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Doom 3 Source Code To Be Released This Year

Posted by timothy on from the carmack-is-awesome-and-I-don't-even-play-games dept.

An anonymous reader writes "John Carmack just confirmed during his QuakeCon 2011 keynote that the source code to Doom 3 will be released this year. The source drop will follow the release of their Rage game in October. Carmack has also challenged other game developers to release their old source code."

2 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Old hardware by compro01 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    How out of date is your hardware? Doom 3 was released 7 years ago.

    --
    upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
  2. He gets it, he is awesome by airfoobar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a shame that a lot of old games (including DOS games, circa 1995) have been consigned to the graveyard of dead software, where they can't be ported/maintained because they have no sources and need emulation, they can't be bought except for second/third/20th-hand, they can't be copied/preserved because of copyright. It's shameful, really. I feel quite angry about that tbh, and I'm delighted to see game creators make an effort to release their code.

    I sometimes see people arguing that releasing the code is impossible because some parts are based on proprietary code they don't have the rights to. I wish they would just cut that code out and release the rest. There are a lot of eager fans out there who would be very happy to rewrite that code and even develop drop-in open-source replacements that can be reused for other ports (yes, even entire game engines). Let's not let old games end up like old films, rotting away in the archives of underfunded libraries without anyone knowing they ever existed.