Descent3 Source-code released

poVoq

Looks like another old commercial game got their source-code released.

This one is pretty nice so I am looking forward to a community driven version.

Edit: Currently unclear licensing, see below. Edit: Now apparently relicensed to GPL3 🥰

glitchapp

poVoq oh this is a good one, I love it, it still looks amazing to me with all those beautiful colors on the sky map and great gradients of darkness and light... maybe it could be overhaul and receive some hd textures to make it up to date.

Technopeasant

Also kinda nice to get a Descent game properly FLOSS, even if it is still good the first two are source available.

Technopeasant

100 forks in less than 24 hours...

Technopeasant

Update 18/04/24 15:11: there seems to be an issue with the licensing at the moment. The MIT license was not meant to be up on it, as this was apparently the default GitHub put on it. That license has now been removed, and so there's now no license on it. Hopefully this will be sorted soon so it can be clear for anyone who wishes to contribute.

kevinbentley/Descent332

poVoq

Ugh, I hope that doesn't end up being a shared source thing again 😑

Peter

It has now GPL3. :)

poVoq

Excellent news!

Technopeasant

Excellent.

Technopeasant

Just got the go-ahead from Interplay! I'm going to move my repo public tonight after I sort through the commit history. Note that the GPL3 makes this a little dicey, so I will likely maintain my fork under the original MIT license, with the explicit goal of that fork being the one that goes on Steam. I cannot link against Steamworks and not violate the GPL, which I might at some point, so they'll have to remain separate, and for fixes worth applying there, I'll have to get individuals' permission to relicense individual patches. There is nothing that stops this repo from pulling in any changes from me, though, and I'll work out a reasonable set of pull requests to get my updates into here. And one can always use the Steam data files with the GPL codebase...so I think this will largely be small inconveniences for me that won't affect everyone else.

DescentDevelopers/Descent39

This is kind of becoming a circus here...

poVoq

Technopeasant sounds like they will figure it out.

But with these heavyweights behind the open-source version now, a libre content replacement pack should be seriously considered.