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Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever

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473 points chocmake | 28 comments | 20 Nov 24 03:15 UTC | HN request time: 1.269s | source | bottom
1. modeless ◴[20 Nov 24 05:32 UTC] No.42191063[source]▶
I wish they would GPL it like Quake. Even if it was missing some proprietary dependencies I bet the community could replace them.

I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.

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2. dmead ◴[20 Nov 24 05:46 UTC] No.42191121[source]▶
Ioquake was helpful for the open Jedi project get an open source version of jk3 working.

https://github.com/OpenJediProject/OJP

I'm sure there is some small group of UT people that would gladly keep it alive in a similar fashion.

3. deafpolygon ◴[20 Nov 24 06:12 UTC] No.42191223[source]▶
Im willing to bet the code for UT is being used for Fortnite.
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4. pests ◴[20 Nov 24 06:16 UTC] No.42191242[source]▶
My first introduction to Unreal was via the "Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition" right around the year 2000. I fondly remember some of those maps (Facing Worlds for one) but to think that lineage ends up at Fornite is crazy to me.
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5. mikepurvis ◴[20 Nov 24 06:25 UTC] No.42191271[source]▶
That shouldn’t have any impact on its ability to be relicensed and open sourced though— any secret sauce in Fortnite is elsewhere, and arguably none of it is code, but rather in asset-level stuff like game/map/character design and monetization/progression strategy.
6. numpad0 ◴[20 Nov 24 07:23 UTC] No.42191522[source]▶
It doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense, but code can be released under multiple different licenses. A 1:1 relationship between code and its terms is not required.
7. jsiepkes ◴[20 Nov 24 07:39 UTC] No.42191589[source]▶
It's a 25 year old game engine. There is not going to be anything in it which they consider a trade secret today.
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8. iakov ◴[20 Nov 24 08:01 UTC] No.42191700{3}[source]▶
Oh man, I loved that game as a kid. I did not have internet back then, but I didn’t care - I spent hours playing against bots. I still remember the voice taunts and callouts (“I slaughtered that guy!”) and creative maps like ctf_face. Then there were the built in gameplay mods like insta-gib and low gravity, fun guns like Redeemer - kept me glued to the screen for hours. I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs - UT was a much better and bigger game! Thanks for a trip down the memory lane. Good, simple times.
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9. zelos ◴[20 Nov 24 08:14 UTC] No.42191750{4}[source]▶
"I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs..."

I was the same. UT was so much fun - bouncing flak cannon shrapnel round corners! But my LAN group all wanted to play CS or that UT mod that was similar (Tactical Ops?).

10. pests ◴[20 Nov 24 08:16 UTC] No.42191762{4}[source]▶
I don't think I knew too much about computers or gaming at that age to figure all that out. I just played the base mode.

My introduction to programming was thru a different game (Subspace VIE, a MMO on dialup back in the 90s later community-remade as Continuum) when squad had a login page at a domain. I really wondered how example.com/?login worked and that led me to where I am today.

11. jsheard ◴[20 Nov 24 09:04 UTC] No.42192030{3}[source]▶
Even the current Unreal Engine doesn't have much in the way of trade secrets, its entire source code is available on GitHub for anyone to look at (aside from the console-specific parts bound by NDAs).
12. ZaoLahma ◴[20 Nov 24 09:19 UTC] No.42192118{3}[source]▶
The base game was fantastic. Never could say no to a game on dm-morpheus. But what really made it great for me were the total conversion mods.

I spent probably thousands of hours playing Infiltration back in the day. I can't imagine how much time and energy must have been poured into completely re-doing a game like that.

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13. rounce ◴[20 Nov 24 09:44 UTC] No.42192255{4}[source]▶
That’s a name that brings back memories. Infiltration was so far ahead of its time, and it’s interesting to look at how many of its features are now standard on even run-and-gun FPS these days.
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14. ZaoLahma ◴[20 Nov 24 09:59 UTC] No.42192343{5}[source]▶
Indeed. It's a shame that Sentry Studios never transitioned into a "proper" game development studio. They were at least 10 years ahead of the curve.

But it's good that the games industry caught up so the infiltration-itch can be scratched in other ways.

15. pxc ◴[20 Nov 24 10:57 UTC] No.42192706[source]▶
When I was a kid, I had so much fun playing open-source games based on Quake engines. Tremulous stands out as especially delightful at the little LAN parties we threw at my house on birthdays and New Years' Eve.
16. Ralfp ◴[20 Nov 24 11:02 UTC] No.42192731[source]▶
The state of things here is that Unreal Engine 1 may be open sourced one day but would need cleaning up first. And they just never got around doing it:

https://forums.unrealengine.com/t/unreal-engine-1/14084/6

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17. looshch ◴[20 Nov 24 11:28 UTC] No.42192869[source]▶
> to the web

you mean like to browser? If yes, how did you achieve UDP connections? To my best knowledge, browsers allow TCP only

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18. desdenova ◴[20 Nov 24 11:37 UTC] No.42192922[source]▶
WebSockets are TCP-only.

WebRTC can run over UDP, but it's not raw UDP. I think that's what they meant.

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19. kaoD ◴[20 Nov 24 11:45 UTC] No.42192971{3}[source]▶
I don't have time to look into the code right now, but it might also be WebTransport:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebTranspor...

EDIT: actually I can't find the code, shouldn't it be linked as per GPL's license?

20. kaoD ◴[20 Nov 24 11:47 UTC] No.42192989[source]▶
I can't find a link to your port's code. I think you have to include it as per GPL's license (and also because it's awesome and I want to see the code!)
replies(1): >>42193640 #
21. Melonotromo ◴[20 Nov 24 12:02 UTC] No.42193104[source]▶
Fortnite uses Unreal Engine 5, the most advanced Game Engine in existens which sourcecode is freely available for a few years now.

Open sourcing old stuff is a lot of effort. You need to find all people involved or know the legal status of the copyright. You need to go through all the code in case you had some properitary stuff in there which you might have paid for. And you need to do all of this next to what you normally do without a direct benefit.

22. junon ◴[20 Nov 24 12:20 UTC] No.42193252{3}[source]▶
WebSockets also initiate a normal Http request first, further complicating things anyway.
23. modeless ◴[20 Nov 24 12:23 UTC] No.42193285{3}[source]▶
Yes, it's WebRTC. It uses real unreliable and unordered UDP packets, peer-to-peer. But WebRTC requires a connection establishment step to happen first, so it can't send traffic to arbitrary UDP services, only cooperating WebRTC peers. Which is fine for multiplayer games.
24. bloqs ◴[20 Nov 24 12:30 UTC] No.42193337{3}[source]▶
Facing worlds liquid drum and bass soundtrack (and the rest of the games) was the basis for my music interest!
25. modeless ◴[20 Nov 24 13:11 UTC] No.42193640[source]▶
It is here: https://github.com/jdarpinian/ioq3
26. tempaccount420 ◴[20 Nov 24 15:41 UTC] No.42194881[source]▶
Why clean up first? Could be devs pushing back because they're ashamed (unnecessarily) of their code?
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27. cibyr ◴[20 Nov 24 23:55 UTC] No.42199466{3}[source]▶
We saw with Winamp how badly it can go (lots of license violations on vendored dependencies):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/winamp-really-whips-...

28. account42 ◴[21 Nov 24 10:25 UTC] No.42202825{3}[source]▶
Cleaning up in this context means figuring out what parts of the code they actually own and removing/replacing the parts they don't.