I’m not well versed in C&C, but it’s always good to see more games open sourced.

  • Ledericas@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    1 day ago

    dont people already make seperate MODS for each anyways, for them anyways,. they figured they wernt making money off having the old games in thier wierd little launcher.

  • Tezzerets_Tea_Time@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    2 days ago

    Holy shit, EA did something… Good? I did not have that on my 2025 bingo card. So, what’s the catch? There has to be a catch, right?

    • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 day ago

      Short version: You can make free stuff for them but they still own all of it and still require people to purchase a copy to use the derivatives.

      • frezik@midwest.social
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        19 hours ago

        You can make complete conversions with your own assets. That’s basically how old id engines work.

    • IHeartBadCode@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      30
      ·
      1 day ago

      This doesn’t release any copyright work in the game. So you will need to go through and remove any sprites, images, audio, etc that is copyright. Which means you will need to own a copy of the game (to have a right to the copyright usage) to use any binary produced from THIS source.

      Additionally, it indicates that you must include in any derivative that the source of your code is from the EA drop here.

      Outside of that, it is GPLv3. Of course it has hard dependency on DirectX 5.0. So a fully free version will need to redo those parts. Also the code is very MS VC++ heavy. Don’t expect gcc to build you a binary.

        • bss03@infosec.pub
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 day ago

          I think so. When I first saw the announcement, I was fearing some barely open source license, and was pleasantly surprised.

      • jkercher@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        Heh, the red alert readme says it currently requires borland for the asm and watcom compiler for the c/c++.

  • DicJacobus@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    5
    ·
    19 hours ago

    its odd that they open sourced Generals and the first CNC and Red Alert, but nothing in between.

    CNC3 was my favorite, and I’ll die on that hill . but RA2 was obivously the fan favorite, and Tiberian Sun had probably the best atmosphere

    • LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      edit-2
      19 hours ago

      Sometimes licenses get in the way, it’s possible they bought an engine or tech from a 3rd party and don’t have the legal standing (or don’t know if they do or not) to release the source.

      • DicJacobus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        19 hours ago

        someone else here suggested that the source code for TS/RA2 was lost. which wouldnt surprise me.

        These are games that were made when and before the Zoomers were being born. they are ancient by most people’s standards.

        • LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          18 hours ago

          Fallout source is gone too. There was just no reliable way to store source code back then, a lot of times it was just one of the developers that had it sitting in a desk drawer.

          If it’s new enough, maybe a burnt CD.

  • ZeroOne@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    1 day ago

    Now if only they open-sourced the SAGE engine, then we’d be all happy

    The engine is highly optimized & produces great visuals, Of course there IS OpenSAGE

  • 9point6@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    2 days ago

    Well I’m very excited to see the injection of life this hopefully gives c&c modding

    I wonder how many of the old guard are still around, I’m glad the cncnet project is still going strong

  • Go-On-A-Steam-Train@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    74
    ·
    2 days ago

    This is brilliant! :) aw, I hope it benefits the OpenRA developers and means more fun things to play eventually :)

    Wait… this is EA… are they okay? This is very unlike them

        • turtle [he/him]@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          19
          ·
          2 days ago

          That would be a completely legendary move if the dev hired by EA just said “fuck it, I’m open-sourcing this shit!”

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            19
            ·
            1 day ago

            It sounds like that’s what happened, but through the proper channels. They hired a known CnC community/modding site admin as the dev.

            I’d imagine he pitched that this was an easy way to reduce maintenance costs while fostering massive good will and making the amount of long tail sales over time higher.

            • turtle [he/him]@lemm.ee
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              19 hours ago

              That’s actually kind of a brilliant concept that should serve as an example for other video game publishers then: open-source the program so that it can be maintained by the community, but require a license to use the artwork. The community could eventually recreate and even improve the artwork anyway.