Far Cry 1.34 source code (2006)

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 uncertain terms that Flash is dead. Is there any good reason why the sources need to stay closed if they aren't going to make any further gains, financial or otherwise, from this product and its ecosystem? I mean the Flash Player plugin and standalone app specifically, not the Flash authoring software — that's still alive under a new name, Adobe Animate.

Trident, the Internet Explorer engine. Again, it's dead for good as far as Microsoft is concerned, so why not release its sources for people to learn and hack on?

Presto, the Opera engine. This was leaked and of course I hoarded it, but it would be nice to see an official release.

Winamp. The company behind it pivoted to some kind of streaming social donation thing. It does not seem interested in maintaining the old Winamp app.

Path, the social media thing for "close friends", their mobile apps. The apps were insanely cool, especially at the time of Path's peak around 2013, but the service was shut down a few years ago. Unless they're going to somehow resurrect the service, there's no good reason for the sources for the apps to remain closed. I'd love to take a look at their implementation of real-time photo filters.

Thinking of it, it makes more sense for non-game apps than for games to release sources. Old games do sometimes come out as "remasters" for modern platforms. These usually reuse the engine and sometimes some of the assets. Non-game software, on the other hand, when it's dead, it's usually dead for good.

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

I guess this is legally unfeasible. Take a look at the splash screens next time you're loading a game - especially AAA but also smaller ones too. There will beone page with a bunch of logos. Havok physics is the one that comes to mind but there's loads more. Each of these is a plugin with proprietary code. They would need to be stripped out before the code could be released, which would probably be a lot of work. And then the code wouldn't run anyway.

This isn't a recent thing - as another comment points out, even the original Doom ran into this problem and only the Linux source was released.

What should really happen is a law that video games get declared public domain and have their source code released after 10 years. All assets and dependencies would get automatically released under a license allowing for their use in that game and derivatives of it.

As it is, the source is mostly just lost to time, making humanity poorer.

I guess the best way woul dbe to regulate that. If you want to sell any software (including firmware) you have to deposit the sources and encryption keys into some state-owned repository. If you decided to stop maintaining the code it would be released into public domain after some reasonable grace period (e.g. 5 years). That would solve many issues including excess e-waste.

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.

> Maybe take game assets resize everything to 1/10th so that it looks like sht but can still be used as placeholder.

The assets are commonly licensed, so you can't include them at all, or in large parts. Commonly the game data is not part of the release either.

The reason is often that those codebases are usually a giant hairball of closed source 3rd party dependencies which would be a nightmare to put under a common open source license, no matter if the companies behind those products still exist or not.

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

Old engines are very far from the current way is doing things. You might learn a lot, but you won't learn what you need to program modern games

My own personal and private opinion is that I wish the legislation would opensource things that are not being actively sold where the owner is a corporation.

You still have registration in USA, so if you register then you have to deposit, if you register with corporate ownership then you pay a yearly renewal, if you stop paying the deposit goes to public domain. Simples.

Agree. I would even be happy if the game was stripped of all licensed code/assets/tools/etc. And honestly, I don't even care if it can successfully compile/run. Just having the code alone would be tremendously useful for the purpose of study.

Often Open-Sourcing is not an option, as they license closed source code for it.

Windows for example couldn't be made open source because of licensed, closed source code blocks.

From a pure archiving point of view it would be great.

It's a shame how many pieces of software are already totally lost forever.

I think they won't as certain parts might have migrated to new engines without being changed much. Like geometry engine etc.

Maybe start a non-profit whose sole mission is to buy up this old IP and release it.

I wonder if this reaches into the territory of “abandoning your copyright” though.

RIP UT2k4

Huh? That doesn't seem right. We absolutely have ambitious games on pc that bring generational leaps in graphical fidelity.

Like the Witcher 3, which was absolutely stunning when it first released. Similarly (although originally a console exclusive) Red Dead Redemption 2 looks incredible on PC. We also have releases like Hellblade: Senuas Sacrifice which pushed the limit of what was possible to achieve with limited resources (regarding the development, not the hardware).

Honorable mentions should probably also include Star Citizen, which although still unreleased is definitely an incredibly technically ambitious project. As is Cyberpunk 2077. The launch might have been a total disaster, but afaik it's the first big game to ship a full ray-tracing renderer.

Maybe we have a different understanding of what a 'technically ambitious' game is. But I see technical improvements left and right. Unreal Engine 5 comes with some features that are just mind-blowing and make a whole new level of graphical fidelity available even to small indie developers. Just take a look at the recently released footage of "Unrecord", where lots of people thought it was real life footage.

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 of FPSes with the 360/PS3 generation in the mid-2000s. That's why FarCry 1 (2004) was a PC exclusive but FarCry 2 (2008) released on consoles and PC at the same time.

> We don't see technically ambitious PC exclusive games like this anymore

You should consider A Plague Tale: Requiem. Even without ray-tracing, it is by far one of the most beautiful games I've played in a long time (since The Witcher 3, at least). Not to mention it has a sucker-punch of a story and a phenomenal soundtrack.

The know how to make a game is free knowledge with paid education add-ons... we figured out the broad strokes.

Smaller tech leaps in client-side game software is difficult to protect from instant duplicaton. The cloud and mobile is the 'last moat'.

Are we going to move into black box software designs and trusted platform modules in hardware to enforce a technology moat for devs on pc's?

It was a weird time. The Xbox existed and while not as powerful as PCs of the day, were closer in terms of cutting edge features thanks it's GPU with prorammable shaders. Doom 3 managed a decent port and Far Cry was remade as Far Cry Instincts which while less graphically impressive, was the better game. Half Life 2 got a port in 2005, but woof, it's pretty rough.

The real winner that year was The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, which did what Doom 3 did (stencil shadows, normal maps, unified lighting) on Xbox months before Doom 3's release on PC. It's the better game, too.

Crytek still makes graphical masterpieces (and IMO crysis has one of the best FPS stories). Crysis 1 and 2 remastered are very good, and crysis 3 is still a masterpiece after more than 10 years.

And crysis 4 is coming.

It got stuck in the soon™ phase

The demo was the first level in the bay. I think after 100 playthroughs there were like 5 different strategies to clear that level, all equally fun and effective.

And indeed at the end you were just pumping 500 rounds into unstoppable Doom-style monster deep inside some dark hallway.

Agreed. I had amazing fun playing the first bits of Far Cry 1, sneaking through the jungle and playing sniper. It was great. Then I got to the end part, inside dark buildings and suddenly stealth isn't important at all, its more of a twitch shooter full of jump scares and requiring fast reactions over anything. I never finished the game

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.

Those early levels where you fight against humans in a tropical setting were the best part. Every Far Cry game that came after, emulated those first levels, and scrapped not monsters in hallways.

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.

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.

As a Far Cry fanatic, even the difference between Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 4 is substantial. Far Cry 3 is one of those games where the gameplay is so good, you don't even pay attention to graphics, but with 4, you are on a different planet.

I would advise NOT using this to learn from. There are so many antipatterns in here that it's a hot mess. There are plenty of better resources that teach good habits than learning how to become another high turnover C++ developer intern about to throw in another broken, fragile lava layer.

:) me too - guiding trigens towards the mercs from a patrol boat with rockets.

Coming out of the bunker was amazing and then the realization that it would be a guided tour because "Doyle" :|

cool

It doesn’t really matter at this point. It is out there and the Internet never forgets.

What will come next, if it ever comes, it will be a game a whack-a-mole that the copyright owners have no chance of winning.

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.

This is a good point. What is archive.org's policy with regards to "leaked" (unlicensed) source code? I imagine they need to remove it.

I think in the US they would be protected under section 230. Which is a reminder to is all (in the US) of why section 230 is so important.

Kinda, Amazon purchased the code and forked it as Lumberyard. Then they realised their own studios didn't want to use it and their game-dev projects failed, so they donated the engine to the Linux Foundation.

But the engine didn't even support Linux yet, so they spawned a new Open 3D Foundation for it, and renamed the engine Open 3D. I haven't heard of anyone using it seriously yet.

There's no reason why a company would be required to release the source code once copyright expires. Someone finding an old copy of the source could spread it around, but that's about all.

However, with copyright expiring 70 years after the death of the author(s), by the time copyright does expire, the sources will have disappeared.