OpenRCT2

[mdtrooper]

OpenRCT2 is open/free engine of Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 as OpenTTD for Transport Tycoon.

I found this by chance in Reddit....and it sounds great (I love this closed game )

In opposite of FreeRCT, this project takes the original compiled code and it is decompile. The result decompile code is very obfuscated but this is job of the developer...he is working in make the code more human readable and replace the m$-win parts by open source parts such as SDL calls.

[charlie]

Very interesting.

I would say that you are on legally shakey ground. Whomever owns the rights to RCT2 could well issue a cease & desist against you for decompiling-then-rewriting-in-situe their code.

Other projects that have worked on this basis have kept a strict line between the developers inspecting+documenting decompiled code and developers re-implementing a program based on that documentation (e.g. ReactOS). I know that's an unreaslistic expectation of a small project / hobbyist, but it means that you are technically breaching copyright and your code will be tainted because it intermingles with the copyrighted decompiled-code.

Thus, whilst it is "open source" in regards to the source being online, it is never a project that can be properly licensed (the decompiled code is not yours to relicense) thus never truly open source or Free software.

[mdtrooper]

Very interesting.

I would say that you are on legally shakey ground. Whomever owns the rights to RCT2 could well issue a cease & desist against you for decompiling-then-rewriting-in-situe their code.

Other projects that have worked on this basis have kept a strict line between the developers inspecting+documenting decompiled code and developers re-implementing a program based on that documentation (e.g. ReactOS). I know that's an unreaslistic expectation of a small project / hobbyist, but it means that you are technically breaching copyright and your code will be tainted because it intermingles with the copyrighted decompiled-code.

Thus, whilst it is "open source" in regards to the source being online, it is never a project that can be properly licensed (the decompiled code is not yours to relicense) thus never truly open source or Free software.

Yes, I think like you.

But...if the project has some lucky, in the next months / years the code maybe will be rewrote in a 100%....but at the moment it is a legal weird thing.

[charlie]

Even after being 100% rewritten, it won't be legal... that's what I was getting at. However it is unlikely that this will be followed up by the game's publisher as these older titles tend to have fallen in a bit of a legal hole somewhere where somebody somewhere owns the copyright but nobody really knows who that is.

[c_xong]

Does this also go for the dune 2 games?
As far as I know, open dune first started from decompiling the closed source games. Nothing has happened to those games yet, so whilst it's not 100% legal, unless the publishers are really hostile then you may be ok.

[charlie]

Right; it comes down to money. In general these old titles are no longer making much money for anyone other than a few thrift stores (online ones included such as GOG). The 'open source' version is rarely going to financially impact anyone at this point.

[mdtrooper]

The code of OpenRCT2 is complete in C. https://www.reddit.com/r/rct/comments/5 ... _from_the/ . Now, there are not any line of close game (from descompilation).

I think the next steps are a lot of features and free assets as OpenTTD.