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Comment by mepian | Hacker News Reader

Epic could open-source the original engine, like its former primary competitor id Software did with the old idTech engines.

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There were some plans to do so a while back:

>We definitely can’t open source Unreal Engine 2 or 3, because of dependencies on a large number of external closed-source middleware packages with complex licensing requirements.

>Open sourcing Unreal Engine 1 might be possible, but getting the source and dependencies into a releasable state would take a lot of cleanup effort that we just haven’t been able to find time for. I hope we can do it someday. [0]

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

Man, I try to think longer term so "a while back" can be 3-4 years ago.

then I see that comment made almost 10 years ago. I feel a lot of that goodwill went out the door once Fortnite became a cash cow.

My guess is that they are very busy and forgot about it. Maybe if someone reminds Tim he will do it eventually.

Fortnite killed UT 4 and I hate it for that

Yup. UT holds a special place in my heart, and the abandonment of UT4 cut deeper than it should have. It's not like they couldn't have afforded a small team to continue working on UT4. Not getting more Unreal Tournament, and not getting the original continuation of Prey[1] are my biggest frustrations when it comes to gaming.

[1] https://youtu.be/jfHCZAK7p-s

On a quick screengrab in response to yours and the above comments. It looks like Fortnite also killed Tim Sweeney's personal involvement with his own forums. They never seem to have the time to do anything on the engine. Too much money to be extracted.

Plot: https://imgur.com/a/fortnite-killed-unreal-engine-developmen...

From: https://forums.unrealengine.com/u/Tim_Sweeney/activity

Epic has some agreement with the old unreal community where people have access to the source and release patches.

https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches

Honestly in an era when so many companies are re-releasing and re-mastering and re-making their back-catalog, I'm shocked that Epic seems to have forgotten their roots.

Where's an Epic Arcade bundle of their 2D masterpieces like OMF2097 and Epic Pinball and Solar Winds? Why isn't Jazz Jackrabbit appearing in half a dozen mascot-themed Super Smash Bros ripoff?

Compare vs Capcom's remakes of all their classic Resident Evil games (Unreal 1 and 2 could get this treatment) and rebundles of all their arcade fighters and beat-em-ups. Or Id's annual rebundling of Quake 1-3 for new generations.

And it's not just big companies like Capcom doing that. How many times has little Croteam re-released Serious Sam 1st and 2nd encounters?

Meanwhile can you even buy UT2004 anywhere anymore?

This is proprietary closed source mindset. Nobody is asking for bug free cleanly compiling and running codebase. Releasing with dependencies removed is enough, community would patch around it in no time.

Exactly. Most open sourced game engines, including id ones, had the same "issue" anyway.

That would be absolutely great if it were to happen, especially if they'd choose more liberal license such as BSD.

I'm a sucker for software rendering and unreal engine 1 has even more advanced features in that department compared to the original Quake (1 and 2) engines.

Would love to port that to wasm if this ever happens.

There is https://github.com/RedPandaProjects/UnrealEngine but I don't know what are the legalities and such...

It'd be nice if they released the code to their old DOS game catalog. Probably piles of 16 bit assembly but it'd still be nice (assuming they still have it)

It took a very long time for the source code for e.g. ZZT to be published, precisely because they apparently lost the code. https://github.com/asiekierka/almost-of-zzt Even then that had some third party comments removed from it.

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