So,... what's the situation on the Dark engine source code?

ZylonBane on 5/3/2009 at 03:56

Quote Posted by New Horizon

It has to exist, somewhere. I can't believe that the employees of LGS didn't have a copy tucked away...even if it is an earlier version.

I can believe it. Back when SHTUP was getting started, I contacted a few of the artists who'd worked on SS2, and not a one of them had saved personal copies of any of their source artwork.

It's mind-boggling, but there it is.

sNeaksieGarrett on 5/3/2009 at 04:01

I never heard that Chief.... :wot: I was under the impression that Eidos still owns it. Which makes sense, given Eidos involvement with LGS.

demagogue on 5/3/2009 at 05:13

I can believe it because reading over the post-mortems, when the shut down did come, it all went by pretty quickly. Apparently they just had enough time to pack up and get out of dodge, with the computers getting sold off and their harddrives wiped. Maybe if they could have seen that coming much sooner, a few devs could have been more proactive in saving a copy.

If that's right, then a dev would have only saved it under dodgy circumstances ... either you stay with the company and there's no need, or you're leaving and then it's sort of sketchy to take off with company property.

But there's still something funny about it. Some devs kept other things we know about ... the soundtrack, the T2Gold levels, the Deep Cover levels... How do they keep that stuff, but not the code that it runs on?
Maybe if you say they did, but the other stuff was easier to release at the time, whereas it was still a little sensitive to release Dark's source code. That sort of thinking is a ray of hope, anyway.

sNeaksieGarrett on 5/3/2009 at 06:00

You mentioned soundtrack. What soundtrack?:confused: If you mean the thing released by CoK (who isn't a developer?), that's obviously fan work ...

jtr7 on 5/3/2009 at 06:08

The one shared by (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=103607) MysteryDev for TDS, and there's the other soundtrack MysteryDev shared for the other Dark Engine game Eric Brosius did the soundtrack for: (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=113469) System Shock 2.

sNeaksieGarrett on 5/3/2009 at 06:20

Oh okay... But I was assuming we were talking about just thief... but I guess you have made a good point that it could be for any Dark Engine game (I was excluding TDS as well, because I assumed that the nature of demagogue's post was about T1 and T2)

jtr7 on 5/3/2009 at 06:29

That was more just about examples of devs having goodies from when they were employed and taking the chance to share them with us.:)

Renault on 5/3/2009 at 06:49

[QUOTE='[NAUC]Chief;1827498']
Either way maybe it'd be better to ask the guy over at:

(http://www.nothings.org/)

to help code Open Dark Engine :cheeky:

Hey, just an fyi, I recently emailed Sean about doing a little Q&A for Southquarter. I originally talked to him back in mid 2008, but the interview never got done. In any case, he's agreed to answer some questions, so you can bet I'll throw in one or two about the topic at hand.