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EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3

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Re: EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3

#11
post #4

The post mentions TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll, I assume it's not the whole source of the games, is it?

Here’s the language they use: “Electronic Arts will be releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license” I assume “their corresponding source code” means “the code for those DLLs”, but I do wonder why they bother mentioning the DLLs at all.

Even weirder considering the games were for DOS originally - and DOS doesn’t use DLLs at all.

Re: EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3

#13
post #4

The post mentions TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll, I assume it's not the whole source of the games, is it?

Here’s the language they use: “Electronic Arts will be releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license” I assume “their corresponding source code” means “the code for those DLLs”, but I do wonder why they bother mentioning the DLLs at all.

> these open-source DLLs should assist users to design maps, create custom units, replace art, alter gameplay logic, and edit data

Re: EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3

#15
post #6
post #4

The post mentions TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll, I assume it's not the whole source of the games, is it?

Most likely the whole engine and the bare metal game without the arts/graphics and music/sound. That's how a lot of opensource clones work. For example OpenTTD [0] was reverse engineered and you have 2 options to actually play the game - either have the original game and use the arts/graphics and music/sound data from the original files - use the open source remake of the arts/graphics and music/sound The 2nd option…

At least with OpenRA you can legally download the original game content ISO CD images (EA released them as free(beer)-ware a while ago) - the only thing missing is about half of the single-player campaign missions as OpenRA can’t play the original game missions directly so the project’s contributors recreate them by-hand,

Re: EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3

#16
As someone who got to be quite good at Red Alert back in the late 1900's, I look forward to taking a look.

While the commercial value of the code dropped to about 0 over a decade ago (or did it?), eventual release of source code is better than never releasing source code.

Re: EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3

#18

As someone who got to be quite good at Red Alert back in the late 1900's, I look forward to taking a look. While the commercial value of the code dropped to about 0 over a decade ago (or did it?), eventual release of source code is better than never releasing source code.

I laughed at "1900's" — technically, you could have gone with "1000's" just as well :)

Re: EA will be releasing the C&C Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert source code under GPL3

#19
post #7

Hey EA, how about the Bullfrog games next?

Found this Theme Hospital project recently, as long as you have a paid for version of the game, it works great https://github.com/CorsixTH/CorsixTH

There is also this clon— er, “spiritual successor”, which got some pretty good reviews: https://www.twopointhospital.com
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