Thread: Games with free source code?

Hello,

Besides ID Software, is there any free source code that game companies have given out? I'm interested in viewing them. The only ones I could find are written in 1992-1997 mostly in the DOS era. It would be fun learning from them.

There are quite a few open source games.

List of open source video games - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I haven't come across any as complex/sophisticated as modern commercial games, though.

Professional game source code won't be released until far into the future well after the lifespan and support lifetime of the game. If the company is in any way still using that code line then you won't see source for it. Some code will never see the light of day. You can learn enough from books to create your own game and game engine. It may not be as fast as some of the pro's but that comes down to algorithms and clever use of the same API's everyone is using.

The biggest difference between home grown games and retail games are the amount of assets in them. Professional games have teams of artists and modellers as well as programmers in various departments working on specific areas of the game. Indie game companies probably have much less at their disposal and home-grown games usually have very little in the way of human resources.

However I'm quite convinced that with the right team an indie game or even a hobbyist game could have the same quality as a retail game. It's certainly not impossible although highly unlikely to ever happen.

You can request the source code for Carnivores (Action Forms), though I think there's some restrictions as to what you're able to do with it. I think they made it available to fans of the game who want to mod or improve it.