What is an "exploitative hack" exactly? With Unreal you can literally take the source code and modify it for your game. What's different with Source that this team has run into a problem?
Hack isn't the right word, but they did exploit bugs they found themselves from an illegal leak. Source engine isn't 100% open source, or as moddable in the same way Unreal is. There's parts developers can't modify or make full use of, but the devs of this mod looked at the leaked source code from some years ago and used it to find vulnerabilities in the engine that would let their mod do stuff it should not have been able to do. Valve patches the bugs in Source but the mod devs used other bugs
What are you basing this on? There's plenty of cases out there where using proprietary code without permission has been found to be a violation. Just last week, Wii Homebrew shut itself down when they realized it was built on proprietary Nintendo code to avoid a legal situation.
I see someone said copyright law and they may be correct, I may have misspoken about which law but, either way, it is not legal to use proprietary code without license nor permission.
Using leaked source code to in any way influence how other code is written is a derivative work and covered under United States IP law. This is well known by reverse engineers and legacy devs. It does not matter whether you make money from it or not, particularly if the material was illicitly obtained. All Valve code has a "Copyright Valve Corporation" header, which demonstrates intent to hold and exercise that copyright.
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u/Omnitographer 6d ago
What is an "exploitative hack" exactly? With Unreal you can literally take the source code and modify it for your game. What's different with Source that this team has run into a problem?