251–260 of 547 posts
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don't quote me on that but i read somewhere that microsoft has a strict policy of NIH in their codebase - everything gets reimplemented from scratch unless it's completely unfeasible. The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.
What is "NIH"? Google only mentions health institutions.
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don't quote me on that but i read somewhere that microsoft has a strict policy of NIH in their codebase - everything gets reimplemented from scratch unless it's completely unfeasible. The only problem might be the software patents that their code leverages.
What is "NIH"? Google only mentions health institutions.
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This is the usual argument you hear when it comes to old Games. It often would take way to long time to "clean" them up from 3rd party contributions/licenses etc. For a OS this is a impossible task.
Usually the argument goes that it would take time/money to rewrite the parts they don't have rights to, but simply deleting those parts and releasing the (now broken) code would be much better than nothing. Of course this assumes they kept track of who owns what code in the first place. Probably a bad assumption in the case of games particularly.
Not only that but for any large company to release code somebody in engineering needs to look at it to at least know what all is there, the legal department needs to assess the risk of potential liability, then which license to release it under needs to be decided. Finally, somebody in a senior business role needs to sign off on doing it.
I think it's great when old code gets released but the reason it's rare is it gets complex and it's nobody's job to do it. That's why many such releases are thanks to an employee deciding to care about doing it and having the internal cred and sway to push it through. Or, as it appears in this case, someone who had access to the code and is awesome enough to release it anonymously years later when the business is defunct or will no longer care.
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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?
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 crimina…
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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.
> 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 t…
When developing software, a company might aquire a license to add some library or code to their product.
This happens all the time with OS's like Windows (licensing the ability to play media formats, etc.) or games (licensing certain engines or algorithms).
That doesn't mean the company squired a license to release the libraries or code as open source 20 years later.
So you'd have to go through the codebase with a fine-toothed comb, line-by-line, because the original developers don't work for you anymore, and the license agreements are long lost.
Releasing large software projects are a massive cost to any company that wants to be protected from potential lawsuits.
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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".
Very few and they still make 90+% of sales before then. A price worth paying
https://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/11nlu70/recently_dayz...
But even if that's an outlier, online games can have a surprisingly long tail where the game remains profitable even if the player count doesn't grow anymore (as long as the developer supports the game at least).
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
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 uncert…
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.
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.
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.
[1] I don't remember the name. It was so long ago that it was when I first got married, the first time!
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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.
Yeah, take a look at this photo: https://i.redd.it/rfvm4j1j9m391.jpg 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.
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They peaked at far cry 2 and it has been down hill ever since
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 mecha…
FC2 didn't have that. FC2 was set in Africa. It's still my favourite of the bunch for a lot of reasons (only a little because I understand the local language the mooks are screaming to each other when you're in the middle of a firefight).
It's funny, when I first bought FC2 I played for about 8 hours and I hated it.
When I went back to it after about 8 years, I found that I appreciated the immersion a lot more, and it quickly became my favourite.