Vega-strike-engine-source: Game History

[royfalk]

The bottom of this page has some info about the start of the project, but it seems a lot was lost in time. We can probably ask @danielrh who started it all. I wonder if the code was based or inspired on source code release from a commercial game such as privateer.

Loki. It would be great if you could shed as much light on this as possible. A good place to put it would be in the wiki

[Loki1950]

Most of the engine is based on Crystal Space a very early commercial project that was Open Sourced way back in the 90's privateer has never released any of it's code as far as I know.

[danielrh]

The game was written from scratch in 1998 starting from WinMain and using a lot of the 3dfx GLide API's. An OpenGL version was created and lived, largely in parallel, at that time... later the whole game was ported to linux using the GPL tuxracer (or some contemporary popular linux game) as a starting point for getting the GLUT and SDL initialization code in a reasonable shape.
Initially Vega Strike had its own collision detection mechanism for objects vs cap ships.
However, Crystal Space's object-object collision detection was added later. Crystal space was only used for collision detection and not for other features.
Hope that helps!

[danielrh]

Vega Strike was always very careful to avoid interacting with and using any proprietary code, and the authors didn't even look at source code dumps like FreeSpace or others, in order to maintain a clean-room philosophy when working in the space simulator genre. The GPL license hygiene is extremely robust throughout Vega Strike's history.

[danielrh]

I would personally be fine to relicense the code under a more permissive license like BSD, but I'm sure some of the collaborators' contact info have been lost to the sands of time, so that would be a big undertaking

[Loki1950]

Thx for that clarification @danielrh remembered the time the Debian maintainers objected our use of the Crystal Space's code as not being GPL that was taken care of by safeways rewrite/refactor of the collision detection code

[BenjamenMeyer]

Question: is this documented in any of the Wikis? If not, we need to. If so, let's get a link here. Once either of those is done and linked here we can close this out.