- Pronouns
- He/They
yes, as the tweet notes. Tim Sweeny did indeed lose the source code as far back as the late 90s. he eventually approved of a reverse-engineering project (from the same user, fittingly.) that rebuilt it from scratch, but this is the real deal.
a few bits and pieces have been publicly taken out due to copyright concerns, though this unfortunately is a common issue with source code releases. the famous release of the DOOM source code was actually the Linux port due to the original DOS version using the DMX sound library, which they couldn't get permission to share.
it's also worth noting Tim had expressed interest in open-sourcing the original Unreal Engine back in 2014, though that hasn't really gotten anywhere since.
maybe this will finally get him to do something about it, especially considering the current circumstances.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.
Open sourcing Unreal Engine 1 might be possible, but getting the source and dependencies into a releasable state would take a lot of cleanup effort that we just haven't been able to find time for. I hope we can do it someday!