with projects like http://daggerxl.wordpress.com and http://openmw.com already existent, it's surely obvious that people would love to have the source code for arena, daggerfall, and the like. i don't know who would have to agree to release these, or who actually has copies of the source code, but there certainly can't be any harm to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethesda_Softworks in releasing these under a http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_free_software_licenses license. i would be very excited to see morrowind or oblivion have a chance to be ported so that the original proprietary libraries they used, such as gamebryo or havok, could be replaced, allowing operating systems other than windows to execute these beautiful works of art, with enhancement, as http://ioquake3.org/improvements/ has done with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_Arena. thanks, everyone!

Years ago there was a rumor that Bethesda lost part of the Daggerfall source code, although the veracity of this rumor is unknown.

I imagine Bethesda is unable to release anything for Morrowind or Oblivion since they use Gamebyro as the base.

They might be unable to release the Daggerfall source for the same reason, as they used the HMI sound middleware for it.

i had figured that tes 3 and 4 might not be considerable due to using outsourced software development kits. on the other hand, quake 3 uses punkbuster, and id simply stripped the punkbuster code before releasing. i understand that none of the numbered elder scrolls titles may be able to compile due to external dependencies that are not legally obtainable for personal use, but that's half the reason to release them, allowing independent developers to replace these closed source proprietary code compilations with free libraries

What, exactly, is a source code?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_code is the text files that program developers compile to create executables. code defines how a program executes, what it does, etcetera. at http://hellowiki.org/index.php?title=List_of_%22Hello_World!%22_codes, many examples of tiny program source codes can be found, for some popular programming languages.

It's one thing to remove the speedtree, havok, or facegen add-ons to Oblivion, but GameBryo makes up the foundation of the Morrowind and Oblivion engines. The GameBryo code was also heavily modified and augmented and that would make it extremely difficult to remove the GameBryo bits and leave the Bethesda code.

Bethesda doesn't seem adverse to releasing source code, they recently allowed Arkane to release the Arx Fatalis code and id also has a history of these releases. The fact that Bethesda itself hasn't released anything like this suggests to me it isn't feasible.

Lucius don't need no stinkin' source code! :toughninja:

source code defines the way the games were played, and it defines the way it's operating systems would execute it's instructions; the way the games could be played in the future doesn't have to be limited to the code of yesterday, because open source software can do more than dos, windows, *.hmi proprietary audio, and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XnGine or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamebryo engines, ultimately. dos box, windows 95 through 7, and pixelated graphics that could be rendered in 1280x1024 today, but are rendered in 128x64, instead, are not the future