Cybermage Source Code?

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Hi, it has been released a Cybermage source code?

Thank you!
 
No source code for any Origin games has been released, nor is it likely (or even desireable, IMO) to happen. EA is not Volition (FS2) or Microsoft (Allegiance).
 
No source code for any Origin games has been released, nor is it likely (or even desireable, IMO) to happen. EA is not Volition (FS2) or Microsoft (Allegiance).

Has EA ever released source code before? And how would it be undesirable unless the game is multiplayer centric?
 
Eh, that's a silly thing to fear - what are the modders gonna do, break into your house and replace your WC disks with their own modded versions? No game's reputation has ever been hurt by modding. Besides, having the source code doesn't make modding any easier. Just look at any modding community - for every thousand people working on new textures or models, there's one with enough programming skills who'd actually be able to do anything with source code. And, as a general rule, anybody capable of altering a game's source code is much, much more than an "incompetent wannabe".

(for the record, Death is absolutely wrong - having the source code would be very desireable indeed, although even without the source code, Mario, Tango and Pierre have been able to do great stuff using DLL patches)
 
Eh, that's a silly thing to fear

Of course, you know these things far better than me. :)

I posted because I've heard people complaining about it (though they may be idiots for all I know.), and fail to see any other reason why a released sourcecode could in any way be harmful.

As for the games reputation I didn't actually mean the game itself, but other mods based on it. It would appear that the words got messed up somewhere between my brain and the reply to thread window. ;)
 
It's kind of funny you bring that up - I often think back to a PC Gamer article a few years ago. It was the "New Gods of Computer Gaming," the follow-up to the Gods of Computer Gaming article in 2000 that included Chris Roberts and Richard Garriot (as well as Roberta Williams, John Carmack and Sid Meiers.) Although I don't remember the exact line-up, the round-table discussion included Alex Garden (the Homeworld guy) and Cliff B. Unrealguy as well as that woman who was dating John Romero whose name I can't remember.

Anyway, the talk turned to modding and there was nearly unanimous consent that there should be less of it - or at least, that's what I got from it. One of the panelists piped up and remarked that he couldn't go and play a normal game of Unreal Tournament anymore; there were too many variations around.

It also seems to be a thought prevalent throughout the game industry in general; I did some researching on game design a few years ago (back when I took mod design Very Seriously) and one of the articles had a section on "How Moddable Do You Want Your Engine To Be?" The justification behind this was that yes, easy modifcation does hurt your game's reputation among people who are too stupid to know when a game is modified (naturally, I had a hard time stomaching this argument, although with the Grand Theft Auto sex mod controversy the author may have a point.)

It's worth noting, anyway, that the original Homeworld engine was said to be well-nigh unmoddable when it came out in 1999, and by the time I got into fiddling around with it (as part of the now-defunct Fleet Action mod) it had been pretty much cracked wide open. So it wasn't the most surprising thing when Relic announced that HW2 would come with modding tools out of the box. Those didn't arrive on time; in the meantime those of us in the community contented ourselves with fiddling around with stat files, which turned out to be far more complex than the ones in the first game When those tools arrived (several months after the game shipped) they turned out to be pretty intensive scripting and programming packages well out of the reach of the layman who could hack HW apart; not to mention the only reliable way of importing new models was through the full version of Maya. I don't know what others thought, but the impression I got, at least initially, was "okay, our unhackable engine has been hacked and now any fool can make a mod with it, so let's release a SDK as soon as the game ships this time, but make it so that only professionals can do anything with it."

Of course, it's probably more likely that Relic, having to develop a high-profile sequal to a major game on time simply concentrated more on making a solid game rather than bending over backwards to cater to the whims of the masses who can neither code nor create. And they did release the HW source code at the same time, so it's pretty hard to accuse them of being stingy.

And of course, all this happened when the game was released a full three years ago, which is the same length of time that passed between the release of the original Homeworld and the widespread creation of third-party modding tools. I still check by the Relic forums now and then to see if anything similar has happened here; as far as I can tell, it hasn't. I'm sure czazen would know a lot more about this than I would, though; I only dabbled in modding briefly, and he's been doing his project for the better part of a year.
 
There's a few things to consider.

Firstly, "unmoddable" engines have long, long ago gone extinct. There's just no such thing, every single engine out there is designed with easy moddability in mind. The reason for this is that games are no longer made by programmers and graphics artists (they haven't been for nearly a decade now) - they're made by game designers, as well. Game designers are people who don't necessarily know how to write a real program - instead, they rely on tools supplied by the programmers to do their work. These tools aren't a part of the engine as such, they're external - so obviously, the game data has to be stored in such a way that it can be easily accessed, read, and modified with an external program.

Secondly - an engine being moddable doesn't mean that the company releasing a game will help people mod it. Take WCP for example - there has never been a more moddable Wing Commander game. It's absolutely fantastic, you can do virtually anything with it - but Origin and EA were able to prevent easy modding simply by not releasing any of their tools. In other cases, companies release specially-designed, cut-down versions of their own development tools so that they can control what people modify. Of course, none of this ever works - at the end of the day, with every game in the world being moddable, the only thing that prevents games from being modded is their unpopularity and/or short attention span. That is to say, if you play a game, finish it, and have no reason to play it again, you're not going to bother modding it, either. The only games worth modding are those that you come back to again and again.

Finally, about the reputation-spoiler argument. It's a pretty darned crazy argument, and in a logical world, it would be thrown out the window right away. After all, the GTA mod just revealed existing content, and the various other "embarrasing" mods (for example, there's a lot of games out there, from Tomb Raider to The Sims, that have nudity mods)... well, nobody ever cares about them except the half a dozen teenagers that waste their time creating mods to strip virtual women of their clothes. However, these days everybody is constantly worried about getting sued, and it is apparently preferable to be insanely over-cautious than to follow common sense. It's also preferable to be over-cautious for another, more important reason - the more talk there is about bad mods, adult mods et cetera, the more likely you are to have congressmen and senators calling for new regulations and the like. So, in that aspect at least, it really is preferable to be cautious - it's just that in many cases caution is taken to the utter extreme.
 
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