Petition for DICE

[Rambo Medic]

It's kinda shitty when you think about it.

Project Reality has probably made a couple thousands dollars richer.

A couple....?

[Rambo Medic]

Signed. But wait, as long as EA has money to make off Battlefield 2, they won't open-source it probably.

I mean, there's an Open Source page here from EA Open Source

Realistically, like Lucas Arts open-sourced the two jedi knight games, they did that due to the oldness of the game and they don't sell it on retail.

And, like that, Battlefield 2 isn't on markets anymore but online. And when it's online through Origin, it makes money.

So they'd probably not open-source it unless it's not giving them the profits they desire, and they feel nice. Once a company open-sources a game, they can't make any money off of it I don't think. Or maybe they can, even though open-sourcing it essentially means you can make your own games, and engines built.

If EA has like a competition to make the best game out of old engines that can turn indie developers into contract developers making games for EA, it would benefit EA all the time while keeping that cheap $9 Price Tag on Battlefield 2.

And since Battlefield 4 is coming, more and more there will be less players. And besides, there's only under 1200 at max players (Rough estimate figures guessed) including mods (Project Reality being the one with the most servers)

So, in short, I'd like a discussion to weather it's feasible to open-source it from a big company's stand-point.

But for facts: One developed said that in 50 years, the EULA agreement would expire, and that's when it would be open-sourced but I doubt that. Last update for Battlefield 2 was in the 9/1/2009. That's 4 years ago! So it would be wise to open-source the Refractor 2 Engine. Though really, I think the devs would prefer the more updated, next-gen CryEngine 3 used for Project Reality 2, that is basically Project Reality ported for CryEngine but with all limitations removed, and theoretically it can support 256 players online.

Unless EA still can make a profit, it's up to EA, not DICE. Dice would probably love to release the engine, but they have an agreement with EA. So take it with a pinch of salt.

When EULA's expire games are not open sourced, it simply means you can freely distribute and modify the game to your heart's content. Actually, if you look at game developers that have open sourced their software, they never re-release their Data under the GPL. Data meaning maps, content, textures, models, etc, the only thing that is GPL'd (made freely and openly distributed) is the source code, the Realitymod team doesn't need DICE's assets, they've already remade the majority of content, other than a few sounds or models here or there.

EA can still sell the game, because even if it's open source, you still need the Data to play Vanilla BF2, so you still have to pay for the game to play it. (See: Doom, Doom 2, Doom 3, Quake Quake II, Quake III, Tribes 2, Star Wars Jedi Knight II, Star Wars Jedi Academy, Sim City (Original), Duke Nukem 3D, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and many more).

[Rambo Medic]

aA man with common sense and simple explanation speaks.

Not to burst your bubble, mr petition maker, but thinking ahead would of saved you some time.

Not to burst your bubble, but there's no sequential order requirement for Open-Source.

Hell, who knows, EA might do it as a PR stunt to get rid of bad press about being d*ckheads. Have some faith.

[C0PPERH34D]

Would be great if we get DICE on our side, but with EA I see no chance in making it opensource...

Nevertheless signed!

Please EA, don't be d*ckheads!

[Hotrod525]

A couple....?

he mean make them a couple thousands richer... xD

[Darman1138]

Signed. Can't hurt anything and it's not like I'm losing something by signing anyway.

[Rambo Medic]

he mean make them a couple thousands richer... xD

My point was that I think they've made them more than a couple...

[Rambo Medic]

Updated with more information, plus included communities that have had this posted to them.

[SShadowFox]

Perhaps you could learn how to edit a post before making multiple ones.

[badmojo420]

Forget BF2, petition them to give us mod tools in BF4.

[Death!]

Forget BF2, petition them to give us mod tools in BF4.

Never gonna happen, EA wants full exclusivity of its Frostbite engine. When you buy a game built on it, it is pretty much like you are buying "a mod" for the "Frostbite game". You bought the "mod" and not the "game". To give modtools for a BF[x] game, means they have granted access for you to build your own game on their beloved and protected engine.


tl;dr you buy BF[X] and not the Frostbite engine itself

[40mmrain]

A more realistic request would be a small Bf2 patch that would lift some restrictions such as the vehicle passenger and squad number limit. Various simple "hardcoded" limitations.

[-=anders=-]

A more realistic request would be a small Bf2 patch that would lift some restrictions such as the vehicle passenger and squad number limit. Various simple "hardcoded" limitations.

Erhmm..........


64-bit support, allow 8GB memory. Would mean better performance and higher res textures... The only thing I want now...

[IWI-GALIL.556FA]

I think our only option here is to wait for PR2...

[carmikaze]

As there are only 127 supporters as of now, i'd call this a fail.

How many members visited the site today? 739? And the countless ones who were too lazy to log in? And most of them haven't given a vote? That's sad. Just..sad.

I could cry.

Maybe the devs should implement a feature to only let those play 1.0, who gave a vote.

[PFunk]

I went through this with the Silent Hunter 3 community.

Anytime a product is tied to a major Triple A publisher you're basically lucky if they even give you dedicated server code these days. They're fascists, and for good reason. They rely on carefully controlling whats actually available for free and since micro-DLC has proven that you can monetize the smallest things for greater revenue combined with higher product release turn arounds netting better long term outlook for a particular franchise, you're basically left with supporting community mods being diametrically opposed to the strategy that mainstream gaming publishers have adopted.

They don't need to lure you in with promises of freedom. This is what indie game developers do now, and the thing is gaming has evolved to become so mainstream that what an indie developer does now is probably akin to what mainstream gaming was like 10 or more years ago. Bohemia Interactive is probably bigger than a lot of triple A developers were like in years past.

The years of relying on mainstream games as semi-complete engine templates for mods is over, at least in a universal sense. A few outliers remain like CryTek, but new engines being available like they were when say Source was released... not gonna happen as much. They see that as giving stuff away for free now, and they're just arming the community with a means to avoid paying for the new product.

You see, the game and the community used to be somewhat separate. They made the game, you created the community, and once every couple years they made a new game and hoped the community would latch onto it. Now they believe that they can own the community as much as the game. Games are now routinely built into the community infrastructure, and if you want to play without their proprietary infrastructure then you're a hacker, a cheater, you're breaking EULA.

I remember an article in PC Gamer (back when people read it in magazine form) that was previewing the new Xbox, the first one. The tag line was "Will the Xbox kill PC Gaming?". Ostensibly no, not literally. The numbers put PC gaming actually at parity with the Xbox and PS3 if you treat each of those consoles as a separate market. We're at 1:1:1 which is far from dead. However, the console experiment following the Xbox has shown us that it did kill how PC Gaming works, at least in the mainstream. The difference objectively to us now between consoels and PCs is that while on a console it seems perfectly normal, on a PC the restrictions that mimic console environment GUIs and software is fundamentally against the freedom we've come to expect.

You might as well all be trying to petition them to give up money, because that's exactly what they see giving us mod tools, map tools, and dedi server code as now.

[Nybble]

I don't think a petition is going to change anything unfortunately.

What you really need is a 'pipe' to someone over at EA who would acknowledge that there would be mutual benefits in releasing the source code. It would also be more realistic to push for a license to use the Refactor engine as opposed to having it completely open source.

With all the attention PR has been getting, maybe someone from EA would even approach the Dev's?

[Kaix12]

Signed, but there will never be 10000, you would have to advertise on TV ad make a BF2 Source engine charity to get close.

[Wayet]

signed..... but i dont think it will ever heppen.

[Skitrel]

Signed. I also passed this on to Ian Tornay who I've had many a friendly chat with, Battlefield community manager at EA. He'll ought to see the merit in this, I doubt you can get BF2 open sourced but the PR team could probably get permission to use the source properly if the right people have the right reasons explained to them. There are a lot of benefits to EA/DICE in doing so. but whether the higher ups see it the same way or not is questionable, but they're not idiots. EA would certainly like to turn their image of late around though, good things like that (which also hugely benefit them) are certainly a good area to start.

I'm going to have to completely disagree with everything PFunk said though. Sensationalist drivel that relies on the belief that people higher up in the company are simply incompetent idiots that can not see the merits of communities. All evidence is in fact to the contrary, mod support in almost all games is increasing, not the other way around. Communities directly bring new players into a game, generate purchases, argue with naysayers and profess the virtues of games online. It's not even based in any evidence at all, it's just a really silly explanation that popped up on the internet and gained tonnes of steam because everyone likes to attack the big bad companies rather than have an intellectual understanding of the situation grounded in evidence.