What if the entire Valve Developer repository leaked.

[GasMaskedCitizen]

super epic citizen.mdl will be in our hands
and possibly gyftvs map

[iRaz_zerr]

Title. I've always thought about this, and it seems like there's probably not going to be any for a while.

[Bruner]

It could be a possibility. A very very unlikely possibility, but a possibility nevertheless.
I believe the most recent Half-Life 2 leaks were from 2016, and then the Postal 3 leak from 2020 which uncovered a lot of beta Team Fortress 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 2 stuff.
https://tcrf.net/Proto:Team_Fortress_2/June_25th,_2007
Most of the Half-Life 2 content discovered in the 2016 leaks I think were around 2003 - 2004. As for the earlier stuff, anything we don't have our hands on yet could be lost to time right now, unless Valve still has all those assets buried in their servers and archives somewhere.

[The One Epicplayer]

The most recent leaks are the earlier 2002 Combine soldier textures from about a year ago, which have noticable differences from the later 2002 sheet that was leaked back in 2016. Some of the textures are slightly higher-res or have minute differences. It's disputed whether or not these are in fact legit but it's still interesting.

[Shift]

"It's disputed whether or not these are in fact legit"
Didn't the author himself had to come to VCC and say he made these from scratch himself? That helmet texture has Substance designer all over it anyway

[Bruner]

Yeah, I guess another contributing factor is knowing which assets are legitimately beta assets, and which ones are fake, or simply wide spread assumptions from popular recreations.
Just take a look at the fake Half-Life 2 Beta soundtrack.

[Toaster]

A leak as big as the 2016 one? no.
Smaller leaks? maybe.
At this point most of the assets we don't have either got deleted and don't exist anymore or they are stored on a 17 year old hard drive in one of the devs basement.

[Bruner]

Poppin' back in real quick to say that it's been confirmed the early 2002 Combine Soldier textures are in fact legitimate.

[Shift]

No they're not.

[Bruner]

No they're not.

https://community.lambdageneration.com/post/bwgxefgd ?

[Shift]

This dirt is literally a default pattern "mg_dirt" from Substance Painter, and wolfcl0ck's "proof" is a bunch of random circles that don't even correspond with each other.

[Bruner]

I don't want to carry this discussion on for any longer. At least here, since it's sort of steering away from the original intent of iRaz's post, but this is all I'll say. The splotches highlighted by Wolfcl0ck DO line up. The original screenshot is of the Combine Soldier facing relatively toward the front, not somewhere like the back of the helmet like the cropped image made for comparison would suggest.

[Shift]

I see you've decided to conviniently ignore the part where I said "it's a procedural texture generated in Substance Painter" which already invalidates all attempts to "match" anything, also thanks for assuming I don't know how perspective or unwrapping work.

I have a few other points to add.
1. In the old soldier sheet leaked in 2016, Valve used head with mirrored unwrapping, which they changed to a regular cylinder unwrapping by the time of the leak.

But "hydra soldier" head texture is using that "2003" kind of unwrap, while everything else is divided into separate materials for each body part, which was a more archaic approach Valve were using before the "2016" soldier.

If it was legit or at least "historically consistent", the texture would've been only a half of the helmet.
(Also, all body textures of the alleged "hydra soldier" were created from 2016 sheet with minor modifications like raised contrast)
2. If you enlarge the hydra screenshot and brighten it up, you can see that soldier's filter has two color tones, and its side is darker than the flat end, while the supposed "hydra soldier" filter texture is monochrome, and side is instead a brighter tone than the rusty flat part.

3. Clearly no one cares because drawing colored circles over procedural noise is more important, but I have 15 years of experience in 2d art, including 5 years as a world and model texture artist for Dark Interval, Megapatch and other projects, and I'm telling you flat that style itself doesn't match with that of valve artists of the time, and by that I mean approach to detailing, brush strokes, use of color, contrast, gradient and everything else about it.
4. Last thing I need to mention is that OddDoc already debunked this thing back in 2021, and specifically mentioned there were no other soldier textures in the repository other what leaked in 2016. OddDoc had access to this kind of information and also has enough of experience to tell bullshit from the real thing.

[Cvoxalury]

I can only add that Shift is right.

The attempts to draw coloured circles in a blurry 30x48 screenshot cropout are absolutely inane in light of ALL other factual cross-checking that is perfectly available to us. I get that chasing is dream can be blinding, but PLEASE use logic.

You can't just shout "this is confirmed!!" because some person says so. You can't even ever fully trust people who showed you some legit content in the past, because -- guess what? Once that runs out, a person can be tempted to do something to be relevant. And they would be in a rare position of this, self-fulfilling authority, where people will buy it because they want to.

We even know who made that texture, damn it. And their history with this kind of things.

[Bruner]

Shift, never did I question your ability in creating art, creating textures or understanding of how they work.
I was simply describing the circumstance that way there wouldn't be any potential misunderstandings.

Anyway, thanks for the confirmation of the illegitimacy of these textures. Sorry for the blatant ignorance on my part.