User:Sitzkrieg/Sandbox/Source code

This page will not discuss methods of acquiring or distributing the illegally leaked source code. It will only cover general information about the leak.

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On April 21st 2020 the source code for many Source Engine games was leaked. Team Fortress 2 was no exception to the leak, as it contained a complete early-2016 build of TF2. The specific leaked build was from the major Tough Break update.

RCE Scare

When news of the April 2020 leak initially broke, fear, confusion, and worry was spread throughout the community from a speculated vulnerability discovered in TF2's source code that could potentially allow for RCE (Remote Code Execution). This caused many players to not play during this time until it was deemed safe to play again. Some media figures within the community warned that only valve servers were effected, while other TF2 media sources claimed all servers were effected. The RCE vulnerability was discovered to have never existed in the first place.

Media Response

Within weeks after the April 2020 leak, media figures within the community began auditing the source code. During this time the "spaghetti code" rumors of TF2 were found to be verifiably true.

On social media websites, forums, and video sharing platforms, comments within the source code received the most media attention. This was due to the comical nature of emotions expressed by the developers. The developers expressed frustration, confusion, and anger throughout many of the comments.

Comments

Some comments within the source code were:

"// this is the easiest way I could find to refresh the goals when switching maps"

"// todo this is dumb"

"// NOTE: This isn't particularly efficient. Too bad! "

"// This is a stupid fix, but I don't have time to do a cleaner implementation. "

"// This is a bad way to implement HL1 style sprite fonts, but it will work for now. "

"// Move it into place and resize.

   This is terrible, but VGUI has forced my hand "

"//FIXME: This doesn't account for children of hierarchy... too bad!"

"// Bizarre vector flip inherited from earlier code, WTF?"

"// Multithreading badness. This will cause a crash later!

   Grab REDACTED or REDACTED know!"

"// This code didn't port easily. WTF does it do?"

"// I don't know why, I don't want to know why, I shouldn't

// have to wonder why, but for whatever reason this stupid 
// panel isn't laying out correctly unless we do this terribleness"

"// use an EPSILON damnit!!"

"// This is catastrophically bad, don't do this.

   Someone needs to fix this. " 

"// Yes, this causes a memory leak. Too bad! "

"// REDACTED says: this is bad, dumb code, and more importantly it's bad dumb code that doesn't make any sense here, "

"// My hope is that this code is so awful I'm never allowed to write UI code again."

Cheating

The source code leak bolstered the development of 'custom' Cheating clients for TF2 to an unfathomable degree. Cheat developers no longer needed to rely on guesswork or reverse engineering aspects of the game. Instead, they could directly read how the game functions. Many new cheating clients were developed at this time. Most pre-existing functions and features within cheating clients received hyper-optimizations, and many new features were added to such clients.

Botting

The source code leak caused a chain reaction of malicious action against the game. After cheating clients became more powerful than ever, botting became easier than ever. This lead to a 4 year plague known as the 'botting crisis'. Two known prominent figures within the 'botting community' were pursued with legal action against Valve.

Cut Content

Many speculated-to-exist assets and features were discovered by the source code leak. Much of this content appears to be beyond the scope of the TF Wiki, so it will be referrenced here.