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Open Total Annihilation Petition

January 14th, 2002 by Crusader

Thanks to Chuckles for letting us know thatSlashdot linkeda petitionfrom TA Forver which asksCavedog Entertainment to open the source code toTotal Annihilation, a classic RTS game.Although petitions usually aren’t terribly successful (a notable exception being thePS2 Linuxpetition effort), several old commercial games have had their source released under relatively open licenses over the years:

Abuse
Wolfenstein 3-D
DOOM
Heretic
Hexen
Hexen 2
BUILD Engine (not really a game, but hey :) )
Quake
Quake 2
Aliens vs. Predator

…and probably more I’m forgetting. I also recall an open effort to reverse-engineer TA, but I’m not aware of itscurrent status.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2002 at 5:50 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “Open Total Annihilation Petition”

anonymouse Says:
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the odds against this are extremely low. The biggest reason is this:

By releasing the source to the public, the company is effectively declaring the worth of that product/technology to be zero for tax purposes. Thus they cannot claim depreciation on it as “unsold”. Many companies simply do not want to give up that benefit.

There are, of course, other reasons, but that one is a biggie. Not to mention the possibility of them reusing portions of the code, proprietary technologies litered through out the source that they do not control usage/distribution of (movie [de]compressors for example), etc.

I’m not getting my hopes up about this one.
crudman Says:
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
http://www.cavedog.com/topten/main.html
bobcat Says:
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
They probably don’t even have the source code any more. I recall something about the studio being disbanded. Seems the Boneyard is still online though….
Lightkey Says:
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
No One Lifes Forever is also released as open source.
Says:
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
h3h3h3, so you like TA, I play it since three years now and it hasn’t lost any fascination to mee!
Says:
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
My personal favorite games are the Descent series. The source for Descent I and Descent II has been release for some time. Both original and updated/modified sources are available.

Original:
D1: http://www.descent2.com/ddn/sources/descent1
D2: http://www.descent2.com/ddn/sources/descent2

Updated:
D1X: http://d1x.warpcore.org
D2X: http://shelob.classrooms.washington.edu/d2x/

D2X is still being updated. Not often, but it is still being worked on.

This series is a classic, IMHO.

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