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Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

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Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#191

Post by pdntspa »

grishka wrote: post #107
Havoc wrote: post #2

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…

Au contraire, Winamp 5.9.2 released recently and it's the same old player.

They are working on a new one that I am somewhat suspicious of, but Winamp 5.9 has been a pleasant surprise.

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#192

Post by someplaceguy »

hesdeadjim wrote: post #180
someplaceguy wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? Wouldn't the calling code be written (and thus copyrighted) by the company that wrote the game rather than the one that created the SDK?

Depends, if it’s code calling a console SDK API then you are bound by terms of the NDA to not publicly share it — forever. Even just function names! More realistically, a drop of source code is basically painting a big target on your company to get sued by a troll. I’ve wanted to release my game’s source but am terrified of this.

Perhaps you could just rename the function names, structure fields, etc, to something different but similar?

e.g. instead of ps3_fly_up(...) you'd rename to something a bit more generic like sdk_float_up(...) or something like that.

It could require a bit of creativity and some work but with a sufficiently-intelligent IDE it'd just be a one-time rename per function name + structure name + field name.

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#193

Post by looperhacks »

dumdumchan wrote: post #159
als0 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The immersion is what sold it to me. No hud, no on screen markers. Need to look at map? Pull it out, hold it in your hand and look at it. I'm surprised no other AAA game has tried this formula.

You might want to take a look at the latest entry in the Metro series

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#194

Post by tobr »

pizzapill wrote: post #177
iforgotpassword wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

As far as I understand, this is even true of lesser known old movies - even the work of figuring out who has the rights to what is unlikely to pay back, so it’s just never released in a digital format.

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#195

Post by gibolt »

grishka wrote: post #107
Havoc wrote: post #2

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…

Internet Explorer is still very much alive for millions of people. Releasing the source would mean unlocking way more exploits on those people, with no plan to patch.

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#196

Post by [deleted] »

bhouston wrote: post #63
sacnoradhq wrote: post #54

Let's see how many antipatterns: - Multiple inheritance - Over-abstraction - Excessive identifier prefixing and suffixing - Use of friend - Use of bit fields instead of bools - Inconsistent mixture of custom and built-in int types - Direct storage of pointers instead of reference-counted containers - Custom (and likely broken) _smart_ptr - Cancerous coding style that adds too many lines - Functions with 7+ arguments…

Sounds like a real world project that focused on shipping a good game rather than have perfect code. There is a reason perfectionist devs do not run big projects. They focus on minutiae rather than the big picture. Even in my own experiences, one of my most successful projects (eventually acquired by Amazon) was a quickly written hacked together project that solved a big issue well. Over time it became better enginee…

[deleted]

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#197

Post by taneq »

suddenclarity wrote: post #6
kelsolaar wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Carmack did a stellar job in that respect. Doom and Quake are still very much alive thanks to his decision.

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 p…

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.

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#198

Post by hotsauceror »

dumdumchan wrote: post #112
Version467 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 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.

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#199

Post by cubefox »

nerdix wrote: post #175
cubefox wrote: post #12

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 any…

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…

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).

Re: Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

#200

Post by deaddodo »

tobr wrote: post #194
pizzapill wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I understand, this is even true of lesser known old movies - even the work of figuring out who has the rights to what is unlikely to pay back, so it’s just never released in a digital format.

This is almost exclusively usually due to either producer credits or music licensing.

For the former, if it's really that big they'll just release it and keep a standard budget aside for if/when the unlocated people come out. The latter is what really blocks movies because it actively costs them money, so they need to be able to earn more than what it is costing them to release. This makes music-heavy/niche music films much more expensive for potential broadcasters/streamers.

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