As I read new trivia additions on MobyGames, I see more and more bits about commercial games being open sourced. I figured that there must be some site out there that documents such transitions and lo and behold:
http://www.liberatedgames.com/
I wager there is some custom FMV code in there somewhere. We already know for a fact that:
- Descent II source contains a 16-bit Interplay MVE decoder
- Quake II source contains a Quake II Cinematic (.cin) decoder
- Quake III source contains a RoQ decoder
A number of the games listed at Liberated Games are only free in that the binary executable and data are available, but no source code.
A few more items I would like to investigate:
- Hexen II is open source (GPL). This screenshot makes it look like the game has some FMV. This game is based on the Quake engine. Per my understanding, Quake did not feature FMV. Quake II did.
- Stargunner is free for download. This screenshot looks like it might be FMV.
- Hidden & Dangerous is free for download. These screenshots may or may not represent FMV.
- Further, The Ur-quan Masters (Star Control 2) has released both source and data. Part of the data available for download is a speech pack. Nothing too special; all of the speech is available in Ogg Vorbis format.
Update: Trixter sends this intelligence about the titles above:
- Hexen II — can’t verify if that’s video, but there are Animation credits in the game so it is probably yes. However, most times that stuff is a FLIC file. (BTW, don’t get all bunched up over FLIC — there are two main variants that are easy to support; the rest of all that junk was introduced and supported by only that one company you found the info on.)
- Stargunner: same thing, most likely a 320×200 VGA FLIC.
- H&D: no video as far as I know.
hexen II simply had some sort of external intro video which could be watched from the autorun, and was a Smacker file….
Hmm, then it stands to reason that the Smacker interface code was excised before the Hexen II source was released. Thanks for the data.