DHackED

Is DHackED (or whatever it was called) really illegal?

Uh... no?

Well, I don't know. It's based on "reverse-engineering" the Doom engine, but id doesn't care because people don't use it to give out the resource set and make money off of modifying the engine. The companies that made Strife, Heretic, Hexen, etc, actually paid to do that with the engine, so they can make money off of it.

So no. If it was illegal, id would have had our collective asses long ago.

From what I remember, it was always legal, especially now when the source code was released. However, because of this, Dehacked has become somewhat unimportant to those who can modify the actual game itself (like me, for instance). Some people still do have a use for it, though.

Why would it be? It is a Doom editor, it just doesn't edit maps.

BBG: Many games have something in their TOS against "reverse-engineering." I don't know if that was part of the Doom TOS, or if it even had one.

This forum is for QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ONLY. There will be no idle talk or spamming or flaming here

-bbg wuz here...Then left...Then DOOM Anomaly came back.

I think it's legality was a bit questionable before the source release, especially early on, though nothing was done against DeHackEd itself, except that users have always been asked to release the patches instead of modified EXEs to ensure security and to make sure the unmodified executable wasn't bastardized by variants (the latter reason now being quite anachronic, with the source release.)

DeHackEd is probably illegal under the DMCA, but that applies to the US only, and id Software would never in hell enforce it anyway.

Alright, good, because I wanted to use it, but it says in the DHackEd documentation that it's illegal or something like that.

I think Myk has it covered.


From memory, distributing modified exe's went against id's wishes and they actively discouraged it. Although I don't think they liked the distribution of patches, I'm pretty sure they never came out and said "don't".

That doesn't actually cover the letter of the law, but is pretty much how id dealt with the issues.

Many modern ports support the patches directly from the command line or as a lump in the wad these days and many, many mods have at least a simple deh patch to go with them.

If you want some dehacked info, you could check my site.

http://www.btinternet.com/~Enjay001/

In an interview or something I think John Carmack may have mentioned that he didn't care for binary executable editing or something like that but nothing really other than that.