So it's still worth a revisit :)
* Graphics are better (this should not be a surprise)
* Some maps have been made shorter (the underground railway tunnels, if my memory serves)
* The last part of the game (Xen) was pretty much completely overhauled, and in my opinion, improved.
This is from memory so I might be getting one or two details wrong.
Is it technically illegal? Yeah, but Valve isn't losing out on any money, and there's no way they're going to risk the negative PR blowback they'd get for a takedown.
Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Obviously. But it does kill the usual "piracy is bad because companies lose money" argument - especially for a 22-year-old game.
> Source available is not the same as open source.
Obviously. But it does show that Valve is more interested in preserving old genre-defying games for the general public, rather than milking every last cent of revenue out of it.
God, AI keeps making life better than I could've ever imagined!
So that makes it okay to pirate and steal games developed by your fellow indie game developers as well?
> Besides, IP law is dead. The rise of AI made it pretty clear that you can steal literally anything without consequences.
Try doing the same thing to Nintendo.
Even large companies like Anthropic were not going to risk going to trial and getting bankrupted of over $120B+ in damages in using pirated copyrighted eBooks for training. The best case was a settlement for $1.5B which that is a record settlement in copyright law.
Until they decide, we can't know if it's illegal or not - who knows, this site might have a license.
Of course, this is a lot more grey area for copyright violations etc because it's a civil matter.
An action can clearly be a crime, but it might be unclear if you did that action.
Valve still owns the copyright to the game and just because they won't do anything now does not mean it is legal to redistribute it without their consent, especially when we know that the game is still being sold. [0]
They (Valve) reserve the right to enforce that and this site clearly does not have such a "license" and haven't disclosed as such. Why would you expect Valve to be in discussions with a 15 year old to redistribute the game for free?
So just say you do not know.
I don't think the parent comment is claiming it's legal, other than the (unlikely) chance that this is licensed, just that it's up to Valve to enforce and not really our concern. A lot of cool things (like the similar https://noclip.website/) are prima facie copyright infringement.
I think we can.
Because projects like this are free publicity and don't actually compete with the product sold on Steam.
I wish we could spend as much time on native application development as we do on horribly crippled and slow browser application development.
Web technology is so non-sensical to me. "you can run an application without installing it!" Well, friend, installation is not required either, and we can deliver applications on demand, and we've done it before. "You just visit a page and you can program the macros on your keyboard!" Again, it's not like those applications are large; they could be delivered on demand if we wanted.
But we don't want that, do we? We want people to remain online under any circumstance, we desparately want their time, so we require that people be online if they want to program their microcontroller and they don't know how to do it without visiting the very convenient webpage.
If people spent 10% of the effort on native applications that they spent on web applications, we would be so much further advanced than we are now. If you're a developer, targeting the web is so seductive, so easy in comparison, that we all have to be online to do anything, now. We all have to run two dozen Electron apps because developers want to have an easy time at the expense of every user.
It's being run through the equivalent of a virtual machine. So it's really quite similar to the layers used to abstract away platform specifics like Wine / Proton does for Windows compatibility. Instead of DXVK you have WebGL.
Why should Valve update their old games to work on Apple Silicon? They're old and only 2% of Steam users (clients?) are on macOS.
Also, this port works offline in your browser. If you've loaded it up before the assets are cached and you can play with no internet. Yes, even if you've closed the tab and open it again later without internet.
But native to what?
Windows is no longer the commonality between all users.
The browser has that role, now.
> We want people to remain online under any circumstance
Webapps often have offline-first functionality,
which is one of the biggest strengths of a progressive web app.