Are there any examples of an "abandoned" game's fans successfully getting the game to be open-sourced?
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OpenTTD or OpenRTC possibly could qualify here?
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The developer of Terraria promised to open source the canceled sequel if a petition could get enough signatures but then it did and he didn't release the code
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Thanks! That sounds more like a rewriting of the engine though?
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Thank you!
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Thanks! Those sound more like rewrites though?
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Thanks! That's lame!
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Yeah I think technically they did re-write them, but the actual gameplay, graphics, and music is identical to the original
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That's cool. That would be something to consider if the developer will absolutely not entertain the idea.
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Plenty of devs think it's easier than it is. A ton of games are built on proprietary tools, and then you get into legal hot water on whether you can even give away things like the soundtrack or assets you bought like stock sound effects.
I wouldn't be surprised if they looked at it after the petition and thought "wait, I actually can't open source this"
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Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2)
But, it's not really abandoned anymore. The developers are FINALLY making an official sequel!
The sequel is not open source, but UQM/SC2 is.
This happened in the early 2000s, but I think they found the source code to a port of the game and said "We haven't earned any money from sales of this game in a decade [and buying digital games wasn't really a thing yet, as people generally believed that anything digital shouldn't have a price], so let's release this to the community to open source as long as they do all the reverse porting and support!"
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Does rewriting the game count? https://2009scape.org/
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I haven't heard of this. Surely Red is just finishing terraria first .-.
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One that I'm aware of is Re-Volt. The source code for both the base game and some addons can be found here.
There was another one that I remember using years ago but I can't find it anymore. It was for another racing game called 4x4 Evo. There is the 4x4 Evolution Revival project but it's not the one I used and there doesn't seem to be any source code available.
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I totally get that, but if that was the reason maybe he could have explained it? Maybe he did? I don't know.
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Thank you!
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Thank you!
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Thanks! Not quite. The idea I have in mind is to avoid having to rewrite it, if possible. Besides, I don't think I'd have the wherewithal to do it.
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Thank you!
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This was my favorite game as a kid. Doing fan-art and a D&D campaign about it for years got me hired on as an artist for the new one! It's gonna be wild.
