If UE1 would be open source, it would be really great for retro-styled games. Just imagine what community could do…
So, UE4 has source code accessible, more powerful tools UE1 ever had, etc. Why do you need UE1 ?
Haha, I love this.
Should you decide to move forward with this, what would the terms be?
Could we, say, release unofficial patches for Unreal Tournament (binaries only)?
If so, I’d love to hear if there’s any news on this. UT’s Linux binaries are still a huge nuisance. They were compiled with g+±2.95 and statically linked with an ancient libstdc++ that does expose all of its symbols. Thus, any halfway decent shared library that you load into the same address space will have most of its libstdc++ calls rerouted to Core.so’s embedded (and broken!) libstdc++ functions. To make matters worse, there isn’t a single gcc released after 2.95 that can still target the 2.95 ABI…
I’d love to help you clean up the code and get it into a state where it works with modern compilers. I would also like to merge in the stability and (server-side) security fixes I have laying around. Besides myself, there’s at least a dozen people (e.g. the guys from OldUnreal) that have reimplemented bits and pieces of UE1 just to make them compatible with modern compilers.
Mostly for porting existing UE1 games and mods for modern hardware as well as operating systems.
Here are published UE1 projects;
https://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:Unreal_Engine_Versions/1#Projects
No GNU/Linux and macOS user reject native ports of Deus Ex, The Wheel of Time and Rune. Moreover, most UE1 games have CPU related speeding issues on modern systems that can be avoided with custom renderers. Having full source code access can let devs to solve all these problems for good. That is the nice thing about Libre Software; if somehow your product became obsolete with newer systems; you can always re-compile.
Here is a nice collection of single player mods for Unreal Tournament 99 that I cannot enjoy on Linux properly due to not being able to change brightness:
I don’t know for sure, but it’s very likely that each one of those games have C++ gameplay components and modifications to the engine source code that you won’t get access to even if you have the UE1 source code, so you would still be unable to port those games the same way the Quake 3 Arena source code is useless to port the first Call Of Duty game to Linux, for example.
For such kind of porting to be possible, the games would need to be built solely of assets and scripts ran by the vanilla engine. AFAIK the only mainstream game engine that worked like this was SCUMM, which was used by lots of point and click adventure games and was fully reverse engineered and ported to countless platforms.
True that. However, even the Windows version of UT99 suffers from serious speeding and brightness issues. Community can provide certain modern features like multicore, modern resolution, 64 bit, SDL2, OpenAL, IPv6 support. Besides, UT99 has dozens of single player total conversions which deserve decent recognition; ioquake3 approach is something that we need. Couple days ago I was able to play Quake III: Arena in the web browser thanks to the source ports. Why shouldn’t UE1 have such nice things?
Thought the same. Would love to work on it.
Would be more a retro thing. Nice to see.
Please,
is the hope that the unreal engine 1 will be released in 2017?
Do you need to clean the code with help? … 
The 20th anniversary of the release will be officially released unreal engine 1 source?
20 years of waiting, a long journey…
UE1 source would be awesome in 2018…
Well guys I found some interesting tutorial about Unreal Engine 1 level maps design Hourences.com – Tutorials how unfortunate that there are no books of Unreal Engine 1 and Unreal Engine 2 only about UE3=UDK and UE4=EGL(Epic Games Launcher) at lest uploaded ebook of 24 pages something related to Unreal Engine 1 you know it’s just a nostalgia nothing else really.
Well… Since now the Unreal Engine 1 source code was leaked with the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 build. I think this is the perfect time to open source it
I mean… I wouldn’t be playing Diablo 1, Half Life and Gzdoom on my nintendo switch if they hadn’t had their source codes released or reversed engineered. This is great for preservation, and Unreal / UT really needs to be preserved. They are great classics!
Oh, nice! Did anyone had a look at the source code that came with Duke Nukem? I think the source might be heavily modified because of duke nukem, BUT, there is hope now we will see an android/switch/xboxes/playstations ports of Unreal and Unreal Tournament. Heck I really hope the code is useful for updating and porting the game. It might actually bring it back to life somehow.
No one has a license to do anything with that source code, though.
At the moment. I have a feeling that whomever did put it out there did so with some intent to make some specific actions occur out of it.
But for right now, that code is absolutely radioactive, from a legal perspective.
I would absolutely love to get my hands on legit code for engine build 2226/2227 so I can fix some ancient games. But I don’t see that happening.
One would be better off building some sort of method to auto wholesale convert entire old games resource sets into UE5, and build a pipeline that allows people who own the games to autoconvert their resources.
We definitely can’t open source Unreal Engine 2 or 3, because of dependencies on a large number of external closed-source middleware packages with complex licensing requirements.
Totally understood (although I’d love to have it, even with the other stuff stripped out, if nothing else for study and knowledge).
Interesting you don’t mention UE1, though 
Source versions 2226 and 3369 of UE2 are long out (unofficially, who would wait those years for Epic). However, they cannot be used for other games, each game has its own slightly modified source. The fact that it got out version 3369 is very important, it contains DX9, which solves the lag on modern graphics cards in the UED at DX8. Today’s graphics card drivers are very bad with the years around 2005.