cross-posted from: https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/534501
Relevevant HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36547801
Only 73MB?
Who does one get the hands on something like this? Just by accident or through an insider or is it possible to reverse engineer something like that? Sorry for the dumb question, I am a programming noob.
Most likely not legally. Possibly by luck, possibly through compromised systems or people.
Or the people who coded it left it on a hard drive that was auctioned off or obtained by whatever means.
Could also have been one of the devs who leaked it. Lots of us keep copies of the source for stuff we work on, so they may have figured it’s been long enough that no one would care if it leaked. However, I haven’t looked at it yet, but I imagine it would be most problematic legally if it contained proprietary 3rd party code. Leaking that could land someone in hot water.
I’m ignorant. Whats the significance of this? Can it be used for something?
As someone commented on the page, this is probably some code shared to third parties to include DRM or be sold on a store. It’s incomplete and doesn’t compile. It could be used to develop mods to an extensive degree, but I’m not sure how much of it would be legal as those tools would have been written using some leaked pieces of software which belong to Ubisoft. It can supposedly not be used to guide an open-source reimplementation of the game, like what was developed for DOOM, the first Diablo game, Moerowind, etc, as per the legal terms, those reimplementations must be developed from blank page, without looking at the original source code.
Butt yeah, I think this can be useful to develop mods and tools.
I cannot wait to dive into this when I get back on my PC. Far Cry isn’t a bad game at all, 18 years on. This is gonna be a gold mine to learn FPS development