Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

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.

> it might have been the case, that there were not that many commands anyway, so that the linked list did not noticably slow things down.

Also, unlike the game code itself which has to finish running its work in time for every frame, it probably doesn’t matter if running a command from the Quake terminal takes a little bit extra time.

Would anyone notice or care about a difference in the amount of time it takes to run the /noclip command for example, in a O(n) vs O(1) lookup of the command in the probably short list of available commands? I don’t think so.

Speaking for myself, if I bring up the terminal in a game like quake to run a command, I’m probably standing stationary somewhere out of danger at the moment. And the amount of time I spend to tab open the terminal and type /noclip would be much greater than the amount that the game then takes to look for that command in its list of commands.

You can take a look at Amazon Lumberyard which is free. It's based on CryEngine, which is behind Far Cry.

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.

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.