EA To Open-Source Part Of Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert To Help The Mod Community

[starshipeleven]

And copying the Star Fleet Flag!

To boldly bring freedom where no man has gone before.

[kneekoo]

Thanks EA for what? Kudos to who? EA is not choosing a OSS roadmap for the future (give thanks to Valve for that), but it's just hoping to draw more users to its games. Understandable, not bad ad all, but nothing OSS community should be grateful for.

They could've done nothing instead of releasing something under a license compatible with CnCNet and OpenRA. The little they decided to release as open source will benefit community projects and all their gamers. How about not being ungrateful? EA is still pretty much a bunch of crap overall, but doing good should be acknowledged as such. This is a good thing and I'm grateful they chose to do it.

[DMJC]

EA has always been very mod community friendly. They only have one rule. Do NOT make money from EA products. Do not try to sell fan projects or remakes for profit. As long as you abide by that one rule, EA has been very friendly/helpful. They have allowed the public release of many source material art assets when some of their artists have died. Wing Commander is a very notable example of this. Some upper members of the fan community actually have the source code to Wing Commander 1/3/4/5 (for preservation, not public release, however we have had glimpses of parts of it now and then), and there was even a team allowed to go into EAs archives and copy hard drives/video/film footage and mainframe backup tapes from the 1990s. EA isn't quite the soulless monster that people make them out to be. There's a lot of good people who work at EA, but they are a business, and they do have to walk a fine line between acting in shareholders interests and in helping preserve the cultural icon that they've become. I'm really hopeful about this news, it's been a very exciting month to be into Wing Commander. We recently had the director release high quality masters of Privateer 2's cutscene footage. At the same time as community members had big breakthroughs in remastering Wing Commander 3/4/5's cutscene footage with AI upscalers (the results are like science fiction with what the AI can generate). We also have teams working on hacking/remastering Wing Commander 3/4/5's game engines right now with higher poly count model projects and adding new features (such as external video players for higher quality cutscenes). All of this is being done with EAs blessing. RA/TD open source is exciting, especially if EA decide to continue the trend into other properties they own.