I wish they would GPL it like Quake. Even if it was missing some proprietary dependencies I bet the community could replace them.
I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.
The state of things here is that Unreal Engine 1 may be open sourced one day but would need cleaning up first. And they just never got around doing it:
When I was a kid, I had so much fun playing open-source games based on Quake engines. Tremulous stands out as especially delightful at the little LAN parties we threw at my house on birthdays and New Years' Eve.
I can't find a link to your port's code. I think you have to include it as per GPL's license (and also because it's awesome and I want to see the code!)
Fortnite uses Unreal Engine 5, the most advanced Game Engine in existens which sourcecode is freely available for a few years now.
Open sourcing old stuff is a lot of effort. You need to find all people involved or know the legal status of the copyright. You need to go through all the code in case you had some properitary stuff in there which you might have paid for. And you need to do all of this next to what you normally do without a direct benefit.
It doesn't make a lot of intuitive sense, but code can be released under multiple different licenses. A 1:1 relationship between code and its terms is not required.
My first introduction to Unreal was via the "Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition" right around the year 2000. I fondly remember some of those maps (Facing Worlds for one) but to think that lineage ends up at Fornite is crazy to me.
Oh man, I loved that game as a kid. I did not have internet back then, but I didn’t care - I spent hours playing against bots. I still remember the voice taunts and callouts (“I slaughtered that guy!”) and creative maps like ctf_face. Then there were the built in gameplay mods like insta-gib and low gravity, fun guns like Redeemer - kept me glued to the screen for hours. I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs - UT was a much better and bigger game!
Thanks for a trip down the memory lane. Good, simple times.
"I did not understand why people are playing CS at the computer clubs..."
I was the same. UT was so much fun - bouncing flak cannon shrapnel round corners! But my LAN group all wanted to play CS or that UT mod that was similar (Tactical Ops?).
I don't think I knew too much about computers or gaming at that age to figure all that out. I just played the base mode.
My introduction to programming was thru a different game (Subspace VIE, a MMO on dialup back in the 90s later community-remade as Continuum) when squad had a login page at a domain. I really wondered how example.com/?login worked and that led me to where I am today.
The base game was fantastic. Never could say no to a game on dm-morpheus. But what really made it great for me were the total conversion mods.
I spent probably thousands of hours playing Infiltration back in the day. I can't imagine how much time and energy must have been poured into completely re-doing a game like that.
That’s a name that brings back memories. Infiltration was so far ahead of its time, and it’s interesting to look at how many of its features are now standard on even run-and-gun FPS these days.
That shouldn’t have any impact on its ability to be relicensed and open sourced though— any secret sauce in Fortnite is elsewhere, and arguably none of it is code, but rather in asset-level stuff like game/map/character design and monetization/progression strategy.
Even the current Unreal Engine doesn't have much in the way of trade secrets, its entire source code is available on GitHub for anyone to look at (aside from the console-specific parts bound by NDAs).
Yes, it's WebRTC. It uses real unreliable and unordered UDP packets, peer-to-peer. But WebRTC requires a connection establishment step to happen first, so it can't send traffic to arbitrary UDP services, only cooperating WebRTC peers. Which is fine for multiplayer games.
I recently helped port ioquake3 to the web, complete with UDP multiplayer, and set up an online demo using the internet archive's copy of the Quake III demo: https://thelongestyard.link It would be cool to be able to do the same with Unreal Tournament.