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A comment on Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unreal Tournament Forever.

Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by modeless on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @12:32AM (#42191063)
I wish they would GPL it like Quake. Even if it was missing some proprietary dependencies I bet the community could replace them.

I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by dmead on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @12:46AM (#42191121)
Ioquake was helpful for the open Jedi project get an open source version of jk3 working.

https://github.com/OpenJediProject/OJP

I'm sure there is some small group of UT people that would gladly keep it alive in a similar fashion.

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by deafpolygon on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @01:12AM (#42191223)
Im willing to bet the code for UT is being used for Fortnite.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by numpad0 on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @02:23AM (#42191522)
It doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense, but code can be released under multiple different licenses. A 1:1 relationship between code and its terms is not required.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by mikepurvis on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @01:25AM (#42191271)
That shouldn’t have any impact on its ability to be relicensed and open sourced though— any secret sauce in Fortnite is elsewhere, and arguably none of it is code, but rather in asset-level stuff like game/map/character design and monetization/progression strategy.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by jsiepkes on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @02:39AM (#42191589)
It's a 25 year old game engine. There is not going to be anything in it which they consider a trade secret today.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by jsheard on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @04:04AM (#42192030)
Even the current Unreal Engine doesn't have much in the way of trade secrets, its entire source code is available on GitHub for anyone to look at (aside from the console-specific parts bound by NDAs).
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by pests on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @01:16AM (#42191242)
My first introduction to Unreal was via the "Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition" right around the year 2000. I fondly remember some of those maps (Facing Worlds for one) but to think that lineage ends up at Fornite is crazy to me.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by ZaoLahma on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @04:19AM (#42192118)
The base game was fantastic. Never could say no to a game on dm-morpheus. But what really made it great for me were the total conversion mods.

I spent probably thousands of hours playing Infiltration back in the day. I can't imagine how much time and energy must have been poured into completely re-doing a game like that.

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by rounce on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @04:44AM (#42192255)
That’s a name that brings back memories. Infiltration was so far ahead of its time, and it’s interesting to look at how many of its features are now standard on even run-and-gun FPS these days.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by ZaoLahma on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @04:59AM (#42192343)
Indeed. It's a shame that Sentry Studios never transitioned into a "proper" game development studio. They were at least 10 years ahead of the curve.

But it's good that the games industry caught up so the infiltration-itch can be scratched in other ways.

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by iakov on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @03:01AM (#42191700)
Oh man, I loved that game as a kid. I did not have internet back then, but I didn’t care - I spent hours playing against bots. I still remember the voice taunts and callouts (“I slaughtered that guy!”) and creative maps like ctf_face. Then there were the built in gameplay mods like insta-gib and low gravity, fun guns like Redeemer - kept me glued to the screen for hours. I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs - UT was a much better and bigger game! Thanks for a trip down the memory lane. Good, simple times.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by pests on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @03:16AM (#42191762)
I don't think I knew too much about computers or gaming at that age to figure all that out. I just played the base mode.

My introduction to programming was thru a different game (Subspace VIE, a MMO on dialup back in the 90s later community-remade as Continuum) when squad had a login page at a domain. I really wondered how example.com/?login worked and that led me to where I am today.

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by zelos on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @03:14AM (#42191750)
"I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs..."

I was the same. UT was so much fun - bouncing flak cannon shrapnel round corners! But my LAN group all wanted to play CS or that UT mod that was similar (Tactical Ops?).

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by bloqs on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @07:30AM (#42193337)
Facing worlds liquid drum and bass soundtrack (and the rest of the games) was the basis for my music interest!
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by Melonotromo on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @07:02AM (#42193104)
Fortnite uses Unreal Engine 5, the most advanced Game Engine in existens which sourcecode is freely available for a few years now.

Open sourcing old stuff is a lot of effort. You need to find all people involved or know the legal status of the copyright. You need to go through all the code in case you had some properitary stuff in there which you might have paid for. And you need to do all of this next to what you normally do without a direct benefit.

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by pxc on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @05:57AM (#42192706)
When I was a kid, I had so much fun playing open-source games based on Quake engines. Tremulous stands out as especially delightful at the little LAN parties we threw at my house on birthdays and New Years' Eve.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by Ralfp on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @06:02AM (#42192731)
The state of things here is that Unreal Engine 1 may be open sourced one day but would need cleaning up first. And they just never got around doing it:

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

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by tempaccount420 on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @10:41AM (#42194881)
Why clean up first? Could be devs pushing back because they're ashamed (unnecessarily) of their code?
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by cibyr on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @06:55PM (#42199466)
We saw with Winamp how badly it can go (lots of license violations on vendored dependencies):

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/winamp-really-whips-...

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by account42 on Thursday November 21, 2024 @05:25AM (#42202825)
Cleaning up in this context means figuring out what parts of the code they actually own and removing/replacing the parts they don't.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by looshch on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @06:28AM (#42192869)
> to the web

you mean like to browser? If yes, how did you achieve UDP connections? To my best knowledge, browsers allow TCP only

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by desdenova on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @06:37AM (#42192922)
WebSockets are TCP-only.

WebRTC can run over UDP, but it's not raw UDP. I think that's what they meant.

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by modeless on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @07:23AM (#42193285)
Yes, it's WebRTC. It uses real unreliable and unordered UDP packets, peer-to-peer. But WebRTC requires a connection establishment step to happen first, so it can't send traffic to arbitrary UDP services, only cooperating WebRTC peers. Which is fine for multiplayer games.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by kaoD on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @06:45AM (#42192971)
I don't have time to look into the code right now, but it might also be WebTransport:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebTranspor...

EDIT: actually I can't find the code, shouldn't it be linked as per GPL's license?

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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by junon on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @07:20AM (#42193252)
WebSockets also initiate a normal Http request first, further complicating things anyway.
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by kaoD on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @06:47AM (#42192989)
I can't find a link to your port's code. I think you have to include it as per GPL's license (and also because it's awesome and I want to see the code!)
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Re:Epic Allows Internet Archive to Distribute Unreal and Unr... by modeless on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @08:11AM (#42193640)
It is here: https://github.com/jdarpinian/ioq3
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