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Havoc
grishka
In general, open-source all abandonware. Here's a few examples of non-game old software that would benefit the society if open-sourced:
Windows 9x and classic Mac OS. No one has sold these OSes for 20+ years and they turned out to be evolutionary dead ends. It would make sense to release their sources so people could learn from them and run them on new hardware more easily.
Flash Player. Adobe has stated in no uncertain terms that Flash is dead. Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem? I mean the Flash Player plugin and standalone app specifically, not the Flash authoring software — that's still alive under a new name, Adobe Animate.
Trident, the Internet Explorer engine. Again, it's dead for good as far as Microsoft is concerned, so why not release its sources for people to learn and hack on?
Presto, the Opera engine. This was leaked and of course I hoarded it, but it would be nice to see an official release.
Winamp. The company behind it pivoted to some kind of streaming social donation thing. It does not seem interested in maintaining the old Winamp app.
Path, the social media thing for "close friends", their mobile apps. The apps were insanely cool, especially at the time of Path's peak around 2013, but the service was shut down a few years ago. Unless they're going to somehow resurrect the service, there's no good reason for the sources for the apps to remain closed. I'd love to take a look at their implementation of real-time photo filters.
Thinking of it, it makes more sense for non-game apps than for games to release sources. Old games do sometimes come out as "remasters" for modern platforms. These usually reuse the engine and sometimes some of the assets. Non-game software, on the other hand, when it's dead, it's usually dead for good.
dahart
> Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem?
I can think of lots of reasons. From a competitive point of view, you might risk having a big enough resurgence that it eats into the business of your replacement. From a technical point of view, it may reveal parts of the sausage making, or expose technology and libraries that you still use and rely on. From a legal point of view, it could open up multiple kinds of liability. From a support and staffing perspective, it typically takes at least a little time to open source something, if you want to do it well, there’s usually vetting & review by engineers and lawyers, and usually the need for more/better documentation than the internal docs.
Think about this from a business perspective- if they predict there’s going to be no financial upside, even indirectly, and there are costs and risks associated with it, then why would they? When companies open-source something, it’s not usually because the code is dead, it’s usually because the people in it are committed to open source and the org agrees to support that cause, or because the company stands to gain valuable attention from the community, and eventually or indirectly, profits.
We do have to support and celebrate when companies decide to release code, but we can’t really expect it or complain when they don’t, it just doesn’t make sense to them and they’re not obligated.
iforgotpassword
I'd guess something big as Windows 9x contains A LOT of licensed third party code which would be a nightmare to get permission for. Try finding five dozen rights holders after thirty years...
geek_at
man I wish they had open sourced OS/2. It could have a linux sized community at this point.
Sadly microsoft had put so much of their code in it, that they didn't allow the release (according to my dad who worked for IBM and was even called "Mr. OS/2" because he had sold it so good to companies)
ttfkam
OS/2 is still in use and under active development, just under a different name.
https://hackaday.com/2023/02/16/arcaos-os-2-updated-for-the-...
rafram
> Trident, the Internet Explorer engine.
Not really dead because it’s still shipped with enterprise Edge for sites that enable IE mode: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode
hulitu
Also i think that people from Spyglass INC would not be very happy.
efreak
Doesn't HTA still use Trident also?
psychphysic
Is there a risk those closed source projects would be sued following the release because they disclosed some forgotten sin?
I'm thinking mostly of anti competitive practices from Windows.
realitythreek
There’s a bunch of costs to releasing closed source code as open source. Generally they’d have to have a team of developers review it, they’d need their lawyers to review it and any licenses. That every company that had licensed code used would also need to go through their own process.
At any time, one of them could say no and the process stops. So you’re basically paying for everyone’s time and possibly to relicense some parts. And im sure I’m missing other parts.
drewcoo
> anti competitive practices from Windows
You would more likely be amazed by all the dumb hacks in the system for backward compatibility, mostly for other companies' software.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050824-11/?p=34...
grishka
It's not like this kind of stuff can't be found by reverse engineering. For Windows specifically, the ReactOS team is doing lots of it to document the inner workings of internal Windows APIs so they could reimplement them.
qingcharles
I doubt it. The Windows sources are available officially through Microsoft if you're spending enough money and your project requires them.
squarefoot
> Is there a risk those closed source projects would be sued following the release because they disclosed some forgotten sin?
I know nothing about law, but I guess software companies would protect themselves in advance by mandating that all their developers use only software and sources that belongs to them anyway. That would be useful in case of a lawsuit where a court could force them to show the sources to prove they don't come say from the claimant's reverse engineered software, or some other FOSS project. Things might be different with 3rd party modules and libraries, where an obscure module was licensed from a company that went out of business ages ago, but all their assets were acquired by another party who finds the module in the wild and decides to sue. Just speculating, but although I'm 100% in favor of FOSS, if the above were real possibilities, I couldn't but understand why some companies are so reluctant to release even old code they couldn't profit from anymore.
manquer
> Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem?
Many reasons are there , it takes a lot of effort for a company to open source anything, to name a few
- Not get sued for IP infringement if your developer from 20 years back copied something or used GPL code etc
- Potentially expose active trade secrets , the program might not be sold , parts the code /algorithms whole modules might still be used in newer applications.
- Presence of PII or other sensitive/inflammatory content in comments and code, could be anything from funny(but inappropriate )method names to comments and documentation .
- poor boundaries, you could have dependencies which are used by the app which are not possible to also be open sourced.
- poor documentation, you simply no longer have all the code or is it time consuming to piece it all together
- expose vulnerabilities in your current offerings , code sometimes has way of being reused , you would be surprised how much “dead” code has a way of living on for decades later .
- third party agreements, not all your code is “your” code, you may have only licensed it from another vendor.
antegamisou
> No one has sold these OSes for 20+ years and they turned out to be evolutionary dead ends. It would make sense to release their sources so people could learn from them and run them on new hardware more easily.
Would add SGI's IRIX too!
catiopatio
> classic Mac OS
I’d be really surprised if Apple still had the source code and custom tools necessary to actually build the thing.
Palomides
they released the Lisa OS code (from 1983) recently, I think they still have all the Mac OS code
building it may be horrible, but the code would still be very interesting to hobbyists
lelanthran
> In general, open-source all abandonware. Here's a few examples of non-game old software that would benefit the society if open-sourced:
That's not the heuristic companies use to determine whether or not to release source code.
> Windows 9x and classic Mac OS. No one has sold these OSes for 20+ years and they turned out to be evolutionary dead ends. It would make sense to release their sources so people could learn from them and run them on new hardware more easily.
The companies would not do that, for the very simply reason being that it would cannibalise their existing offerings if "people could [...] and run them on new hardware more easily."
The biggest competitor to Windows 10 was not Linux or Mac, it was Windows 7. The biggest competitor to Windows 12 will be Windows 11.
grishka
> The biggest competitor to Windows 10 was not Linux or Mac, it was Windows 7.
I have to wonder how relevant Microsoft will remain in the long run. There are several projects maturing that allow people to run Windows apps — the one reason people use Windows in the first place — without any Microsoft involvement whatsoever. The fact that Win32 API has barely changed over the last 15 years also helps.
Wine compatibility is getting ever better. ReactOS is aiming to reach beta quality "soon".
kelsolaar
John Carmack did a stellar job in that respect. Doom and Quake are still very much alive thanks to his decision.
suddenclarity
Even he had some challenges with releasing Doom:
> The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did to windows.
I would assume it's a lot more complicated today. Even the most simple programming projects tend to have a ton of dependencies nowadays.
And it doesn't even account for the fact that you might be killing future projects by handing out the blueprint of old games. Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?
dj_mc_merlin
> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?
Probably, unless they all had the budget to create a shit ton of new assets and replace the old ones. And the code was released with a license that allowed commercial use.
the8472
Elder scrolls games are very moddable and people have made total conversions and map extensions. That didn't prevent the sales of newer TES games based on slightly improved engines and slightly better assets (fan-made assets are often still ahead of the official ones, but it takes years of refinement to get to that point).
nottorp
> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?
You are over appreciating the geek's willingness to toil on assets and make up a compelling storyline :)
Not that Ubisoft games are worth playing, but for a single player game at least it can be much worse.
neurostimulant
> And it doesn't even account for the fact that you might be killing future projects by handing out the blueprint of old games. Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?
Releasing the old doom source code doesn't stop id software from making sequels all the way up to doom eternal.
poisonborz
> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?
Maybe not, but we would have 100 other games that may have expanded the genre further.
WastingMyTime89
Less commercially motivated uninspired follow ups and more original content seems like a huge win for culture at large. Large video game and movie studios are mostly churning out copy-pasted garbage nowadays.
tacocataco
Looping back to doom, here is a free library of doom mods.
According to Doom Eternal's wiki, it sold 3 million copies in spite of all these free to play doom games.
taneq
In the very short term, sure. All of the discussions of this kind of thing (and of copyrights and patents in general) have this same very-short-term perspective. "Patents SUCK, they're MEANT to encourage innovation but it's been SIX MONTHS and we STILL can't use [technique X]." Sure, but 20 years from now that patent will expire and we'll all be able to use it thanks to the fact that it was patented, and so significant parts of the 'secret sauce' are a matter of public record.
In the case of Doom, the engines being released has lead to an active community developing the engine (eg. GZdoom which can now be played in VR, with ray tracing, fancy shading, etc.) on pretty much any hardware with a processor.
lamp987
Falcon 4.0 (1998) had a source code leak after Microprose went bankrupt and just like Doom it also had many community forks.
Its still alive and kicking today as Falcon BMS.
marcins
Oh man, I remember building a new PC for Falcon 4.0. I think I still have the manual binder somewhere. I didn’t actually stick with it for that long in the end - I should check out what the community has done in the meantime!
throwaway2990
25 years and ultima online is still alive and kicking in the community shards.
arendtio
Absolutely, and those releases weren't even that old (<10 years).
There are so many things that I learnt from tinkering with the Quake 3 source code in 2007, I am still very happy and grateful that I had the opportunity at the time. My understanding of topics like real-time applications, AI, platform independent code and debugging would be very different if that code would not have been released.
esperent
I guess this is legally unfeasible. Take a look at the splash screens next time you're loading a game - especially AAA but also smaller ones too. There will beone page with a bunch of logos. Havok physics is the one that comes to mind but there's loads more. Each of these is a plugin with proprietary code. They would need to be stripped out before the code could be released, which would probably be a lot of work. And then the code wouldn't run anyway.
This isn't a recent thing - as another comment points out, even the original Doom ran into this problem and only the Linux source was released.
masklinn
It's often legally feasible but the result is difficult to get value out of (and obviously worthless for the company).
For instance Frictional open-sourced their HPL engine, Penumbra: Overture, Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs.
However the Amnesia games are built with Autodesk's FBX SDK, and I don't think they include any assets, they're not necessarily uninteresting artefacts but there's not much you can do with them either.
torginus
I'd be fine if they put up their code with the proprietary parts removed. They can just include a FIXME stating that the physics engine/video player etc. is missing. If the community picks up the code, they can just replace the missing parts.
grogenaut
I've worked on games before. We ported our game to havock between versions. That took 8 months for one dev. The code review was 3 weeks. Ripping ours out was a month by itself. There were several libraries like that. The sound system was similar and we had to upgrade it every game which was similar work to havock. Heck there was a really simple font to bitmap lib/utility we used and that would have taken several months to replace. A month to rip out.
I moved us from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 for our debugging UI and literally just removing all the calls to the old debugging UI system was something like 2 weeks my only goal there was to get it to not compile. Wiring up all 3,900 debug UI connection points to the engine with access to all the rest of the game engine library and having written parts of both systems in the engine and the debugging library and the new UI library still took me almost 2 weeks I did it with both systems working at the same time which was actually easier than doing a full rip out. The studio I worked at tried really hard not to use proprietary libraries and it was a big deal for us using havoc but we needed to they ended up going back for the next title. They also wrapped literally every library with shims to make it easier to Port but things like physics engines are just basically impossible to wrap fully as our sound engines and font libraries the implementation details leak into everywhere.
The suggestion you're making is a very large amount of work probably on the level of several engineers for several years on a Triple-A title now you're talking like a million dollars for the company to open source it and locking up some good devs for a year or more. There's literally no economic trade off in doing that unless you can come up with a way to make one.
Porting would be an okay economic trade off there.
ironSkillet
Removing these proprietary parts can actually be a lot of work or potentially impossible without a major refractor, especially if they're foundational to gameplay, like a physics engine.
maccard
That's gojng to be a hell of a lot of effort, unless the third party libraries were abstracted out in the first place.
stepupmakeup
I believe most popular libraries and middleware (like Havok) aren't freely available/leaked, OR at the very least it's some ancient version with massive API differences compared to newer versions. Around the time of the Pokemon leaks in 2020 I was watching people live on Discord struggling getting Pokemon Diamond to compile, because apparently the DS Wi-Fi component of the official SDK was never actually leaked online (at the time)
concordDance
What should really happen is a law that video games get declared public domain and have their source code released after 10 years. All assets and dependencies would get automatically released under a license allowing for their use in that game and derivatives of it.
As it is, the source is mostly just lost to time, making humanity poorer.
nerdix
Would be nice but remastering 10+ year old games is very profitable these days so I'd imagine that the industry would lobby very hard against it.
scheeseman486
Doom, Quake and System Shock all have high profile remasters in spite of their source releases. Hell, one could argue they had high profile remasters because the source ports kept the game and communities alive.
Meanwhile, look at Unreal. Not even sold anymore.
flohofwoe
There's a lot of games that have a shelf life of more than a decade. Maybe make that "10 years after the game is no longer sold".
Vespasian
That (maybe) would have worked in the olden days of physical disks or catridges. Today it is trivial to keep the game on steam with zero sales (or almost zero).
If lawmakers wanted to pass a law that actually made this happen they needed to stipulate a cut off date (and potential compensation) as well as rigid rules about what one can do with the released code.
account42
Practically only games that are continuously updated have longer shelf lifes. In that case only the original version would have to be opened after 10 years and later modifications would have to wait ten years after their release.
concordDance
Very few and they still make 90+% of sales before then. A price worth paying
pshirshov
I guess the best way woul dbe to regulate that. If you want to sell any software (including firmware) you have to deposit the sources and encryption keys into some state-owned repository. If you decided to stop maintaining the code it would be released into public domain after some reasonable grace period (e.g. 5 years). That would solve many issues including excess e-waste.
gonzo41
As an aside, have you played red alert lately. Holy crap. I tried a while back and it's like people have just been studying that game non stop since I was a kid. I got owned. But year totally agree.
I sort of think that with a smart OS license for game IP you could put a lot of stuff into the public domain and it would flourish in really interesting ways like fan fiction.
bombcar
Same thing with Heroes III - they talk about “breaks” and chains and things on multiplayer and it just blows me away.
BiteCode_dev
I though I was good at starcraft before going to Battlenet, and I though I learned I wasn't.
But last year I went to play HOMM3 online, and I imagined I could at least teach the kids a trick or two.
I was so wrong.
masklinn
> Maybe take game assets resize everything to 1/10th so that it looks like sht but can still be used as placeholder.
The assets are commonly licensed, so you can't include them at all, or in large parts. Commonly the game data is not part of the release either.
flohofwoe
The reason is often that those codebases are usually a giant hairball of closed source 3rd party dependencies which would be a nightmare to put under a common open source license, no matter if the companies behind those products still exist or not.
cubefox
I remember when Far Cry came out. Around the time, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 were the most anticipated games for quite a while, mostly because they promised graphics far ahead of anything released so far. But as they were delayed multiple times, Far Cry stole a lot of their thunder when it came out months before them, with similarly impressive graphics.
We don't see technically ambitious PC exclusive games like this anymore, as the market for these games greatly decreased in relevance. Most people don't own an expensive desktop PC anymore (due to smartphones and laptops doing most of their jobs) and they just buy a console if they want to play games.
Version467
Huh? That doesn't seem right. We absolutely have ambitious games on pc that bring generational leaps in graphical fidelity.
Like the Witcher 3, which was absolutely stunning when it first released. Similarly (although originally a console exclusive) Red Dead Redemption 2 looks incredible on PC. We also have releases like Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice which pushed the limit of what was possible to achieve with limited resources (regarding the development, not the hardware).
Honorable mentions should probably also include Star Citizen, which although still unreleased is definitely an incredibly technically ambitious project. As is Cyberpunk 2077. The launch might have been a total disaster, but afaik it's the first big game to ship a full ray-tracing renderer.
Maybe we have a different understanding of what a 'technically ambitious' game is. But I see technical improvements left and right. Unreal Engine 5 comes with some features that are just mind-blowing and make a whole new level of graphical fidelity available even to small indie developers. Just take a look at the recently released footage of "Unrecord", where lots of people thought it was real life footage.
zokier
It depends what your reference point for the rate of progress is. The release date of Crysis is closer to release date of Doom than today, but visually Crysis holds up dramatically better than what Doom did at the time of Crysis release.
mcpackieh
On the other hand I bet there are more people playing Doom 1 & 2 today than Crysis. Doom's gameplay held up better, and 3rd party WADs (in large part facilitated by the primitive graphics making it easy for one-man creators) gave Doom a life of its own.
zirgs
16 year old games were considered "retro" when Crysis came out. Crysis came out 16 years ago.
Closi
Parent comment said PC-exclusive, Witcher 3 and RDR2 are examples where the PC port came out way after the console release and they are both fairly old games at this point.
derrikcurran
Witcher 3 came out on PC at the same time as consoles. CDPR has a long history with PC gaming and they tend to emphasize the PC experience. They also own GOG which is a PC game store/platform. RDR2 on the other hand was indeed a timed console exclusive.
cubefox
To be fair, I edited in the "exclusive" to make it clear I wasn't talking about ports, so he might not have seen it.
p_l
Witcher series, and generally everything from CDPR RED, is PC first and anything else an afterthought (if not contracted out port to someone else)
cubefox
Most ambitious games are now primarily developed for console while only being ported to PCs. Cyberpunk 2077 was apparently primarily optimized for PC (while still being a cross platform title) but that's an exception.
Kaytaro
Witcher 3 is 8 years old and considered an old persons game. I learned that the hard way when I tried talking to my nephew about video games.
In all seriousness, most of your examples I would consider part of the previous era of gaming, which ended with Fortnite’s explosion. Hyper realistic games will continue to be developed of course, but the overall industry trend is moving towards mobile-friendly graphics, which presents its own set of technical challenges.
Version467
I agree that Witcher 3 doesn't count as "current gen" anymore, but it wasn't meant to represent that. I picked my examples to show that we've seen high fidelity games throughout the last decade. All of those games pushed the boundaries of what's possible in some way and I don't think we've seen a decline of that at all.
There are just so many more games now that it might seem like that.
hutzlibu
In general I agree, but I rather remember The Witcher 3 for the story and atmosphere, than for the graphics. Likewise Senuas Sacrifice - it pushed the limit for psychological games(the game is about processing loss through a psychosis, so it is not a casual game). In either case, both titles are really worth it.
dreday
I have never heard of Senuas Sacrifice, so I googled it. It's 85% off on steam summer sale ($4.49 in the US). Just an fyi for anyone else interested.
mcpackieh
Witcher 3 caught a lot of flak when released for looking worse than what was shown at E3. Why gamers still pay attention to early-access peeks of games at E3 is beyond my comprehension, it seems like a recipe for disappointment every time..
mvdtnz
You're undermining your own point but listing a bunch of console games.
nerdix
The PC gaming market is actually bigger now than it was back then.
The difference is that consoles didn't really start to become viable for the FPS genre until the Xbox/PS2 generation (and even then it was really just Halo).
So an FPS was PC exclusive by default with only the biggest games getting a clumsy console port or spinoff years later (like FarCry Instincts). Consoles became a first class citizen in the world of FPSes with the 360/PS3 generation in the mid-2000s. That's why FarCry 1 (2004) was a PC exclusive but FarCry 2 (2008) released on consoles and PC at the same time.
cubefox
Competitive FPS games did even exist on the N64 (James Bond Golden Eye, Perfect Dark), and in the next generation they were very common and mostly had the modern two stick controls which is still used today. So I don't think that had anything to do with it.
> The PC gaming market is actually bigger now than it was back then.
This might be true, but I'm fairly certain that the market share of the PC platform has strongly decreased relative to the consoles. AAA games have largely shifted to consoles or console ports. The most plausible reason is that the desktop PC market has collapsed. The heyday of PC gaming was probably somewhere between Quake (1996) and Crysis (2007).
nerdix
The "next generation" after N64 was Xbox/PS2. In my previous comment, I pointed out that FPSes on consoles became viable during that time. There were FPSes on consoles even prior to Golden Eye/Perfect Dark. For instance, there were SNES ports of Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. They were just all pretty bad. Even the "good" ones like Golden Eye don't really hold up against the PC shooters of the time.
Shooters didn't become a premiere genre for consoles until the 360/PS3 era. Like I said, as far as popularity went, there was Halo and MoH (to a way lesser degree) during the Xbox/PS2 days but not much else. And then all of a sudden, shooters became the hottest genre on consoles in the mid-late 00s. That's when CoD and Battlefield made the transition over to consoles in earnest. It's when Sony invested heavily (and ultimately failed) in creating a "Halo killer". It's when CoD went from a pretty successful PC franchise to consistently being the highest selling game year after year.
As far as the PC gaming market goes. There was a dark age starting in the mid-00s. But PC gaming is very popular right now (we'll have to see what impact high GPU prices has on its future) .
For instance, Activision makes more money from the PC platform than all consoles combined.
https://www.pcgamer.com/activision-is-making-more-money-on-p...
PC has been Ubisoft's second largest platform (ahead of Xbox but behind PlayStation) since 2018
https://www.statista.com/statistics/269679/breakdown-of-ubis...
No one in the industry ignores the PC market anymore. Everyone (except Nintendo) is releasing their games on PC now even companies that weren't traditionally in the PC gaming market like Japanese publishers. Genres that had a spotty history of PC support (Sports, JRPGs, Fighting games, etc) are seeing consistent PC releases. And even Sony conceded and started releasing their exclusives on PC (years later but it's still a dramatic shift from even a few years ago).
As someone who was primarily a PC gamer in the 90s, I can tell you anecdotally that I know several people who were console gamers only 20+ years ago who are now PC gamers.
scheeseman486
FarCry Instincts was much better than FarCry, I'll fight ya!
delta_p_delta_x
> We don't see technically ambitious PC exclusive games like this anymore
You should consider A Plague Tale: Requiem. Even without ray-tracing, it is by far one of the most beautiful games I've played in a long time (since The Witcher 3, at least). Not to mention it has a sucker-punch of a story and a phenomenal soundtrack.
barrysteve
The know how to make a game is free knowledge with paid education add-ons... we figured out the broad strokes.
Smaller tech leaps in client-side game software is difficult to protect from instant duplicaton. The cloud and mobile is the 'last moat'.
Are we going to move into black box software designs and trusted platform modules in hardware to enforce a technology moat for devs on pc's?
scheeseman486
It was a weird time. The Xbox existed and while not as powerful as PCs of the day, were closer in terms of cutting edge features thanks it's GPU with prorammable shaders. Doom 3 managed a decent port and Far Cry was remade as Far Cry Instincts which while less graphically impressive, was the better game. Half Life 2 got a port in 2005, but woof, it's pretty rough.
The real winner that year was The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, which did what Doom 3 did (stencil shadows, normal maps, unified lighting) on Xbox months before Doom 3's release on PC. It's the better game, too.
jacooper
Crytek still makes graphical masterpieces (and IMO crysis has one of the best FPS stories). Crysis 1 and 2 remastered are very good, and crysis 3 is still a masterpiece after more than 10 years.
And crysis 4 is coming.
haolez
I remember that the initial levels of Far Cry 1 were amazing jungle/beach scenarios that enabled a lot of different strategies for overcoming the smart human enemies.
The last levels, however, were all inside claustrophobic buildings with weird monsters running around.
If all levels had the feeling of the first ones, it would be my favorite game of all time.
leokennis
The demo was the first level in the bay. I think after 100 playthroughs there were like 5 different strategies to clear that level, all equally fun and effective.
And indeed at the end you were just pumping 500 rounds into unstoppable Doom-style monster deep inside some dark hallway.
KiwiJohnno
Agreed. I had amazing fun playing the first bits of Far Cry 1, sneaking through the jungle and playing sniper. It was great. Then I got to the end part, inside dark buildings and suddenly stealth isn't important at all, its more of a twitch shooter full of jump scares and requiring fast reactions over anything. I never finished the game
iforgotpassword
I agree. Wasn't it zombies? The first levels set a great feeling and atmosphere, everything was mysterious, and then it felt like they ran out of ideas and were like "hm yeah let's add zombies, because that's not totally something overused". And yes, I don't even remember the later levels and didn't even finish the game.
lelanthran
Not zombies, I remember mutants. Dr Evil[1] created mutants from people, etc, etc
[1] I don't remember the name. It was so long ago that it was when I first got married, the first time!
mbs159
Dr. Krieger
bartislartfast
Those early levels where you fight against humans in a tropical setting were the best part. Every Far Cry game that came after, emulated those first levels, and scrapped not monsters in hallways.
b212
One of the most beautiful games of its time.
Stopped gaming years ago but saw my cousin playing Far Cry 6 the other day and it looked better but not that much better. After 17 years. Crazy.
Version467
Have you compared it to screenshots from Far Cry 1, or to your memory of the game?
Far Cry 1 was a beautfiul game, absolutely, but the new iteration clearly does look a lot better than the original.
hifikuno
This was one thing that surprised me when playing the remastered version of Halo. It looked exactly as I remembered it. Then I swapped to the original graphics and realized my nostalgia and memories had added lots of extra details.
busfahrer
Had the same experience with the StarCraft Remaster
simonklitj
Yeah, take a look at this photo: https://i.redd.it/rfvm4j1j9m391.jpg
Looks like a lot of improvement to me.
xwdv
Somewhat, you can still see how the sky looks unnatural from the HDR effect which just ruins everything. The top is a more natural realistic sky. Shoreline is kinda weird too.
lelanthran
> Looks like a lot of improvement to me.
Dunno about "a lot". Certainly, it's improved in the area of modeling humans and faces, but landscape still looks pretty much the same.
dumdumchan
They peaked at far cry 2 and it has been down hill ever since
paxys
Far Cry 3 was miles better than the first two. In fact it was because of the success of 3 that every later game was just a copy of it, and the franchise stagnated.
als0
There's a lot to be admired by Far Cry 2: the environmental mechanics, the introduction, the lighting effects, the gritty and exotic atmosphere... but to me it was not a fun game. Not in the way that Far Cry 1 was fun.
hotsauceror
If they’d re-release Far Cry 2 with graphics on par with FC 5, I might never play anything else. I could hike around all day admiring the scenery in FC 5, or ride a jet ski from one end of the river to the other. But the story was hokey and tropey, most of the characters were uninteresting, and the ending was enough to put me off of Ubisoft for good. FC 2 had a great story, great characters, lots of interesting mechanics. And of course, the Standard Ubisoft Paradigm (climb a $TALL to unlock a map quadrant, sneak into $PLACE and fight $HEAVY, $SNIPER, and $LIGHT, have a $FORCEDENCOUNTER with $SUBBBOSS for some exposition), was still new enough that we weren’t tired of it yet.
mcpackieh
I liked Far Cry 4's setting and characters, but the game otherwise seemed very lazy and uninspired. Bland map and very little do to in between outposts. Little emergent fun to be had, except for doing missions or clearing outposts. Same complaint with Far Cry Primal; really neat idea but lazy/rushed execution.
bloqs
What is really interesting, is that lots of people would accuse you of rose-tinted spectacles and similar, I have continued to game from about 1998 until today.
the gaming industry is in a very odd place, and not unlike the film industry. Rehashes and sequels to increasingly aging 80s and 90s franchieses is the done thing. It generates nostalgia bucks from the older folks, the new folks are ignorant of the originals so just consume them at face value, and there is the magic 3rd property of being much cheaper to develop than creating something original.
This has lead to a huge drought of good new things because MBAs are not condusive to creative risks.
In gaming, what also follows the same line is stuff like graphical development. It's far more economical to take the Original game engine, and just gradually modify it as each generation passes. As a result, the most recent Far Cry game is almost identical in graphical quality to the last 3-4 at least (and it's not massively far away from the original either).
Because of cost-saving increment culture. Now, there is an additional element at play here, increasing polygon counts are exponentially uneffective - if a car with a circular wheel has 3 points, it looks awful. Double those points to 6, and hexagonal wheels look a hell of a lot better, and are passable in many older games. Double it again to 12 and it becomes indistinguishable from a circle at a glance. Double it to 24 and you would barely notice, double it again and it looks no different to the last generational increment.
The other issue is despite tooling coming so far, we it still takes a human artist the same amount of time to draw and design something. If that has to be done at increasingly extreme levels of detail, it's going to require more artists (and artists also don't even work well like that). So that also presents new problems.
So along with all the cost-saving and business optimisation of the pipeline of games production, there are real factors at play in how things have improved that really change how things look and feel.
I will say, if you watch a youtube video of the original game being played in high detail on a high end machine (this would have been before 1080p was a thing I believe) and watch a video of FC6 with a modern high-end machine at max settings, it's still impressive.
papito
As a Far Cry fanatic, even the difference between Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 is substantial. Far Cry 3 is one of those games where the gameplay is so good, you don't even pay attention to graphics, but with 4, you are on a different planet.
hexagonwin
Illegal or not I'm glad to see these getting released on public, it won't cause much harm due to being ancient but they're great learning resource.
sacnoradhq
I would advise NOT using this to learn from. There are so many antipatterns in here that it's a hot mess. There are plenty of better resources that teach good habits than learning how to become another high turnover C++ developer intern about to throw in another broken, fragile lava layer.
a20eac1d
So what should people be learning from then? What are some better resources?
cahoot_bird
I remember there is a bug with the hang glider that if you move down and up you gain momentum
Back in the day far cry 1 was ultra realistic graphics.
The game was fun to play, the most annoying thing is if you throw a rock or grenade where they can see if your stealth meter in instantly goes to zero and they start shooting you.
I played it a lot, hehe.
mediumsmart
:) me too - guiding trigens towards the mercs from a patrol boat with rockets.
Coming out of the bunker was amazing and then the realization that it would be a guided tour because "Doyle" :|
cahoot_bird
The game is riddled with small bugs, like you can knock the phone off the rock in the first level bunker then the cut scene will have him picking it up.
Having the trigens fight the people throughout the game was fun, and stealth aspect as well.
It's funny how the game emphasis seemed to be on the realistic mode, but it's like it was only tested on medium - the trigens would die very quickly and easily on realistic if the guards shot them, if I had to guess probably the bullet damage is turned up on that mode.
omgmajk
I have spent many hours reading the source code to games from sources like https://github.com/bobeff/open-source-games - this is going to be a new fun weekend project!
inteligence_po
Good links on another leaks:
github.com/StrongPC123/Far-Cry-1-Source-Full
breachforums.vc/Thread-FarCry-1-Leaked-Source-Code
I guess it is interesting about github
cuken14
cool
ftxbro
maybe someone is trying to cause trouble for archive.org by putting such clearly violating content on there
ExoticPearTree
It doesn’t really matter at this point. It is out there and the Internet never forgets.
What will come next, if it ever comes, it will be a game a whack-a-mole that the copyright owners have no chance of winning.
naillo
The internet can wipe things completely given enough want from corporations. For instance the hulk hogan tape seems utterly gone no matter where you look.
rebane2001
No it can't if you do your part
MaxBarraclough
I think that's unlikely, it's a drop in the bucket at this point.
Last I heard they were hosting Nintendo ROMs, in unarguable infringement of the copyrights.
ftxbro
Well that sounds bad. Are they all-in on piracy like their server is hosted on international waters or rotating between some whack-a-mole servers from like kazakhstan and mongolia and eswatini?
xwdv
Yup. Hosted on a server farm aboard a repurposed cargo ship flying a pirate flag roaming international waters, spending its life evading the coast guard, using starlink satellites to provide connectivity to the rest of the world. The crew is made up of former cyber criminals evading the law from their home countries for hacking related offenses, along with a few actual Somali pirates or random killers and war criminals. They have the greatest collection of pirated software, raw leaks and rare media files that you won’t find anywhere else.
boomboomsubban
No, they just follow DMCA claims and there's no real issue. They are under no obligation to police themselves.
stefncb
They were also hosting the release doom wad files for multiple versions last time I checked.
throwaway2037
This is a good point. What is archive.org's policy with regards to "leaked" (unlicensed) source code? I imagine they need to remove it.
boomboomsubban
If the content owner DMCA strikes it, they'll remove it. If not, it's not really their problem. Basically the same way the rest of the internet works.
dreday
I think in the US they would be protected under section 230. Which is a reminder to is all (in the US) of why section 230 is so important.
zerr
CryEngine is open source now, isn't it?
debugnik
Kinda, Amazon purchased the code and forked it as Lumberyard. Then they realised their own studios didn't want to use it and their game-dev projects failed, so they donated the engine to the Linux Foundation.
But the engine didn't even support Linux yet, so they spawned a new Open 3D Foundation for it, and renamed the engine Open 3D. I haven't heard of anyone using it seriously yet.
Dracophoenix
Actually, before Lumberyard was released, Crytek had already open-sourced Cryengine and gave it away under a pay-what-you-want model until the engine's 5.5 release.
debugnik
Source-available is not open-source; I know people care increasingly less but having access to the source is not enough for it to be "open".
gattr
I still do a playthrough of FC1 every two years of so (on highest difficulty). I love the game mechanics (though not the Trigen-heavy levels).
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I wish companies would just opensource really old engines for educational purposes.
Maybe take game assets resize everything to 1/10th so that it looks like sht but can still be used as placeholder.
Would boost the pipeline of talent for the entire industry