A lot of old games have become unplayable on modern hardware and operating systems. I wrote an article about how making games open source will keep them playable far into the future.
I also discuss how making games open source could be beneficial to developers and companies.
Feedback and constructive criticism are most welcome, and in keeping with the open source spirit, I will give you credit if I make any edits based on your feedback.
Be the change you want to see. Make some games worth playing and release it as a FOSS and prove it can be a commercial success as well. See how it goes.
Asking people to release their work for free while providing very little incentives other than your own benefit aren’t going to convince people who need to put food on the table NOW, without relying on miniscule probability of popularity or success after pouring years of your time.
Well, one of the alternatives is what ID Software used to do, where they would sell the game for a period of time and then open source the code Once sales dropped off.
Why would we need open source instead of just removing drm?
Most people aren’t going to compile old games for new hardware. That’s not an easy task.
Abandonware is a thing, and there are some websites dedicated to it. GOG has done some great stuff releasing drm free games. So long as we have drm free, we can always build emulators to run what can’t natively run on modern systems.
Are you kidding? Think about all the skilled contributors that currently work on emulators, do you not think that some of them would switch to working on re-compiling games? And I agree there are probably weird platforms that it wouldn’t be easy for, but anything x86 is going to be much more trivial. I mean, someone was even reverse-engineering Super Mario 64, re-coding the entire game. The original source code and ability to use the code without getting sued would make things so much easier. Yeah, not every game would be done, but the big titles would be.
As far as emulating the rest, access to the source code would make it far, far simpler to figure out compatibility issues and make sure that every game is actually playable.
The open sourcing of the quake engine is where a lot of modern engines got their roots.
Can you explain that? Are you saying there are modern engines using parts of quake 1 source code?
The engine Can of Duty uses is effectively a heavily modified quake 3 engine.
By this point it’s so modified it may as well be a different thing, but make no mistake it has evolved from the quake 3 engine.
The first 3 or 4 used quake 3 engine for sure, but didn’t they switch it at some point?
Edit: nm I found the wiki page on the topic: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IW_(game_engine)
Tldr; it’s what you said
