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Graphics Open Source Games

DOOM 3DO Source Released On Github 323

New submitter burgerbecky writes The port that was as hellish as the game world itself, DOOM for the 3DO's source code has been released on github. The original programmer outlined the corners cut and why.
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DOOM 3DO Source Released On Github

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  • by cold fjord ( 826450 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @07:12PM (#48493961)

    FTA:

    Firstly, this was the product of ten intense weeks of work due to the fact that I was misled about the state of the port when I was offered the project. I was told that there was a version in existance with new levels, weapons and features and it only needed "polishing" and optimization to hit the market. After numerous requests for this version, I found out that there was no such thing and that Art Data Interactive was under the false impression that all anyone needed to do to port a game from one platform to another was just to compile the code and adding weapons was as simple as dropping in the art.

    I'm starting to think that as a developer the automatic assumption should be that you are being hired for a death march unless there is strong evidence to the contrary.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 )

      yet more on why unions as needed

      • Result before unions:

        Sometimes programmers hired on death marches, feel free to leave and find better work.

        Result after unions:

        All programming now inherently a death march because unskilled "coders" most senior members of any team, cannot be fired and also direct architecture.

        Leaving a job where the petty minded rulers feel like you slighted them means you will never work as a coder again because other union shops are told not to work with you.

        • Cars got made (Score:4, Insightful)

          by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @08:07PM (#48494201)
          and continue to get made well in Germany with Union Labor. Also, I'm fed up with the guys putting parts on at the assembly line getting blamed for for shitty American Cars. They just tightened the bolts people. Yes, it's hard, mind numbing work; but at the end of the day it was management going to engineering to say "Make a car _this_ cheap that we can sell for _this_ much that created shitty American Cars. Engineers just do what they're told, and Management wasn't unionized.
          • by Kobun ( 668169 )
            To play Devil's Advocate (just a little bit) - there are cultural differences (sometimes huge) between the USA and Germany, and a HUGE cultural difference between their respective labor unions. There may be more to a German car being built well than whether or not a Union was involved.
            • People blamed Japanese cars eclipsing American ones on cultural differences too. But fact it, it was an American business theorists, W. Edwards Deming, who was the father of Japanese car manufacturing's business practices. And if you look at his preaching, you'll see - well, that it is preaching, in a sense. There is a distinct moral tinge to it, directed almost exclusively at leaders.

              Deming was an avid Episcopalian and psalm writer. Turns out is was a light codification of "protestant work ethic" in busine

          • Re:Cars got made (Score:5, Interesting)

            by I'm New Around Here ( 1154723 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @11:37PM (#48495129)

            and continue to get made well in Germany with Union Labor. Also, I'm fed up with the guys putting parts on at the assembly line getting blamed for for shitty American Cars. They just tightened the bolts people.

            My father worked for GM and was in the UAW. It never stopped him from telling us how bad his coworkers and fellow union members were. Stupid and lazy people are not excluded from union membership.

            One of my teachers in high school also had UAW experience. One story I remember was of the spot welders that were supposed to make a dozen precise welds as the frame moved down the assembly line. Some days the workers just didn't care, and made eight welds that were near where they were supposed to be. Those cars would rattle from the missing and misplaced welds. Also, he mentioned the senior union members who came in late, left for lunch early, and never returned. Or worse, returned from lunch drunker than they were earlier.

            So, for all the good than someone can point out in unions' favor, there are just as many examples of how they eventually fail. As another post points out, it is more the character of the worker than his membership in a union that determines the quality of his work.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

              Isn't being drunk at work something you can be fired for, union or otherwise? There clearly has to be a balance, and just because American did it wrong doesn't mean the concept is broken. People are suggesting throwing the whole idea out when it just needs some improvements, but that seems to be the normal polemic nature of American political "debate".

              • Isn't being drunk at work something you can be fired for, union or otherwise?

                In a rational world, yes it would be. But here in America, unions make their own rules. Senior union members would have to do much worse than being drunk to get fired. However, new union members would not necessarily have that protection. That would still be at the discretion of the union bosses though, not the employer.

                There clearly has to be a balance, and just because American did it wrong doesn't mean the concept is broken.

                That is true, but most of us here on /. are American living in America, so we give our slant to it. Personally, I don't reject the concept of unions, and I know what conditions they were for

        • Result after unions:
          ...
          ... where the petty minded rulers feel like you slighted them means you will never work as a coder again because other union shops are told not to work with you

          What's this have to do with unions? Do non-union industries have some mystical property that makes hiring-managers inherently non-petty?

          • What's this have to do with unions? Do non-union industries have some mystical property that makes hiring-managers inherently non-petty?

            They are of course just as petty, being the same people that would exist in both systems - but are not nearly as wired into each other as union leadership has traditionally been across companies.

          • I believe the reference is to union leaders, not managers. In most cases managers are not union members.

        • All programming now inherently a death march because unskilled "coders" most senior members of any team, cannot be fired and also direct architecture.

          You do realize that you can create your own union however you want. Make it easy to fire bad coders. The problems you listed are pretty specific to the UAW and government job unions. Look at German Unions. Everyone is in a union over there.

          Model the union however you want when you create it.

        • by mjwx ( 966435 )

          Result before unions:

          Sometimes programmers hired on death marches, feel free to leave and starve as every employer was abusing their workers.

          There, fixed that for you.

          It's amazing how some people forget how things were before labour unionism was a thing.

          Hell, back in the good old days, some companies paid you in company money that could only be spent at a company store with prices that were set by the company (and if you didn't have enough company money which was normal, you could borrow some fro

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        Ask all those steel workers how their union is going. Oh wait we don't have any steel workers anymore because they priced themselves out of a job.

        • by rockout ( 1039072 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @08:48PM (#48494381)

          Another over-simplified common argument from someone that doesn't know anything about unions, just knows that they don't like them, because, uh... Ayn Rand! or something.

          Steelworker jobs disappeared as a result of automation. One quick example that you can find in 5 seconds of googling:

          “When I joined the company, it had 28,000 employees,” said George Ranney, a former executive at Inland Steel, an Indiana mill that was bought out by ArcelorMittal in 1998. “When I left, it had between 5,000 and 6,000. We were making the same amount of steel, 5 million tons a year, with higher quality and lower cost.”

          But keep spreading that myth of "unions=job loss". They're lapping it up in the red states. Amazing how so many middle-class people will vote against their own self-interests.

        • Ask all those steel workers how their union is going. Oh wait we don't have any steel workers anymore because they priced themselves out of a job.

          Yea, I bet it had nothing to do with China dumping ore and finished steel products on global markets.
          It's not like the USA and other countries have spent over a decade suing China via the WTO over their steel exports.
          And it probably had nothing to do with the growth of lower fixed-cost just-in-time minimills that took over half the market.

          Or we can go with your union worker theory.

    • What makes you think this is unique to developers?
  • Neat, thanks (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It's interesting just to look at the overall organization of the code, although relatively few will probably invest hours in getting to know it well.

    I noticed that the source code is released under the MIT license, but the submitter/coder also points out the DOOM 3DO IP is owned by ZeniMax, who retains exclusive rights. I assume that applies to names, trademarks, and graphics only.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    While this code is historically important, and its release is excellent news, I would like to see larger companies like IBM and HP release code to old versions of useful or widely used products.

    I would love it if HP would release the source code to older versions of HP-UX, Tru64 UNIX, and older Digital software.

    I would also love it if IBM would release the source code to older versions of AIX, DB2, Informix, the Lotus products, and so on and so forth.

    This source code would be great to have available due to

    • I had some opportunity to work with HP-UX (built GnuMake on it for a in-company build/QA system), it was always an interesting and very different beast. Is it still around in any form?

    • by _merlin ( 160982 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @07:50PM (#48494127) Homepage Journal

      The trouble is there's so much cross-licensing and license pollution involved. No-one would know for sure whether a codebase contains something licensed in a way that prevents them from redistributing it in source code form. Well, IBM might, but I wouldn't expect anyone else to.

      • Copyright (c) 2014 Olde Skuul, id Software and ZeniMax Media

        Does this mean Miss Heineman got id Software and ZeniMax onboard with releasing the source for the 3D0 port?

        • I guess that's how we should interpret it. I don't see her talking about asking for a permission, though.
        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          Yes, she would have needed to obtain redistribution rights for the source code from all copyright holders.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Chances are there's too much buried and forgotten in any decades-proprietary OS that would make any company nervous about releasing the source code at this late date, and that would apply to Windows, OS/2 and Mac OS 9 as well. Somebody could come out of the woodwork and start filing lawsuits.

      Not to mention the SCO courtroom shenanigans surrounding the murky tale of the opening of the Unix IP in stages over four (!) decades. Nobody wants to risk revisiting that.

    • I worked at Motorola about 10 years ago on a team that was just there to keep old applications written in the 80s and 90s around so that when non-upgraded customers wanted changes they could pay through the nose for us to dig up their applications and make changes. This was big money for Motorola and I guess the customers thought it was better than going through the upgrades.

  • IB4 Michael Hardy (Score:3, Informative)

    by Nyder ( 754090 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @07:37PM (#48494067) Journal

    http://youfailit.net/?p=49 [youfailit.net]

    My guess is this guy will start selling this game, claiming he programmed it, and a 3DO emulator source he'll also claim as he did.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 0xdeaddead ( 797696 )

      all the domains in that thread are gone. does that guy even exist anymore?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Why is this rated Troll?

      It may be unlikely that the individual named in that series of articles will actually rip-off this project, but I found the articles to be "Informative", even if it's "Off-topic".

      Now, slightly-more on-topic (but not really), and in a more positive tone: Ms. Heineman, thank you for releasing this. And thank you as well for Bard's Tale III. I spent many hours watching my father play it during my youth. Many fond memories there... (Except for the memories of trying to figure out t

  • by 0xdeaddead ( 797696 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @08:05PM (#48494189) Homepage Journal

    come back out. It's interesting to compare the various ports of doom that have been released over the years.

    Thanks for the hard work!

  • Its always great to see code for console and computer platforms which don't otherwise have a lot of code available.

    The source code for the Atari Jaguar version of Doom is out there somewhere too.

    Personally I want to see more source for games (Doom or otherwise) on platforms like the NES, SNES, N64 and Genesis. Would be very interesting to see the code (assembly I would imagine) for a proper commercial SNES title...

    • by tepples ( 727027 )
      A few commercial NES games, such as Super Mario Bros., have been disassembled and commented on RomHacking.net. And of course, homebrew [pineight.com] games [novasquirrel.com] for [google.com] NES [untergrund.net] often come with source code.
  • Oddly I don't see any posts about the source itself, but I found it pretty interesting to browse through... though I was trying to find the code that triggered state change for the enemies to fight each other when one hit another, I couldn't figure out where exactly that happened...

    Very cool also it includes all of the graphics and audio assets.

    • though I was trying to find the code that triggered state change for the enemies to fight each other when one hit another, I couldn't figure out where exactly that happened...

      What do you mean? This is open source, which means that anyone should be able to easily make modifications. ;)

  • if ohshit (Score:5, Funny)

    by rwven ( 663186 ) on Sunday November 30, 2014 @08:59PM (#48494439)

    Well, I've been looking for like 5 minutes and already found this gem:

    https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/... [github.com]

  • by Bobtree ( 105901 ) on Monday December 01, 2014 @10:04AM (#48497243)

    Gamasutra did a great interview with Burger a few years ago: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/... [gamasutra.com]

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