What happened to the Freelancer (2003) source code?

[u/blondewalker]

Has any Digital Anvil internal archive or similar ever surfaced? Let's open a search for it here. The code is over 20 years old, and some old DA devs are surely here on Reddit; we just need to get their attention.

[u/Hjalfnar_HGV]

Apparently Microsoft says it is supposed to be in their archives but they can't find it.

[u/zapocan → u/Hjalfnar_HGV]

They make it sound like they need to do spring cleaning, as if search doesn't exist. Then again, given how default search behaves on Windows maybe I understand.

[u/Hjalfnar_HGV → u/zapocan]

AFAIK it is a physical archive with various data storage variants. HDDs, CDs etc.

[u/GenericNameHere01 → u/Hjalfnar_HGV]

So less 'Jedi Archives' and more 'the warehouse where they shoved the Ark of the Covenant'. Got it.

[u/Peterh778 → u/GenericNameHere01]

That may be rather apt comparison, given how some companies stored their data 🙂

I heard a story how one (much smaller) company tried to find a server on which one -rather obsolete- application had run for about 10 or 15 years when it has finally broken down. They finally find it in after barred (by other version, bricked in) doors in some kind of janitor closet-like room of which nobody was aware (because when original employees left the company, institutional knowledge went with them and that application was, from what I heard, maintained as a side project by one and only IT worker who still knew how it works 🙂).

[u/cgaWolf → u/Peterh778]

I'm pretty sure that's how PSP/Vita online services work nowadays :p

[u/kolbaszcica → u/Hjalfnar_HGV]

We all have the same problem with old digital projects

The source code was on the broken laptop
All the holiday photos are on dvds but I don’t have a reader anymore
That old machine has been scrapped for parts but I have the hdd somewhere still I just cant find it

[u/themanfromoctober → u/zapocan]

It’s one of those things like the rights to No One Lives Forever where they’d say it cost way more than it’s worth to search

[u/Practical_Sand5563 → u/Hjalfnar_HGV]

imagine some random guy just deleted the code without knowing it

[u/Nogardtist → u/Hjalfnar_HGV]

they should find an archive where it fixes their windows 11 but they wont even look for that

[u/Hephaestus_I]

Fwiw, I did spot someone over in gamingsuggestions a week ago who said that they worked on it (towards the end and from the Microsoft side however). Dunno if he frequents here tho.

Edit: Possibly make that two, as one of the responders also said they worked on it too.

[u/itamar87]

Upvoting and commenting for visibility 🤓

[u/MomoSinX]

it is considered lost but maybe one day someone randomly will find it lol

[u/VaLightningThief]

Potentially silly and uninformed question: Why is it important to have the source code? Is it modding purposes, or conservation or something else?

[u/MemoryWinter → u/VaLightningThief]

it’s not a stupid question, the answer is both! games are (often) written in code that gets compiled into machine code designed to be executed by a computer. imagine in the original code a given variable was called “shipAcceleration,” which gets turned by the compiler into a byte address along with a list of instructions that happen to the data stored at that byte address. this can be reverse engineered, but it’s a tedious process of “solving for x” many times, looking at all the operations that happen to x to eventually infer what the original purpose of x was.

a lot of the authors’ intention or meaning behind why things were made a certain way is lost as the compiler rewrites them for the same result using many more but much simpler instructions for a CPU to execute quickly (hence, “machine code”). similarly, for performance, compilers will also choose to “optimise away” branches of code, comments, names, and structure, that are otherwise useless in the compiled release. this process is similar to simplifying a math equation.

while reverse engineering tools continue to improve and make it easier to restore program code that can reliably produce the same machine code, for compiled programs it will always be a fundamentally “lossy” process where it’s impossible to completely restore the original version; like a photograph of a painting. it’s genuinely interesting for the field of software design and research to know how and why things were built with different hardware constraints, it may resolve the remaining mysteries in the reverse engineered code, and might hold clues about experimental or canceled features of a game.

in the case of Freelancer, i don’t think the GLS software that powered its multiplayer server browser was ever released to the public. though modders have made community reproductions of this software to allow people to play online and even to extend the experience for modding.

[u/blondewalker → u/MemoryWinter]

Or to put it simply: I want to see the comments of the devs and try to understand their thinking behind the game design.

[u/Nanosinx]

We can thank that missing spaghetti code to the one man building the never gonna release Star Citizen game...

[u/HeIIoween]

I think they lost the archive. It's no big deal, though, because LibreLancer wrote almost everything from scratch.