Cat Mother Open-Sources Game Engine

Mr.Oreo writes "According to Flipcode, Finnish videogame development company Cat Mother Ltd. has now closed its offices, but in their last meeting the company board decided to publish all company source code as open source. A large part of the game assets are also available. Published material includes a fully playable prototype of a 3rd person action/adventure game, and a commercial quality in-house 3D-engine (C++/DirectX9). The source code is published under the BSD license, and the content is published under the GPL license. Just downloaded the engine and snooped through it - it looks pretty complete, and definitely worth having a look at if you're a 3D code monkey."

Comments

It's things like this ...

[Kleedrac2]

that really make me renew my faith in open-source. This is what it's truly good for in the private sector. I get annoyed every time I hear some kid say that Half-Life should be open-sourced just because the sequel is coming out and it's based on Quake II which is open-source anyways. This is what Open-Source should be though ... the company is defunct and the technology would go to waste otherwise ... why not give it away under the BSD liscense so you can still get the kudos. Hell, maybe the original developers will get to finish their dream in their spare time!!

What happens next?

[IM6100]

The question I have to ask, and maybe I am being skeptical, is 'what happens next?' I see that they've shut down the company web page, and there's downloadable code available on a sourceforge page. I don't see any links on the sourceforge page for anybody involved in an ongoing project. Does that sort of thing 'grow' out of the code eventually? How?

i hope other companies follow this path

[incubusnb]

not only older finished products, but cancelled products that didn't make it to the world should be presented in Open Source.

i remember when certain games that i was looking forward to would get cancelled, if more companies released the source, at least there would still be a chance for it to be a finished product.

for example, EA's Motor City was a great game, now its closed the doors on the server, why can't they release the source code under the GNU and allow people to setup their own servers, or to re-program on offline mode. now my $60 product is useless and my Faith in EA is damaged. just because they can't use the soucre anymore, doesn't mean nobody else could.

I applaud Cat Mother's innovative ideals, the world would be a better place if more companies saw Open source the same way.

Re:OS games

[rlowe69]

I hope they release their in-house documentation too.

This is a game development company. What documentation? ;)

Check out their news timeline

[stoborrobots]

what's funny is that the news on their homepage suggests that their company timeline was:

1. Get seed funding from Venture Capitalists
2. Become a registered Xbox developer
3. go bust!

So now their trying the slashdot principle:

1. Release all code as open-source
2. ???
3. profit!!!

Kudos

[Quill_28]

For releasing under the BSD license and not GNU.