News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Source code for Quake 2 rerelease. Parent comment

Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by squeaky-clean on Thursday August 10, 2023 @10:23PM (#37084367)
Doom 3 even had that issue to a smaller degree. They had to rewrite some sort of lighting middleware before open sourcing. That's just one piece of middleware though, and modern stuff is probably much more hairy and complex.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by jsheard on Thursday August 10, 2023 @10:29PM (#37084392)
That one wasn't middleware but rather a patent issue, the code in question was written by Carmack but he had unwittingly rediscovered a technique that had already been patented by Creative Labs. Id licensed it from Creative for Doom 3s commercial release but legal wouldn't sign off on including it with the open source version so Carmack swapped it out for a different, slower algorithm.

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/patent-issue-forces-new...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by chii on Friday August 11, 2023 @01:23AM (#37085378)
This is why software patents shouldn't be a thing at all =(
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Source code for Quake 2 rerelease by squeaky-clean on Saturday August 12, 2023 @08:06PM (#37105324)
Ah thanks for the correction. It's been a while since I've read the details.
[ Parent | on HN ]