Open-sourcing Doom 2016 may not happen...

One of the best things about id software was that after a certain period of time, they would always open-source their games. However, I don't think that's going to happen anymore, because IIRC, Carmack was the one who open-sourced everything, and he left id to go work for Oculus before Doom 2016 was released. I don't think that the current members of id software will EVER want to open-source Doom 2016. So, if you're actually waiting for the source code for Doom 2016 to come out, let me tell you that it's very likely that it will never happen.

I thought this was already established prior to the games' release.

The game would likely be in an Unreal-1-esq situation anyway, where it relies on a number of proprietary backends and libraries that no one wants to, or are able to, rip out and make functioning replacements for. I recall from an old Mick Gordon interview that the sound systems are licensed from somewhere else, for example.

Modern software is just too complex these days. It's almost never the case that one entity owns all the code.

It'd be nice if ZeniMax who owns Bethesda will make id Tech 6 available.  Same for the Rage engine (id Tech 5).  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

The Doom (id Tech 1), Quake (id Tech 2), Quake III (id Tech 3), and Doom 3 (id Tech 4) are open source.

Those engines were made open source about four years after release of the first games.  That means id Tech 5 should have been open source by now but it's up to ZeniMax to allow that to happen.

Forget it. Ever since Zenimax made id part of them and basically is mandating using their engines for a game under their brands, I'd say we can kiss any kind of source code goodbye. That was very much a Carmack thing, and the lawyers have won that battle now.

Since id Tech 5, they use a proprietary Microsoft-licensed image compression library. That's one of the chief reasons that open sourcing it would be pretty much impossible. Besides that, Doom 2016 also uses Bink, Wwise, and Umbra, which are all proprietary and have trade-secret APIs. It's also increasingly less trivial as time goes on to remove all "TiVo" platform code from these giant projects - MS, Sony, Nintendo, Steam, Bethesda.net, etc. Just as an example, leaking so much as one function call from the Nintendo SDK can get your license revoked and subject you to lawsuits. Lawyers don't like the chance of it.

I am not even sure why people still want Id tech 5 and higher to be open-sourced.  People would only be able to look at the source code, but they wouldn't be able to do anything with the code at all thanks to the complexity, making the idea of open-sourcing it useless.

an individual person might not be able to, but I'm sure a really dedicated team could figure it out and work with the engine to make what they want.

... actually this makes me morbidly curious if anything relatively interesting's come out of the open sourcing of UE4 from a long time ago.

Is there really a need to have an open source id Tech 5/6 engine when we already have id Tech 1-3 available?  You could ask yourselves about those 3D Super Mario games when you look at Super Mario Bros 3 and Super Mario World.

It's not the same corporation anymore. Times have changed.

5 hours ago, SamuelNMEvander said:

It's not the same corporation anymore. Times have changed.

But let's not forget:

On 4/19/2019 at 7:07 PM, Quasar said:

Since id Tech 5, they use a proprietary Microsoft-licensed image compression library. That's one of the chief reasons that open sourcing it would be pretty much impossible. Besides that, Doom 2016 also uses Bink, Wwise, and Umbra, which are all proprietary and have trade-secret APIs. It's also increasingly less trivial as time goes on to remove all "TiVo" platform code from these giant projects - MS, Sony, Nintendo, Steam, Bethesda.net, etc. Just as an example, leaking so much as one function call from the Nintendo SDK can get your license revoked and subject you to lawsuits. Lawyers don't like the chance of it.

With modern software it rarely is the case of one entity owning the code in its entirety.

Hence my point. It's not even up to devs anymore. The corporate business world entered the industry and now it's all licenses and trade secrets. 

If open sourcing is to happen at all then expect it to happen when the last game in the current zeitgeist is going to come out. I have a feeling that Bethesda want to make a bunch games out of all the Id franchises and then let the franchises become dormant (so people won't become bored and so they will want more) and after 10 or so years they will revive the games but under a new style and direction. So the new Doom franchise will have either a trilogy or maybe a couple more games all of which span roughly a decade. Therefore, the earliest we can expect the source code for a new Doom game is in at least 10 years. It's too much effort releasing the code of every game.

Oh, and don't forget all the middleware they use,

Honestly I'm not expecting the open sourcing of D2016 to happen at any point.

It uses so much proprietary stuff, from what others are saying, that it's probably going to be a nightmare to open source everything.

It could maybe go open-source in like, 2 decades, so we are probably much better off just recreating Doom 2016 in ID Tech 4 anyways.

At GDC the speaker mentioned that for ID7 that they trimmed down the code and removed Megatextures and replaced it with a streaming solution.  WHatever that means

5 hours ago, Zemini said:

...and replaced it with a streaming solution.  WHatever that means

IIRC streaming textures means you are constantly loading and unloading textures from memory as you approach them, instead of having all of them loaded from map start, like Doom 2016.

Very unlikely as already noted by many. More so, even if Zenimax permitted it and they worked out the legal entanglements to make such possible (which the odds of happening would even be lesser than a lighting strike bringing down the plane you're on as you fly to your new multi-million dollar private island after winning the lotto), and you somehow *did* manage to get idtech 6 as open source, you'd need a financially-backed and very knowledgeable/coordinated team to really even accomplish much as far as a game project goes due to it's sheer size of components and tools and all the man hours required to make anything really worth while. 

It would be the literal equivalent of someone handing you the blueprints and raw materials for engineering a nuclear power station and then walking away while saying "Here you go. Have fun!"