Oh, neat. I'll never use it, but I imagine that this could open some new doors up.

Yes. Finally, an engine to power my new game. It's the story of a young boy's quest to find the street cat that wronged him.

I like seeing when these older engines get opened, but aside from maybe some indie guys that already more or less know the engine from working with the original game, do they ever get used? Or is it more about the principal of releasing the information?

Yeah, totally useless. That would be like making an open source Jedi Knight engine. And who in their right mind would want that?!?

The Berserker revamp of the Quake 2 engine is quite glorious. And Duke Nukem 3D can always look nicer than JK will ever be.

... THAT said, I've noticed that these revamped engines post-source code release are more or less about graphical advancements (varying in quality) - for better or worse. I guess there really isn't any point to make Duke Nukem 3D suddenly be able to run both brushes and the 2D BUILD stuff OR for Quake 2 to not have... uh, something that was already bothersome in late 1997?

Anyway, I thought the Serious Sam games were revamped at some point by the companies themselves so eh.

In any case, this stuff is always good as opposed to the alternative scenario.

People used the old quake/quake2 sources to port Linux. Tons of them are really good, and they keep on working on more modern boxes. If JK were opened up I'm sure someone like Jon`C could make it work properly on windows 10 in 20 minutes.

or he will find code that is so mind numbingly sloppy it's a surprise it even ran on 1997 hardware

Refactoring is easier than reversing.

He's apparently done enough reverse-engineering already to know that it's mind-numbingly sloppy, but I would guess that having the source code would enable him to see how things were done far more efficiently. Reverse-engineering is serious business. Does anyone really buy the whole "oops, we lost the source code" excuse/rumor? I don't buy it, personally. I mean, we know that it was still being used in modified form for the GrimE ('98) & Jones ('99) engines. Sloppy code or not, these people weren't idiots--many of them went on to have careers elsewhere in the industry.

Should have used github... oh wait.

@Jon, did you take a look at ResidualVM? Could you learn something from them? Or they from you/Gorc?

Probably not. We've both implemented the common bits more or less the same way already.