Half-Life: 1 Engine Update Released

Posted by Sebastian · 06/07/05 @8:23 pm · half-life · add comment

New updates for the HL1 Engine have been released. This update is more of a bug/maintenance release as the release of VAC2 approaches. Restart Steam for the updates.

HL1 Engine

Fixed several exploits triggered by malicious server operators (found by Stan Bubrouski)

As part of the next version of VAC, which is currently in testing, the Linux game server now must have GLIBC 2.3.2 or above installed

HL1 Engine Master Server Query Protocol
These changes bring the HL1 engine's querying protocol in line with that of the Source engine. If you connect to Steam enabled game servers using a third party tool, you may need to contact the vendor for an update.

Added a challenge number to A2S_PLAYER and A2S_RULES server queries.
Setting "sv_enableoldqueries" to 1 (currently the default) allows old style (no challenge/response) queries to work

Changed A2S_INFO server query to require the string "Source Engine Query" appended to the end of the query packet

Removed support for "info", "infostring", "details", "players" and "rules" queries, use A2S_INFO, A2S_PLAYERS and A2S_RULES instead

Couple of points of interest to server operators in this release.

1) The new querying subsystem has been implemented in HL1 now, the old (vulnerable) protocol will be disabled in a future update (in the next
month or so). MAKE SURE TO UPDATE YOUR EXTERNAL TOOLS NOW. This process has already happened for the Source engine so hopefully your tools already work with the new query format.

2) Under Linux you now need at least GLIBC 2.3.2 (i.e what the Source engine requires) to run the new VAC code. If your distribution is too old you will see something like this in the console:

---------------------------------------------
Error:./vstdlib_s_i486.so: undefined symbol: __cxa_atexit
Could not establish connection to Steam servers (steamclient).
---------------------------------------------

You should upgrade your Linux distribution in this case. If you do not upgrade you will not be able to run a secure server once the new VAC system is released.

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