Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: gil@snsys.com (Gil Jaysmith (Telecommuting)) Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: a better idea than 'Black Magic' Date: Mon, 02 Feb 1998 00:06:28 GMT Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 31 Message-ID: <34d50c6a.13897359@news.playstation.co.uk> References: <6as572$bpc1@emeka.playstation.co.uk> <6as9ur$c0f6@scea> NNTP-Posting-Host: th-eng04-017.pool.dircon.co.uk X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.1/32.230 On Fri, 30 Jan 1998 02:35:55 -0800, "Michael Hough" wrote: >And why not release it? It's a generation old, just as (presumably) Ridge >Racer is. Even Netscape is releasing source nowadays. And who will ever again trust a link saying "Download Netscape from this site" ;=) >And console game companies (in the days before Yaroze) haven't had anybody >but other professionals to release source to. Now, perhaps, it's >different--though I sense conservative movements seeking the absence of >change. There might also be, for id, a greater coolness-to-effort return >releasing Doom to the entire world, than a console company releasing to us. Most console game developers aren't in charge of their source code. If they were, they'd send it to Sony or to us so we could do our support jobs a little more easily. As it is, we end up providing compiler and linker support without anything more than the occasional snippet of C which might or might not be causing the problem. Console game code is usually controlled by someone in the game creation chain (publisher, producer, coders, outsourced coders, converters, whatever) who isn't interested in what others in the programming world do or don't want. Everyone else involved in the game's production typically signs an NDA which forbids them to distribute anything to do with the game to anyone else. Amongst other reasons, this is why anyone waving around a CPE or EXE file they say they've gotten from an authorised developer is liable to get themselves and that developer in heaploads of trouble. - Gil