Al Lowe reveals his Sierra source code collection

Post by ekianjo » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 7:07 AM UTC

zanny wrote: post #66

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that raises an interesting problem - if you want to look back 1000 years the sources are scarce, and largely composed of the thoughts of the educated or the wealthy - people who could read and write and store these items. 500 years from now we're going to be faced with a totally different problem - if a user wants to learn about the year 2018 where do they start? Official documents will appear to be stored be…

500 years from now we will likely have strong AI capable of rapidly processing the exabytes of data we produced in this day and age as a unit test for the self-modifying system updates. That being said, on a timescale as long as 5 centuries, I don't think anyone can even begin to fathom in the slightest with any degree of confidence what anything will be like. I just hope the advances this century might make it a pos…

Post by ptman » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 7:59 AM UTC

rixrax wrote: post #68

Al Lowe, if you're reading, I am humbly asking you to consider putting all the source code you have for Sierra etc. games up to GitHub for all of us to {gaze|look|worship...}. Let the collectors have the pleasure of having it all on the original physical medias, but let the rest of us mere mortals have access to the essence. Edit: alas, it's pointed out that above may not be possible as IP is owned by someone else. T…

Post by scrollaway » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 8:49 AM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #64

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a text command driven game, isn't it? Getting an encyclopedic listing of all of the different text that the original recognized would be most easily handled by reading it from the original code. I suppose just examining the original media might have been enough. Or maybe they abandoned that command style? I didn't play the remake.

If they wanted to referrer to the original dialogue or images, it's easy to do without the source. ScummVM and other projects already have tools out there to extract all the game data from old Sierra games.

Post by cenal » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 8:57 AM UTC

mschaef wrote: post #82

TheDong wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's still copyrighted and so cannot be legally displayed or distributed by the internet archive for another ~65 years (95 years from publication for copyright to expire). Many of us won't be alive to see this code legally. The copyright period could also increase again if the law retroactively increases it again.

> Many of us won't be alive to see this code legally. Dunno about you, but for me, it's hard to imagine an 85 year old in the year 2083 even caring about seeing this code legally.

Post by laythea » Sat, Dec 01, 2018, 10:03 AM UTC

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #14

kevin_b_er wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If rare video game market is anything like I think it is, this will disappear into a jealous "private collector". You'll never ever see the source code because they feel that dumping or providing digital copies of the disks would degrade the value of their collection. And public suffers just a little more under greed and selfishness.

> And public suffers just a little more under greed and selfishness. I don't know if "I don't have a copy of King's Quest 3 source code" counts as suffering.