Valve accidentally compiled and pushed earliest Left 4 Dead prototype called "Terror Strike" into the latest CS 1.6 update and community figured out how to play it.
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Their source code management must be an absolute disaster for these kinds of things to keep happening.
"Accidentally" keep happening. How the hell do you compile and push out code for a game you're not even updating at the time, accidentally?
Because all Valve games are mods all the way down.
When your game is a mod of a mod of a mod, this stuff happens.
I can understand bits and pieces, because that is very true with Valve... But the entire prototype?
for a 20 year old game it's probably only a couple of megabytes
There's actually some truth to this statement in general. Most games, at least the ones deriving from quake engines that i know of, have an engine(e.g. the exe) and a game (a dll/so) plus assets. When modding SDK-s are released, it's essentially the source code of the game section that when compiled needs the same engine to run. New games from a studio using the same engine are usually just forks of the previous game code. It's fair to reason that some code may be shared to get updates on old parts while developing a new game.
So yes, most games are mods of mods.
Because source shares code and assets between projects to cut down on development time
Or their marketing is decent
I'll take the bite for number 2.
I can see compiling happen accidentally, since it's probably just a compile flag and someone forgot to disable it. But pushing is really surprising, sure it can be automated, but usually you have a manual process for such things (e.g. my company's prod deployment is 100% automated, except for a manual approval step once everything is ready).
So the only way for this to happen imo is if they pushed something intentionally and has accidentally disabled/enabled a flag at some point prior.
It may very well have been two or more different people stepping on each other's feet in the dark.
I recall binge-ing Source leak summary videos. Everything that Valve uses that engine for is extremely tightly coupled.
Whenever CS:GO or Dota 2 gets an update, data miners get to work and discover a bunch of assets of unrelated source games.
Sounds like your company is doing things the halal way and using modern standards. At Valve, it's just a clusterfuck dev tool GUI on top of a monolithic codebase where no one can possibly know a fraction of what's going on.
Lol, I've been at places like that. Sounds awful.
Half of the IT industry running the world is probably still running on this.
Ew. Do they have no shame?
“Hey, you know what would be fun? Let’s release really old versions of some of our games - I think fans would get a kick out of seeing them!”
“Ugh, no. Why would we want to spend the money on testing and supporting something that only a small fraction of the player base would even care about?”
“Um, ok. How about if we “accidentally” push it with our next release. We won’t have to do anything to support it - modders willl figure out how to get it going, so we don’t have to do anything, and they get a fun Easter egg. Win win.”
“Accidentally?”
“Yeah. People will backfill some reasoning for how even though we’re a professional software company, we have no idea how source code control systems work. It’ll be fun to see what they come up with.”
Yeah, that's believable, esp given the culture at Valve.