Maxis release SimCity source code
Well, talking of that great phenomenon known as open source, as I was last week, it now seems that Maxis is joining the fray, by releasing the SimCity source code.
SimCity is a simulation and city-building personal computer game, designed by Maxis founder Will Wright, and it was first released in 1989, which makes it pretty longstanding. It is said that to do well at the game, you just have to think like a capitalist. The code was officially released on January 10th 2008, so now anyone can port it, run it, and modify the game. The code has been released under the GNU General Public Library (GPL) license, brought about by the fact that there are plans afoot to add the game to the OLPC XO Laptop, which at the moment runs entirely open source software.
Naturally EA, the game company that owns the rights to SimCity wants to protect its trademark, and so there have been a few changes to the original source code, and all references to SimCity have been replaced with “Micropolis”, which is appropriate really, given that this was the original working title for the game.
The Micropolis source code, which was originally written in C, has been recast into C++ classes, and integrated into Python. The code has been considerably cleaned up and bullet-proofed.
So now that the code is available, what are aficionados going to do with it? It is interesting to see that yet more top code is going open source, and it will be intriguing to see where the current trend leads.