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
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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.
Doom is open source, at least the original ones were
I think he means leaks provided as torrents.
There’s also Diablo with Devilution.
Everything is open source if you can read assembly
Machine code tells you what it’s doing. Source code tells you why.
Only if they wrote why in it though, plenty of people (unfortunately myself included) fail or forget to add meaningful comments or they let their comments go stale when making changes by forgetting to update them (I do it a lot too), and some people also use horrible function names that don’t make any sense.
So it only really applies to source code intended to be released where care was made to ensure it would be readable, it might not apply for source code never intended to be public, such as stolen, leaked, or posthumously released. In this case the only real benefit is that it can be recompiled on different architectures provided there isn’t a dependency issue preventing that.
Source code without comments is still way easier to read than machine code.
And there are very likely comments anyways.
Multiple Devs will work on the same code for years and of course they need or at least appreciate comments.
But even if you can intuitively understand what the machine code is you’ll still need to convert it by hand back into something more portable, or to the machine code of another platform you might want to run it on. There’s not really an easy automated way to do that, even when playing dirty.
That’s the hard part, getting it into a different form, such as from x86 to ARM or from 6502 RISC to x86.
More powerful decompilers would definitely be a very useful application of AI!
Far Cry https://github.com/manfromafar/far-cry-source/tree/main/SourceCode
Super Mario 64 https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64
Zelda Ocarina of Time
https://github.com/zeldaret/ootThank you for sharing!
I mean, if you want to see some games’ source code you don’t have to rely on piracy. As other people have already said, there are open source games, some developers of older games have officially released the source code (notably VVVVVV, doom, and also quake iirc), some devs have released important part of their source code (e g the entire inputs handling code of Celeste).
Additionally, the vast majority of all Unreal Engine games’ engine code, including huge AAAs like Fortnite, is in Unreal Engine (duh), which is
open sourcesource-available.UE isn’t open source afaik
UE is open source as in the source code is available to anyone. But the license isn’t very open.
Right, but it’s best to call that “source available” so the pedants don’t crucify you 🙄
Yes there is indeed a difference, but for us it makes little to no difference. In the end what matters is that we have it without having to reverse engineer it, which is a slow and laborious process (even when you do it with dirty methods).
I knew I was gonna get this answer but still couldn’t be bothered to check the correct term so that’s on me.
I think you’re technically right because the EULA specifies that you basically can’t use that code (or a modified version) outside of a licensed UE project, but outside of that it basically is. All the code can be read, the engine and/or its editor and all related tools can be compiled from the source, and you can make pull requests on the official repo.
IIRC it is not actually open source because you can’t modify and/or repackage it without epic having their say in it (I think one of the licenses tiers is basically you agreeing to pay upfront + royalties for the authorization to modify the engine’s code and ship the packaged version with the project)
It’s called “source available”
A thanks for explaining. I didn’t know that.
UE is source available, not open source.
ayo gta 5 source code leaked yesterday you might want to check it out
LMAO, I’ve got to be one of God’s favorites
The mentions of unreleased DLC was interesting to read about.
Theres also jak and daxter, i believe it was called openGOAL?
openGOAL
seems interesting
I think I need to store this page on this discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games_with_available_source_code