Friday, April 13th 2007
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. possibly stole code from Half Life 2 and Doom 3
All over the interweb, there are intermittent forum posts with a strange topic: how similar S.T.A.L.K.E.R. looks to Half Life 2 and Doom 3. These claims certainly do not go unfounded. Someone, with way too much free time, went through and manually compared the texture directories of Doom 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. You'll see the results in the first two pictures below. A particular texture, lights_impflash.dds, has the exact same name of the Doom 3 version, excluding the extension. Half Life 2 has also been allegedly stolen from. Not only are the file names nearly identical (except for the extension), the images are extremely similar as well. Whether or not anything comes out of this depends on what ID Software and Valve decide to do. Do you think S.T.A.L.K.E.R textures are stolen?
Source:
Shack News
26 Comments on S.T.A.L.K.E.R. possibly stole code from Half Life 2 and Doom 3
Play Urban Terror 4.0 (www.urbanterror.net/news.php). It took Frozen Sand over 2 years to get it out so I doubt they copied anything and to top it off - it's free!
Standalone version comes with the Quake 3 version.:rockout:
I have Doom 3 and Half Life 2 and got bored of em after a week or so. They all look alike to me and they all play alike and that's what wrong for me with them. They don't play the way I want to play - fast, fun and action packed CTF style online.
or not.
:rockout:
HL2 was great but D00m3 was terrible
A lot of them are a very simple operation or render and are fairly standard textures are there.
It's one thing to say STALKER looks like HL2 or Doom3, it's quite another to find similar light coronas and projector textures, tiny little textures which should look pretty similar if they look good. Plus, who would ever notice this texture similarity in-game? They didn't find what they were looking for so they found something else that's close.
And when a project as big as stalker is accused of such a thing its a big deal, if its true I have a deep disrespect towards the stalker team members that knew of this and said nothing, and if they are dropped then good for stalker.
If it was stolen, think about the series of events:
Half Life 2 development-
Stalker Development-
Doom3 Development-
Do,,3 release-
Half Life 2 release-
Stalker Release-
They could have taken anything to improve upon what they had, I have issues believe a game in development for 5 years + Can look that good upon release unless they cut corners (Valve used the Havoc engine instead of designing there own, a very smart choice.)
You could design a map for ANY game with that number of textures.
Even if an employee DID put them in there on purpose to cut corners, does anyone have a suggestion on how a company can control this sort of thing to ensure that it doesn't happen? Its simply not possible to physically compare EVERY texture in a build to EVERY texture in EVERY other game. Its something that, while unfortunately, game developers will have to grin and bear. Chances are no companies will take someone to court over a couple of textures, its simply not worth the time or effort. And if whats likely to be an innocent mistake deters people from playing the game, then they're players that are not worth it in the first place.
Could be that STALKER took textures from another game. Shame. Or maybe they BOTH took it from some the same 3rd party? Maybe some textures are out there as freeware. I don't know the answer to that one. But if there was texture ripping going on, then this is naughty but NOT AS BAD as code theft.
If they REALLY took code then they are in for big big trouble.