Re:Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
by johnnyanmac on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @03:56PM
(#43095000)
>I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be used to justify having Source2 open as well.on
I'm not fully up to date but I'm under the impression that Source 2 is currently used by their modern games. I don't think that's the case for Source 1. The same logic wouldn't apply.
>After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all?
Pretty much what you said. It's all down to cost-benefit at the end of the day and of they think there's more cost (perceived or otherwise) to releasing source 2 code they won't bother.
Re:Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
by LegionMammal978 on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @03:31PM
(#43094674)
b) can get dicey, depending on how hard the 3rd party in question wants to defend their copyrights. Google v. Oracle was resolved on the basis of being transformative, not on the basis of class and function declarations being too insignificant to copyright. So if you can't even keep the 3rd-party headers, you're left with a bunch of function calls that you have to piece together the meaning of.
Re:Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
by EMIRELADERO on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @03:36PM
(#43094741)
You could just strip out all mentions of the 3rd party component on the codebase. Let the community figure out how to plug in a replacement.
Re:Valve releases Team Fortress 2 game code
by nemothekid on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @04:01PM
(#43095077)
>Let the community figure out how to plug in a replacement.
Far more likely the community kicks up a huge stink about how Valve released a crippled engine.
I feel like that's irrelevant, because the same logic can be used to justify having Source2 open as well.
After all, what value is there in keeping the game code private at all? The only things I can think of are a) anticheat, b) NDA'd 3rd party code, and c) protecting important secret sauces made by the company itself
a) and b) are both solved by simply not releasing those portions of the code, while c) is a bit moot. Any competitor can already (legally) RE the binaries and recreate any juicy proprietary algorithms, unless they're patented. But in that case they would be protected even if the source was released so it's still the same situation.