its odd that they open sourced Generals and the first CNC and Red Alert, but nothing in between.
CNC3 was my favorite, and I'll die on that hill . but RA2 was obivously the fan favorite, and Tiberian Sun had probably the best atmosphere
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Sometimes licenses get in the way, it's possible they bought an engine or tech from a 3rd party and don't have the legal standing (or don't know if they do or not) to release the source.
someone else here suggested that the source code for TS/RA2 was lost. which wouldnt surprise me.
These are games that were made when and before the Zoomers were being born. they are ancient by most people's standards.
Fallout source is gone too. There was just no reliable way to store source code back then, a lot of times it was just one of the developers that had it sitting in a desk drawer.
If it's new enough, maybe a burnt CD.
still susceptible to disc rot
Broken clock
Is Tiberian Sun included!!!??
No. The repo has Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert 1, Generals with Zero Hour, Renegade, and components for the HD ports of TD and RA1 they put out a few years ago.
AY YO RENEGADE!?
From what I've read/know, the source for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 were lost a while ago. Doesn't mean it can't be reverse engineered at some point, but it's challenging. I'd LOVE for those to be next though!
Yes, if you click the link, it takes you to the EA github amd you can see folders for all included games
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Extremely rare EA win
Are they trying to become the not most hated studio? The bar is pretty low these days...
I feel like at some point, EA became the least hated major studio by staying exactly where they were. The rest of the industry zoomed past them.
Nah, you're going way too far. Least hated studio? What about CD Projekt Red? Larian? Fromsoft? Who hates Warhorse more than EA?
Maybe I should clarify that to "publisher". EA itself doesn't really make games anymore. They fund the studios who make games.
This is brilliant! :) aw, I hope it benefits the OpenRA developers and means more fun things to play eventually :)
Wait... this is EA... are they okay? This is very unlike them
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Holy shit, EA did something.... Good? I did not have that on my 2025 bingo card. So, what's the catch? There has to be a catch, right?
This doesn't release any copyright work in the game. So you will need to go through and remove any sprites, images, audio, etc that is copyright. Which means you will need to own a copy of the game (to have a right to the copyright usage) to use any binary produced from THIS source.
Additionally, it indicates that you must include in any derivative that the source of your code is from the EA drop here.
Outside of that, it is GPLv3. Of course it has hard dependency on DirectX 5.0. So a fully free version will need to redo those parts. Also the code is very MS VC++ heavy. Don't expect gcc to build you a binary.
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Open sourcing old games is awesome for video game preservation.
Yeah, this should be standard practice
To use the compiled binaries, you must own the game
Was expecting a catch. Still good for modding I guess
Anyone know if this is a technologically-enforced “must” or just a “pretty please”?
I'm assuming this is more about art assets. Art is not code and you shouldn't expect them for free. It's not a catch.
Correct. The license (at least, the one I read for Red Alert) is GPLv3 with some additional stuff. The additional stuff is mostly about not using EA trademarks in your version or showing any connection to EA itself. So it appears that a clean room asset swap would be allowed as long as it includes the title screen.
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Open source does not mean that the intellectual property is free. There's a lot of good that comes from this, and it's not like those games are expensive.
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dont people already make seperate MODS for each anyways, for them anyways,. they figured they wernt making money off having the old games in thier wierd little launcher.
Now if only they open-sourced the SAGE engine, then we'd be all happy
The engine is highly optimized & produces great visuals, Of course there IS OpenSAGE
I hope everyone's SSDs have enough SPACE
When I first played Red Alert, it was on a computer with a 6.4GB hard drive, and I had no idea how to fill up that much space at the time. I think we'll be fine.
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