Proprietary games, Free software

For many years, the games industry has made use of Free Software to help make their products better. A peek at a manual’s copyright acknowledgements (or exploring a game’s installed folders) can yield a number of interesting values. For example, Epic Games’ Unreal Tournament series has made use of the Free Ogg Vorbis codec for years, as well as OpenAL and (in the latest version of the game) the wxWindows library. Vorbis is used in other places as well – the PC version of mega-hit Grand Theft Auto San Andreas uses it. Another area of popularity is using Free Software for scripting engines – for example, the ever-popular Playstation karaoke series of games from Sony, Singstar, makes use of the Lua scripting engine (as well as Vorbis for its audio). Civilization 4 included a full copy of Python to handle its own scripting tasks.

How this happens license-wise varies, and is one of the primary concerns for game companies (whose code is kept proprietary, late-in-life iD Software games notwithstanding). Sometimes, permissive (non-copyleft) licenses allow a library to be used directly via dynamic linking, or even compiled directly into the end application. Sometimes this is not possible with a library’s Free license – however, a different (typically proprietary) license is also available as an option. The FreeType library for example offers users the choice of the GNU GPL, the world’s most popular copyleft license, or a permissive MIT/X11-style license which obligates the user to advertise the usage somewhere. The Qt windowing toolkit is available these days under a choice of Free copyleft licenses (GPLv3 or LGPLv2.1), or a paid proprietary license.

So, on to a new title. Yesterday was the release day for EA’s The Sims 3. Now, visibly, this game’s Free bits are not part of the game – but are part of the “Cider” compatibility engine based on Wine, used for the Mac “port”. As it is based on Wine, Cider includes buckets of Free libraries, as mentioned in the manual: libpng, libjpeg, dmalloc, bstring, SDL, FreeType, squish, iniParser, ffMPEG, and (generally speaking) Wine. However, this doesn’t always tell a full story – as I implied, sometimes something Free is used under a proprietary license, and often that replacement license does not require any copyright attribution in the game’s manual. Does The Sims 3 do any of this?

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Could be, could be. Oh, and for the nascent Sims 3 modding community, that might be your cue for where to start investigating the new custom items’ format.

9 Responses to “Proprietary games, Free software”

  1. So much for the anti-Mono trolls saying no one wants Mono – I bet Sims3 alone puts more Mono users (and who are willing to pay MONEY!) on the planet than people who even subscribe to the anti-Novell zealotry.

  2. […] Sometimes it’s Novell employees and some of those who are responsible (not Novell employees) are writing about proprietary computer games (yes, Windows) at the moment. Those very same people are also pushing hard to put Novell’s own Banshee inside Ubuntu, by […]

  3. Gotta love unrelated FUD trackbacks.

  4. @Stifu, Oh, I DO. That’s why I let them through – because they’re evidence of the attacks me on a regular basis. The very best ammunition against nuts is their own nuttiness.

  5. @directhex, yes, but it takes a human being who has a brain to see through Roy S.’s (IMHO very plainly transparent) words. Roy’s little cult of ignorance has grown.

    Every time I ask someone who attacks Mono on the basis of “Well, it came from MS”, I ask them to back their words with evidence, and they never are able to do so. For example, there’s the whole patent claim. That’s fine and dandy, but at least in the US, I can’t find any valid, granted patents on the CLR… and neither can the people who appear to claim it.

    In any event, it’s only self-evident if you’re not a moron… and most of the people on the Internet, well, are. :-/

  6. @Michael B. Trausch, You can’t fix idiots. I prefer to just laugh at them.

  7. Any idea what the embedded mono actually does yet?

  8. @Dan, Presumably the same thing most embedded languages do (see Lua and Python examples) and handle scripting. In the case of The Sims I can see it as a neato way to handle objects in the game as, well, Objects.

  9. More information from a Sims 3 staff member: http://go-mono.com/forums/#nabble-p24037564

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