Why help complete this? If they would be willing to have an open source D2 out there, they can just release the original source code. It would seem even more "ideal" to me.
Fun (or sad) fact: they apparently lost a lot of the source code and assets. Looks like they were able to recover most of the code, but not the assets [1]
They said they lost the source code pre-release, but managed to reconstruct most of it. Given that it was released and that there have been many patches, I think the source code is fine.
I think the only thing they really lost are the hi-def assets from which the lower-def ingame assets were created.
I don’t think games are well adapted to open source. For starters, it’d be very hard to build an adjacent business like Red Hat, and there are very significant time and capital requirements even for smallish projects.
These might be the reasons why the model never caught on like it did for generalist software.
How accessible is game code to a modern web dev that understand memory management and such, but never really uses C/C++ outside of coursework?
If I pull in Diablo / Half-Life / Shadows of Chernobyl source, am I going to see pretty clean files in an organized fashion that I can open with a modern IDE or a code dump?
mraison|5 years ago
[1] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/how-diablo-2-was-almost-lo...
im3w1l|5 years ago
I think the only thing they really lost are the hi-def assets from which the lower-def ingame assets were created.
_ph_|5 years ago
dmos62|5 years ago
arcturus17|5 years ago
I don’t think games are well adapted to open source. For starters, it’d be very hard to build an adjacent business like Red Hat, and there are very significant time and capital requirements even for smallish projects.
These might be the reasons why the model never caught on like it did for generalist software.
throw1234651234|5 years ago
How accessible is game code to a modern web dev that understand memory management and such, but never really uses C/C++ outside of coursework?
If I pull in Diablo / Half-Life / Shadows of Chernobyl source, am I going to see pretty clean files in an organized fashion that I can open with a modern IDE or a code dump?