With the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection releasing next month for Windows, EA had a bit of an announcement to make today in regards to open source.
Posting on Reddit as well as the Steam page, EA announced that both Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert will see their data being opened up. They will release "TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the GPL version 3.0 license". This is being done, they say, as a result of a collaboration between them and the community and they went with the GPL to "ensure compatibility with projects like CnCNet and Open RA".
This is quite surprising, I will admit. They already released the originals free back in 2010, during the 15th anniversary so this sounds like a nice step further. If it helps other projects reimplement more of them, then that's a win-win for everyone. Hopefully they will eventually do the same for more.
Although the Remastered Collection won't officially support Linux, do check out OpenRA if you haven't before, which supports the classic Westwood strategy games in a free and open source game engine. It's not fully the same, due to plenty of modernization but it's close and has support for a lot of the single-player campaigns, AI battles and cross-platform online play.
Feels like we're currently living in upside-down land. We have EA doing actual open source under the GPL, and on the other side we have id Software who used to release their game engines as open source now putting invasive anti-cheat into them like with DOOM Eternal.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
This is quite nice. It probably enables a lot of moddability, like Civ 4 did, and is huge for this kind of project.
But what exactly does these .dll files? How that huge this announcement is? I read the post on Steam but it could be clearer IMO.
appetrosyan May 20, 2020
That is not the EA I know! Has EA released any other of their old games under GPL?
In fact they released the source code of the original Simcity. Also under the GPLv3.
Now, if any EA people are reading this and want to do the same for BioWare's Aurora engine and derivates, i.e. NWN to DA2, I'd be even more happy... :P
Last edited by DrMcCoy on 20 May 2020 at 9:46 pm UTC
This is quite surprising, I will admit.I think we have a contender for GoL Understatement of the Year. :)
That is not the EA I know! Has EA released any other of their old games under GPL?
It still can be. Guy from EA who is behind C&C remaster project love C@C and is passionate about it. He bring Petroglyph games (former Westwood guys) into it. So i think, big part of this is really this one guy, not EA as a whole.
You can se his atitude from this video.
That is not the EA I know! Has EA released any other of their old games under GPL?
It still can be. Guy from EA who is behind C&C remaster project love C@C and is passionate about it. He bring Petroglyph games (former Westwood guys) into it. So i think, big part of this is really this one guy, not EA as a whole.
You can se his atitude from this video.
So, similar to Timothee Besset from id?
If it wasn't for this guy id software most likely hadn't released any Linux builds.
That is not the EA I know! Has EA released any other of their old games under GPL?
It still can be. Guy from EA who is behind C&C remaster project love C@C and is passionate about it. He bring Petroglyph games (former Westwood guys) into it. So i think, big part of this is really this one guy, not EA as a whole.
You can se his atitude from this video.
So, similar to Timothee Besset from id?
If it wasn't for this guy id software most likely hadn't released any Linux builds.
It seems likely. Community around C&C helped with remaster in some degree, so this can be the one guy repaying to community. But it's only my opinion.
Huh, okay, I admit, this is pretty great. GPL, too, nice.
Now, if any EA people are reading this and want to do the same for BioWare's Aurora engine and derivates, i.e. NWN to DA2, I'd be even more happy... :P
DA: O please :-). I own the game, but I know it would make a huge difference for you and your engine :-).
Last edited by STiAT on 21 May 2020 at 9:01 am UTC
Pompesdesky May 24, 2020
Nice to see, but that they banned Battlefield players on Wine, did not undo and did not apologize, I have not forgotten that either!
From what I've read here and there it's not that clear that they banned Battlefield players only because of them playing through Wine. Some were saying there could have been actual cheaters blaming their bans on WIne use.
I'm playing BFV via Wine since a couple of weeks and it works fine in multiplayer, even better than BF4 where I'm getting kicked now and then for a lack of ping.
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