Dark engine (System Shock 2, Thief) source code leaked

Apparently it was found on a second hand bought HDD. More info here.

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Oh my!

I'm not really sure what to think. Both games are really excellent and rank high on my list of favorite games, but System Shock 2, in particular is quite a problem to run on modern computers. Perhaps this event might spawn something good if the right people get their hands on the source?

Since that has been leaked, Perhaps it's possible that the Blood source code might leaked as well.

Hopefully we'll see ports to modern operating systems come out of this. There is of course the problem of it not being very legal, so let's wait how Eidos reacts.

Jannak said:

Since that has been leaked, Perhaps it's possible that the Blood source code might leaked as well.

Don't hold your breath.

This is incredible news. There is no community that could benefit more from this sort of thing right now.

Vaporizer said:

Now this is awesome!

They should've waited till Christmas before going public with it :D

c/s ss2 port!

FUCK YES

I followed that link backwards through a few layers of paraphrase and didn't end up anywhere that convinced me that the source is really out. Can a programmer confirm?

In the linked thread there is this linked thread:

Giving a 63 MB .7z download:

I haven't checked it myself.

[edit by mod: not a good idea to link to these]

Jannak said:

Since that has been leaked, Perhaps it's possible that the Blood source code might leaked as well.

It may no longer exist.

Creaphis said:

I followed that link backwards through a few layers of paraphrase and didn't end up anywhere that convinced me that the source is really out. Can a programmer confirm?

/*
@Copyright Looking Glass Studios, Inc.
1996,1997,1998,1999,2000 Unpublished Work.
*/

// $Header: r:/t2repos/thief2/src/version.h,v 1.5 2000/01/29 12:41:51 adurant Exp $

Technician said:

It may no longer exist.

Is it even needed? What does Blood have that isn't possible to get from a combination of the released Build source and reverse engineering the exe like some Greg Lewis wannabe?

This sauce is awesome. I miss System Shock 2 so much.

This...this..this is so amazing. Someone better use this to fix the crashes with quad core processors.

So who holds the copyright? Is it Eidos? Here's hoping they aren't cocks and will officially release the source with a lenient license. Or just give the green light to use it freely for non-commercial purposes, if the leaked code in question is the only copy left.

No, not non-commercial. Something like the GPL would probably be better. Often they can't, or won't, because they would have to spend time excising third party code they can't re-license.

If I have to venture a guess the result of this will be DMCA notices and more website takedowns by the feds.

This is amazing. There was talk a while back about trying to reverse engineer the engine but this is almost unbelievable. I am so stoked!! The thief community deserves it.

kristus said:

Is it even needed? What does Blood have that isn't possible to get from a combination of the released Build source and reverse engineering the exe like some Greg Lewis wannabe?

That explains the large quantity of Blood source ports that overshadow even Doom.

After a little more reading it appears the code was in the process of being ported to dreamcast. The SCSI HDD was in a dreamcast devkit that was bought second-hand. What a find!
Original thread here: http://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2047

Technician said:

It may no longer exist.

Actually Matt Saettler has the Blood source code.

I am fucking pumped. This and blood are the number one games I've wanted people to do proper source ports of.

iori said:

This is amazing. There was talk a while back about trying to reverse engineer the engine but this is almost unbelievable. I am so stoked!! The thief community deserves it.

No they don't. not like this. Now any reverse engineering is subject to auditing, scrutiny and DMCA takedowns. Thanks a lot, whoever leaked this.

There's a thought: how illegal is it to write code based on a spec written from stolen code? (This is assuming anybody involved in playing with it would even care about such a clean-room approach.)

system shock 2 is actually extremely easy to run on modern computers...i just got finished playing through it again on my win7 64 a couple weeks ago.
if you can use doom sourceports and doom pwads then it is no more difficult than that.
but yes, other than that this is very exciting news.

Csonicgo said:

No they don't. not like this. Now any reverse engineering is subject to auditing, scrutiny and DMCA takedowns. Thanks a lot, whoever leaked this.

Edios would go after the source code from a 12-year-old game? Damn.

Actually, I don't think Eidos would own the rights to the code - I think that falls to Electronic Arts. Which just makes things that much worse, because they're more legally-active than most publishers.