Older Engine sources

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hey there!

First, Epic - I am speechless by the daring move you made - making this awesome engine’s source available to all (subscribers). I think I lack the words to properly describe how thrilled I am by this - but someone probably described it already :wink:

Secondly - Are you planning to release any of the older engine’s sources (1, 2, 2.x, 3)- just for curiosity’s sake?

Thank you and do keep on this awesome work!!

2

Hello,

My understanding is that we will not be releasing older engine sources, as much as we want to that work would be better spent getting you folks more awesome UE4 features and platforms.

3

Hi Paul,

Thank you for the reply. I agree with working on new features - but if there any a few seconds of free time perhaps the team would consider releasing the older sources… I took a peek at the “lost” UE3 2011.05 code, and it too looked as good as UE4. This is the reason I subscribed - to “congratulate” Epic on a truly fine game engine - on which some of my favourite games run.

Keep up the good work

Nuno

4

Old engine source

There is a long history on this topic, but the short summary is: We’ve looked at this extensively and concluded that releasing UE2 & UE3 source would be impractical due to the large number of integrated third-party libraries which have limitations on redistribution. The public source code release only became practical with Unreal Engine 4, due to an extensive effort to clean up external dependencies.

UE1 might be possible at some point in the longer-term future, but that would be more for nostalgia than practical utility.

5

Ooh, I didn’t even think about all the third-party stuff that must be in there… thanks for clearing this up Tim. Now we know it’s not because you want to be secretive :stuck_out_tongue: Keep up the good work on UE4! :smiley:

6

I would appreciate this a lot. It may be old but I would definitely find it educational to see how the Unreal Engine was build back in the day.

7

Hi Tim, thank you personally for answering on this topic.
Yeah, even if UE1 relase happens for nostalgia reasons, it will be awesome.

Greegdumb: Way too many third party (commercial) libs. Imagine when the doom source was released they had to leave out a sound lib. In this case (UE3), a whole more would be left out, due to the third party libs commercial licenses.

But still, pretty good if UE1 comes out sooner or later

Again, thank you for clearing the subject, Tim.
-cheers

8

How far down the road would you class “longer-term future?” Releasing the old UE1 source would be great not only for nostalgia’s sake, but the community made Unreal 227 patch from OldUnreal would benefit from this GREATLY due to only a single person being allowed to work on it atm due to an NDA with Epic. Myself, and the remaining Unreal/UT99 community would absolute love this and UT99 would also be able to receive the same community-upgrade treatment from this too!