from Hacker News

Publishing free software video games

by wicket on 6/30/23, 4:02 AM with 98 comments

• by progval on 6/30/23, 7:11 AM

  This is targeted toward "securing your game’s legacy", but it seems to be missing a crucial part of some games: servers.

  When games have a required online component, servers shutting down are the most likely reason the game becomes unplayable, more than the client not working on current platforms.

  So another option that could be added to the list would be to make the server free software (or at least share its binaries) before the client's assets or the client itself. This can also boost the community if they can host their own servers with custom mods (eg. Minecraft)

• by schemescape on 6/30/23, 5:17 AM

  > The Quake engine was also released under the GPL, and went on to be highly influential, serving as the basis for dozens of games, including time-honored favorites such as the Half Life series. Large swaths of the gaming canon were made possible thanks to the generous contributions of free software game publishers.

  This seems misleading. Half-Life was released in 1998, but the Quake engine's source code wasn't released under the GPL until 1999, so presumably Valve had a non-Free Software license to use the code.

• by barbariangrunge on 6/30/23, 6:01 AM

  A friend explained to me that the real benefit of foss is the community building huge things together, faster and better than any individual. So, you don’t make your game foss, but rather, you build a set of foss tools for everyone to benefit from, and the community eventually begins to contribute back, and you end up with a huge machine that does really cool things. Everybody then uses these tools to make amazing things, yourself included. It’s win win. He’s had some cool experience with this stuff, mostly outside of gaming.

  But pure source code dumps, besides being valuable to students, usually isn’t that worthwhile. It’s a lot less win-win as well

• by Kiro on 6/30/23, 8:02 AM

  I hate when people bring up VVVVVV as a counter-argument to "But my code is embarrassing!". Saying it's an example of "truly awful code" when it's beautiful and well-structured compared to my stuff just makes me confident that I will never get over the embarrassment.

• by brucethemoose2 on 6/30/23, 4:59 AM

  Barotrauma is an excellent example of fully "source available" in a multiplayer game. Practically speaking, Rimworld and Minecraft are like this.

  Mindustry is an excellent example of the "have your cake and eat it" open source model. Its sold on Steam, but it's GPL 3.0 and free to download elsewhere. Shrug

• by bentley on 6/30/23, 5:56 PM

  My favorite proprietary game that went to free licensing is Star Control 2: The Ur‐Quan Masters.

  Wikipedia: “Released to critical acclaim, Star Control II is widely viewed today as one of the greatest PC games ever made, and has appeared on numerous publications lists of the greatest video games of all time.”

  Available as ‘uqm’ in most package managers, or from https://sc2.sourceforge.net/.

• by hgs3 on 6/30/23, 6:19 AM

  From what I understand, if a game engine's source code is GPL, there is no legal way to require derived games release their assets under a CC license. Does this mean we need a "super license" that incorporates the terms of both GPL (for the code) and CC-BY-SA (for the assets)?

• by hospitalJail on 6/30/23, 2:04 PM

  Since Microsoft bought Minecraft, I've been quite worried about the possibility of losing a great game to a giant.

  While I don't play Minetest or the other FOSS minecrafts, I'm so happy to see it happening. When I was able to dig and build, I was relieved.

  I don't know what the future holds, but I want my unborn children to experience that feeling of digging all the way down, building all the way up, digging through mountains, and making houses. That was so cool.

  Microsoft is a scary company with the way they treat Windows 11, wonder how much longer until there are ads inside Minecraft Java.

• by User23 on 6/30/23, 2:22 PM

  One interesting thing is the FSF’s principles have absolutely no problem with a free engine and paid assets. They explicitly say they have no position on artwork and I’d say art, sound, level design, and so on all qualifies as artwork.

  That arrangement looks like a good one to me. It leaves plenty of room for the seller to make money while respecting user freedom. And every case I know of where a mod community thrives greatly lenthens the lifetime of the game. Needless to say having the engine source available would be a huge benefit for modders.

• by noduerme on 6/30/23, 9:59 AM

  >> But my code is embarrassing!

  This has always been the first reason I haven't open-sourced some of my code. The second being that it's also totally useless, and lots of people could write it better.

• by TheMode on 6/30/23, 8:12 AM

  What we need are programs compiled down to some minimal instruction sets, simplifying the implementation of custom vm able to run such software.

  The source does not mean anything if there is no working compiler, or if the compiler doesn't support your new shiny platform.

  It is the same for servers. Having the source for a whole hosting service depending on some specific hardware doesn't matter.

  If we decide to truly care about software legacy, we need to re-think the stack.