So there are multiple sites&groups that pirate video games especially on PC. I was wondering if there are places on the internet where you find source code for games especially the highly modifiable ones like Half Life 2/Portal and Skyrim. Or groups that crack into the source code of games (or even software in general), not only for PC maybe PS, XBox or mobile too, and share it. I just wanted to see some code samples of games or their engines, maybe I get hooked into video game design. Shout out to Valve for sharing a lot about the creation of Half Life 1
Well, source code is not sth that you “crack”, you can only reverse engineer it (I think it was done with Doom, also OpenRA) or steal it from the company’s servers. The use for it is also rather niche, so the risk vs gains ratio is not attractive enough to feed dedicated websites. You can also look at fully open source games like 0AD and check out what they did!
Edit: I stand corrected (thrice); Doom was indeed open-sourced, not reverse engineered. Thanks for pointing out!
Doom was open sourced later. An example of a game that got reverse engineered just fine is Super Mario 64
Or the time the people who made doom reverse engineered super mario 3 for PC, then turned it into commander keen after Nintendo was unimpressed.
It wasn’t quite reverse engineered. They found a hacky way to bypass hardware limitations and basically duplicated the game.
Also Minecraft was reverse engineered.
though mojang did eventually publish name maps
Yeah but that was more of a “if we can’t beat 'em, join 'em” thing and I believe some, if not most of the modders don’t even use the official mappings and prefer the cracked version
I need this to happen to Gran Turismo 4. Series has gone so far downhill since that entry…
No Doom was made open source, same with most of the old Id games.
I was once at a talk by someone in that company and he straight up said that open sourcing it was a mistake. I assume because that meant they couldn’t sell us a thousand versions of it like Skyrim.
No word of whether its ongoing popularity was at all caused by open sourcing it.
There’s no way going open source has done anything but help Doom. I guarantee they’ve made more money from people buying their old games for the WADs to play with source ports and mods than they’ve lost money to things like Freedoom.
The engine is Open Source, not the game itself. You still need to buy it.
The game and the engine are both open source. The game’s assets just aren’t freely available, so you still need an official WAD or an asset replacement pack like Freedoom.
I think he means leaks provided as torrents.
There’s also Diablo with Devilution.