This will change when the game is unlocked and playable and memory dumps become available, of course.

[Luke M]

Is anyone else stalled at 88%? Is this because I haven't opted in for any of the pacakages?

I had this happen yesterday. So I cleared out my steam cache and redownloaded the files last night. I opened up Steam today and it says pre-load is comlete, so I guess that did the trick.

[DaveC]

Is anyone else stalled at 88%? Is this because I haven't opted in for any of the pacakages?

I had this happen yesterday. So I cleared out my steam cache and redownloaded the files last night. I opened up Steam today and it says pre-load is comlete, so I guess that did the trick.

I did that once before, looks like I'll have to do it again. Blarg.

[nutsak]

You just have to find the .gcf that is stuffed, it's not the whole lot.

I'm pretty sure mine was the counter strike source file that was buggered - I've also had the shared models go nuts.

[Chris Fernando]

It is an essentially unknown format which has not yet been released in a playable (known plaintext) state. There's not much I imagine anyone could do right now with it, hacker or otherwise. Even the most basic compression/encryption scheme will defeat an attacker of the caliber of game crackers when they don't have a "live" version to tinker with. This will change when the game is unlocked and playable and memory dumps become available, of course.

But, even though it's an undocumented format, it hasn't stopped people from trying to make sense of the file structure and release viewers like GCFScape (http://countermap.counter-strike.net/Nemesis/index.php?p=25).

Besides, even when Steam was in early beta last year, and the format was completely unknown, people still managed to extract the 2nd locked Bink video from the .gcf file at least a good few days before Valve would have actually released it. After that incident, Valve got smart and encrypted the cache.

Oh and regarding the thread topic, this post (http://www.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=162840) should answer it:

HL2 preload "Stuck" at 88%

If this is happening to you, please just leave it that way for now. You've likely got all the data, and it is just reporting it incorrectly. We're working on an update to fix that, but in the meantime, please don't delete your cache files just to make it go up to 100%

thanks,

Taylor

[Sam Jones]

Is anyone else stalled at 88%? Is this because I haven't opted in for any of the pacakages?

You need to properly charge the Flux Capacitor.

[shift6]

Besides, even when Steam was in early beta last year, and the format was completely unknown, people still managed to extract the 2nd locked Bink video from the .gcf file at least a good few days before Valve would have actually released it. After that incident, Valve got smart and encrypted the cache.
Because people guessed formats (because Bink is so uncommon among games nowadays) and made a known plaintext attack. That's my point. Now even with encryption people are able to make viewers and such because certain aspects of the plaintext were compromised before (when they weren't encrypted at all).

Having been compromised once, Valve would need to completely re-engineer the data packing format in those GCF files to prevent future intrusion. That's a bug-fest nightmare, so I imagine they'll just suck it up.