Here's some news I never thought I'd see: the source code for Crytek's
2004 FPS, "FarCry" was posted to archive.org.* It appears to be
genuine, and has been hypothesized to be the code provided to Ubisoft
minus the DRM. It appears to be genuine, although there's some
question as to whether it compiles or not. In any event, it's only the
program code, and - missing the game assets (maps, textures, models,
etc.) you won't get very far with it.

It's unknown who posted the code; quite possibly some disgruntled
employee who probably should have known better. I'm sure the People In
Charge will make quite a fuss about this, although probably more about
the leak than the code itself. As impressive as "FarCry" was in 2004,
it's extremely long in the tooth today. Designed for single-core
processors and GPUs stuck on DirectX9, it's not a crown jewel of
Crytek.

Examining the code will be of interest to game historians but probably
nobody else. It's not like somebody is going to start churning out new
games using the FarCry engine... not when Unity or Unreal are far more
capable, easy to use, and without potential legal entanglements. It
would be great if Crytek just rolled with it and made the code
officially public - not necessarily open-source, but neither demanding
it be taken down either. Still, it may not be entirely up to them, if
the code includes third-party libraries, which is likely.

Regardless of Crytek's decision, now that the code is 'out there',
there's no putting that genie back into its bottle. Hopefully some
invested gamers will start poring through the code, finding all sorts
of interesting tidbits and tricks used to squeeze so much performance
out of 2000s-era PCs. "FarCry" really was breath-taking when it first
came out, challenging Id and Epic in their own arena. Pretty good for
their first game.

* https://archive.org/details/far-cry-1.34-complet

On 7/3/2023 8:05 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

> Regardless of Crytek's decision, now that the code is 'out there',
> there's no putting that genie back into its bottle. Hopefully some
> invested gamers will start poring through the code, finding all sorts
> of interesting tidbits and tricks used to squeeze so much performance
> out of 2000s-era PCs. "FarCry" really was breath-taking when it first
> came out, challenging Id and Epic in their own arena. Pretty good for
> their first game.
>
> * https://archive.org/details/far-cry-1.34-complet

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